With the chance to be Hive dictator for a day, this is what I would do:
- Reduce social rewards from 65% of the token inflation pool to 5%.
- Increase staking rewards from 15% of the inflation pool to 65%.
- Increase witness rewards from 10% of the inflation pool to 20%.
- Reduce unstaking time to 5 days.
- Increase the number of consensus witnesses to 30+1.
- Increase the number of witnesses needed for consensus on hard forks to 25.
- Reduce witness votes per account to 20.
- Require a minimum of 10,000 staked HIVE to run a consensus validator node (witness).
These changes would be made in addition to currently proposed code changes, such as HIVE-to-HBD conversions and witness vote decay. Numbers 1-4 would be the priority and have the most immediate and significant effects.
Why would I do such a thing?
Hive (and previously Steem before it) just continues to bleed out. Only about 36% of total supply is staked. Around 54% of non-staked HIVE is stored in known exchange wallets. Unstaking still outpaces Staking from week to week.
The 3% APY on staking rewards isn't attractive enough to stake HIVE for 13 weeks and it seems that few investors care about the social media part of Hive, so curation incentives aren't much of a factor. A 4x increase in staking rewards and a large reduction in unstaking time could reverse the long-standing trend of unstaking and sending funds to exchanges where they can be staked in other tokens or traded for other tokens that offer better yields or more speculative upside.
More consensus witnesses, better incentives for them, and a reduced number of witness votes could help attract better witnesses and diversify the top 30. As witnesses are paid in staked HIVE, the incentive to hold those distributed tokens due to much higher staking yields is greater.
Hive needs stronger hands but we don't incentivize it - outside of the social rewards system which is almost entirely unattractive to investors. Locking funds for 13 weeks is also far too risky in conjunction with the social mechanics and given the history of the token's performance.
What becomes of Hive after the Day of the Dictator?
Hive would be left with:
- A more decentralized blockchain
- Three-second block times
- Free transactions
- A native decentralized exchange
- A decentralized, native stablecoin that pays interest
- A potential 12%+ APY for staking
- A 95% reduction in unstaking time
- A 92% reduction in layer-one social rewards
- A potentially more diverse set of consensus witnesses
- Better incentives to invest in and build out Hive's financial ecosystem
And that's just what we would have immediately after the changes are made.
I would then relinquish my dictatorial power, grab a nice frosty beverage, watch Hive flourish, and happily read all of the "Thank you!" comments from the joyous investors and users of Hive that had finally realized the genius of the plan. I would quietly retire to my newest Lamboyacht and count my HIVE stacks as they grow larger and larger every day, allowing for even more Lamboyacht purchases that would save the sad normie economy. Statues of me would be erected in town squares around the world and global citizens would speak glowingly to their grandchildren of the time when prosperity and humanity had been benevolently airdropped to the Hive people.
This is the future.
This is the way.
Make it happen.