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Dash Economics Discussion Series

HeyMichael

HeyMichael

Member
Join Dash Core Group’s Ryan Taylor from 6/10-6/15 as he hosts daily discussions with the community on the proposed changes to Dash economics.


The discussion will provide community members with the opportunity to share feedback and ideas surrounding Dash economics with Ryan and Dash Core Group. Once these discussions are complete, we will take all feedback into consideration, followed by the submission of all economic proposals to the network for a vote.

For those who have not seen the latest proposed solution to Dash economics from Dash Core Group, please review the following video:

For anyone unable to attend these discussions live that would like their input heard, please submit your questions/comments via this form: https://forms.gle/U7LcWH6KxY6Np2M77.


 
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What is the plan for implementing the 0% to 20% treasury? Would this be phased in over time or done all at once? If all at once, would it be done ASAP or after some milestone relating to the reallocation of mn/masternode rewards?
 
What about the idea of keeping miner rewards fixed and letting the unspent treasury accrue to masternodes only. Your plan of letting miners share in the unspent treasury adds unnecessary uncertainty for them and dilutes the basic idea that masternode owners can directly benefit from being responsible with treasury funds.
 
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I support the proposed 9% reward shift from miners to masternodes, as is, timeline and all. It is a prudent nudge in the right direction.

I also support the periodic readjustment of the minimum fees. One tenth of a cent vs one hundredth of a cent is meaningless to a normal user, but if it helps prevent spam attacks it is a useful adjustment. It is boggy territory, however, pegging dash's network dynamics to fiat units of account.

While the proposed changes to the treasury seem like a balanced compromise, I'm not convinced it does enough to reel in wasteful spending before opening the door to even more wasteful spending. In agreement with Geert above, I don't think splitting the leftover treasury funds between the MNs and the miners will be effective enough to smarten up. Granting all leftover dash to the MNs has a better chance of inviting necessary participation and scrutiny to improving outcomes. We are at great risk of doubling the silly wasteful spending. I would vote against the proposal as is.

I would support a treasury adjustment where the remaining funds are split 50-50 between MNs and miners, but the 10% cap remains, or all rewards go to MNs and the cap is lifted to 20%.

Like politicians, many of our MNOs love spending other people's money, even if it is not really doing any good. It just inflates the supply and makes us look naive or corrupt.
 
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If you pursue price stability in order to facilitate payment, imitating MKR is the best doctrine. Mortgage dash, generate a stable version of dash, and implement it using protocol-level methods.
 
It seems incredible that such a small change can have an impact. I see you are basically trying to flatten the curve of available money supply and I understand that. You have my support. I would like to know how long you think this needs to be in place before evaluating whether or not it worked? Seeing how the supply apparently smoothes out over time, I guess we either get it right on the first try, or evaluate monthly (very often) to see if more adjustments are needed? Or are we throwing an educated guess hail Mary and be done with it?

Not that that's bad, but if it falls apart, how long would it take to reverse the changes? Is there a safety net in place? I don't foresee any troubles, but if it whacks out our balance ...??? What if assumptions are incorrect? Anyways, I'm all for this
 
I wonder if we could distribute the un-allocated funds from the treasury each month to those masternodes that voted in the previous superblock, in order to increase voting participation.
We could even save up those un-allocated funds and re-distribute them every six months to masternodes with a voting history.

So instead of un-allocated funds getting burned, it would be used to increase voting participation.
We could run this for a certain period of time (lets say 1 year), evaluate and then make the decision to continue or not.

With regards to the flexible budget system proposal :

I am not in favor of raising the budget from its current 10% of the blockrewards to something that can flex higher. I think the current 10% of the blockrewards to our decentralized budget should stay as is.
Building a sufficient Dash Core Group war chest for future bear markets should also continue as is (through separate budget proposals within that 10% of the blockrewards).

Whenever i hear the argument that a flexible budget system could be used to better support good projects, i think of ALT36 (a good project with good support but ultimately failing on its Dash usage promise due to outside factors). Do we really want to expose our masternode payments structure to these projects, that due to their crypto nature can carry risks and possible failure? And do we really want to introduce an element of uncertainty to a masternode owner's future Return On Investment (ROI) ?
 
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qwizzie said:
I wonder if we could distribute the un-allocated funds from the treasury each month to those masternodes that voted in the previous superblock, in order to increase voting participation.
We could even save up those un-allocated funds and re-distribute them every six months to masternodes with a voting history.

So instead of un-allocated funds getting burned, it would be used to increase voting participation.
We could run this for a certain period of time (lets say 1 year), evaluate and then make the decision to continue or not.

With regards to the flexible budget system proposal :

I am not in favor of raising the budget from its current 10% of the blockrewards to something that can flex higher. I think the current 10% of the blockrewards to our decentralized budget should stay as is.
Building a sufficient Dash Core Group war chest for future bear markets should also continue as is (through separate budget proposals within that 10% of the blockrewards).
Click to expand...

While I would be willing to vote for a compromise, I, too, prefer above all else that the 10% cap remains. Simply dumping more money into the treasury will not make things better. Everyone in crypto should recognize the failure of that approach by looking at the spending habits of government. There will never be enough money for those who are seeking to get their hands on easy money. Who is asking to spend more money, anyway? Ineffective proposal owners? Of course they would clamor for that.

All efforts in fine-tuning the proposal system should be directed towards better aligning incentives, the power of which is something everyone in the dash community should recognize. We must spend smarter, not more. The money has to come from the MNO's pocket. The only projects that receive money should be those that are able to show they're really done their research, their spending plan is open and detailed, and it will reflect positively on the network. It should be difficult. It should not be a pig trough of easy money for familiar names and hangers-on. It has been too easy, and the results have been minimal.

I think the first step ought to be to give the remaining funds to the MNs only. If that proves ineffective in improving spending and bringing more MNs to the table over the next year or so, then I would be open to quizzie's suggestion, granting the remainders to those with an active voting record.
 
I don't even know why I'm bothering to comment here as I've pretty much disengaged with this whole ridiculous process. In short, "we want more masternodes but that would dilute our income, so we'll give MNOs a pay rise and hopefully that will fix things". It's a joke. I guess this is what happens when an entire community worships one person so much.

Ask yourselves, what are the benefits to the end user? - None. Do you actually believe that competing for ROI will get you somewhere?? Trust me, there have always been other projects with higher ROI - decred, PIVX and many more. What do you think these extra rewards will be spent on? - the buying of other coins. ROI doesn't know or care for anything of loyalty or love. Attract the parasites and watch your corpse being eaten away. I mean, for God's sake, DCG spent how many months researching and grooming the community for this, while at the very same time telling you they didn't have the resources to do A, B and C. FFS, don't you think there were better, more productive things they could of being doing to bring value to end users?

If you believe making MNOs choose between the treasury and themselves is such a good idea, go ahead and let's apply that to the first 10% as well. What's up, don't have the balls to put your money where your mouth is?

20% going to the treasury either gets sold into USD to pay staff, or feeds the buying of more masternodes into a smaller group of people. Maybe we should insist ALL contractors are paid in dash directly. But no, don't have the balls to do that either. Wait, I know your response to this is, "the individuals will sell to USD anyway". Bingo, there you go, large swathes of dash being sold to USD or MNOs buying up other coins, what else is there?

This is money for monies sake. Moving numbers around on a spreadsheet. Again, of absolutely no benefit to our end users.

The way it was designed to work; the fewer masternodes, the greater the share to MNOs. The more masternodes, the lesser share to MNOs.Self-balance. Except it's not now, you're magically inventing excuses why it's so inefficient. Let me tell you what is inefficient; that the largest proportion of users have the least say in how this thing works. More importantly, there is NO MECHANISM for MNOs to represent the needs of their constituents - end users. MNOs are self-appointed, they don't have to win the hearts and minds of end users, they only have to serve themselves. Chasing ROI is self-serving.

So, there's this duality going on. OTOH, masternode rewards are dwindling every year by 7.14% and MNOs are feeling the pinch. At the same time MNOs are refusing to recognize that the fixed pricing of masternode collateral (1000) and proposal submission (5) is effectively, in real terms, becoming more expensive. Yes, inflation progresses but emission is reducing. Emission is the here and now, the cost to obtain today. By maintaining fixed costs, we effectively reward early adopters, and latecomers are dis-incentivized. Nothing wrong with rewarding early adopters but systems function on the circulation of blood. Dash needs fresh blood, a healthy churn of masternode owners, and a healthy supply of proposals. But right now, what we have is a minority of people pulling the strings and patting themselves on the back.

Last month a newcomer submitted a proposal to build an offline smartcard. MNOs, in their infinite wisdom, rejected it because it threatened their favoritism of DCG. Proposals like that don't come around often these days and they haven't come back for a second chance. Meanwhile, bitcoin cash has working prototypes of the same tech. Do you not understand, your loyalty to DCG and your small niche of friends is killing dash? Go ahead and dismiss what I say, but take a cold hard look at dash's ranking, bit by bit slipping into oblivion. Our Users Must Come First.
 
I wanted to put my thoughts in the Discord Dash Talk (#ryan-questions channel) but was told by macrochip to remove it or rephrase it.
Then I heard that Ryan was not going to respond in that channel, leaving me unsure how to share my thoughts...
So I'll just jot them down here and hopefully someone will find it useful.
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3 issues: 1 fast growing circulating supply, 2 Voting participation, 3 Fixed Treasury.
#1 has been linked to MN ROI, which is correct but MN ROI is not just a percentage of Dash being paid out. It is also the value per Dash. So if we can increase the value of Dash per coin then also the MN ROI would increase. I think that is the preferred way, because all Dash holders benefit in this scenario. Increasing the MN reward allocation ONLY rewards a very small group. I would like to see the MN reward split into two parts: a service reward and a savings account. Then it is but a small step to make savings accounts available to others as well. This would make Dash more desirable as a HODL-coin, thus increase its price and reduce its availability and increase MNO ROI.
From savings accounts it is but a small step to allocating voting rights to smaller hodlers. For example a 100 D holder could get a 1/10 vote. This would increase voting participation as many smaller hodlers would like to have a say as is demonstrated in shared MN services.
#2 The current calculation for a proposal to get funded is wrong. People who do not vote should not get included in the calculation. One could vote "abstain" if one insists on being included without actually voting. But non-voters should NOT be included. It is simply wrong. If you do not vote and insist on being included then you are basically against progress in Dash.
#3 The treasury should be variable and be linked to the rewards of those who are entitled to vote (whether they actually vote or not). As indicated above I would like to increase the number of entitled voters by introducing savings accounts with a minimum of 100 D. Perhaps at a later stage when the value of Dash has increased significantly we could give voting rights per 10 D in a savings account.
Those are just my 3 cents/satoshis/duffs
Looking forward to any response from the community and Ryan.
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I read above that GrandMasterDash has some similar thoughts on MN ROI. And I read from Ferdando that saving account ideas have been proposed/considered(?).
I would very much like to know why the savings account option is not pursued. I think it is the better way to go.
Ernst.
 
@mage00000 I partially agree with your view. I too very much want to see a more inclusive project. Ryan thinks your average user is not interested in voting - and maybe he's right, maybe a lot of people won't vote - but I think this is the same in politics, a lot of people don't vote BUT they would hate you if you took their right to vote away from them. This is also why some people call dash "centralized" because they recognize that masternode owners constitute a very small part of the population; to some it feels like a cartel of bankers all over again.

Take a look at Decred's treasury and see how they have more voters and good participation. For example:

Title : Decred Latam Marketing and Events Proposal 2
Amount : $46,000
Yes Votes : 9,952
No Votes : 6,451
Voter Participation : 41%
 
Dash's DAO created a "workforce" of masternode owners. Let's do that again. Let's create a second treasury that socializes and activates a new type of workforce. Dash Platform is not build for large data objects. How to store and distribute large files is something DCG is working on. So how about we move that function to a streaming torrent-like network (not masternodes), where content creators and a Content Delivery Network (CDN) are paid directly in dash. A dash-enabled distributed Netflix. Forget ROI, I'll happily take a pay-cut for that because the revenue from such a thing would be far more than what is being offered here.

A second treasury, also of 10%, where all grant applications go to content artists and studios. These artists then upload their content to the CDN and the end user pays a small fee, which is split between the artist and the hosting node(s). Masternodes randomly checks the CDN (Proof of Service for speed and latency), collects and distributes payments, and keeps a mere 2% that is distributed back to the masternode owners and / or the treasury. The better the content, the more views, the more fees, skimming just 2% but millions of times over.

Ryan's proposal is easy to implement but takes five years to come to fruition. That's five years to develop Dashflix.
 
I would vote yes just to reduce the miner reward but I find this proposal disappointing and frankly misguided.

We should target the miner reward based on the amount of security we need.
And equally we should target the MN ROI based on the number of master nodes the network needs.
Using the number of master nodes to affect economics seems really wrong and it would be better to just reduce the inflation.

It also seems wrong to me to think that an increase in circulating supply is caused by a reduction in master nodes. I think it's the other way around. If you have a MN but want to sell, you have to reduce the number of master nodes. It's not like you first stop running your master node and then think "oh, well now I might as well sell".

I run a MN, not because I want to or because I think the ROI is good. My goal is just to hold Dash and I run a MN just so I don't lose out on all the inflation that's paid out to MNs. I even have to pay tax over that income (because I'm honest like that). I'd rather have less inflation and thus less price pressure and not have to run a MN. If too many people choose not to run a MN only then we should increase the MN reward to make sure there are enough nodes. The ROI should probably be dynamic based on a target number of MNs, with a cap to limit total supply.

While I think it's good that a concrete proposal was presented, I think multiple kinds of proposals with parameters should be presented and DCG should run surveys among MNOs to understand which type of proposals with which parameters are preferred by the network.
 
Today I found out that Ryan DID respond to questions in that channel. And that yesterday was the last day. Thank you macrochip!
 
Not sure where I got the impression that the proposals would be submitted for this cycle, but if that is the case, I hope they are submitted soon. I'm hoping we see proposals broken out as follows:

1. Change the allocation 9% towards masternodes?
2. Allocate leftover treasury funds to masternodes and miners?
3. Increase treasury cap to 20%?

I think this would provide enough granularity in case something doesn't pass, and allows simple followups in the next cycle.
 
forro said:
Not sure where I got the impression that the proposals would be submitted for this cycle, but if that is the case, I hope they are submitted soon.
Click to expand...

I also got the impression the proposals would be submitted for this cycle (June) because of this :
(Timestamp 1:57:00)

It is feasible for some of these changes to come out as early as the fall, if they are approved in the June cycle.
Click to expand...

Now i am starting to think this could take longer.
 
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Geert said:
What is the plan for implementing the 0% to 20% treasury? Would this be phased in over time or done all at once? If all at once, would it be done ASAP or after some milestone relating to the reallocation of mn/masternode rewards?
Click to expand...
If approved, we would incorporate the changes into the Core product roadmap. Given these changes would require a protocol change, the new functionality would likely be included in a major release. Our Core software typically has a major release every 4-8 months, depending on the volume of changes included in the release. v0.16 is already on testnet, so it would likely be included in v0.17, but we'll need to assess the exact timing if and when the changes are approved.
 
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