Hello !
Recently I've been thinking of quick wins for hive, basically what small steps can we take to improve it. I've been on steem/hive for almost 3 years now and there's one thing that I never really liked was being forced to claim rewards, it feels like a chore, and if you don't do it, regularly you won't have as much hive power when voting and thus you are losing out and potential curation rewards.
I think one of the very first scripts I wrote on steem was an auto reward claimer because I didn't want to do it manually anymore (https://github.com/drov0/Steem-reward-manager, still exists, and it's been updated for hive :))
And when asking around I realized that basically almost no one claims their tokens manually for the reasons stated above, it's cool the first 5 times but it quickly gets annoying.
So I asked around to some of the people who were there when it was implemented (@abit, @blocktrades and @vandeberg) to know why it was done that way instead of sending the tokens directly to accounts.
Basically it was done like this because of a feature that never came to be, multi-chain fabric, and for the added gamification (it feels much more significant to claim once per week 50 hive rather than receive 0.5 hive every 2-3 hours).
So apart from gamification, there are no real reasons for it to stay that way. And I think it would be much more clean if we had tokens sent directly to our accounts upon payout. I made an issue and gathered some thoughts on the steps that would be needed to implement such a feature : https://gitlab.syncad.com/hive/hive/issues/24
Basically I view this as being done in two separate hard forks:
- First a hardfork to create the tokens directly instead of asking users to claim, over time the number of accounts with pending rewards will drop significantly.
- Then a second hardfork to force those last accounts to claim rewards via a hard fork and disable/remove the claim_reward op, although that one may be optional, there is nothing really wrong with leaving the claim op there and have those people claim their last "claimeable" tokens whenever they feel like it.
erratum: Actually having thought about this a bit more, I think leaving the claim_op and leaving those last accounts with pending rewards alone is the better move. So we should be doing it in one hard fork.
And to be precise, it would not be a hard for FOR this feature, it's more of a "let's include this in a hard fork among other changes"
I don't think it would be too hard of a change to implement and I will probably get on it in the following week once my work on RC delegation pools is done.
So I'd like to get some feedback from the community first, would you like to see this change implemented ? Why ? Why not ?
And while I'm at it, if you have some "quick wins" ideas (no, shipping smts is not a quick win) I would love to hear about them
Disclaimer:
THIS DOESNT MEAN THIS WILL GET INCLUDED IN HIVE AT ALL, me working on it is not a guarantee of it, ultimately it will come down to whether this feature is wanted or not.