An open-source hbdstabilizer bot

The hbdstabilizer has become a very valuable tool in the Hive ecosystem, helping to keep the Hive-Backed Dollar (HBD) peg to the US dollar. It was created by @smooth and so far he has been the only one running such a bot.

To help reduce the dependence on a single person, I decided to create an open-source version of the hbdstabilizer bot, and it is now available here: https://gitlab.com/borislavzlatanov/hbdstabilizer

How it works

The bot is based on the pseudocode provided by @smooth. The thinking behind it, at least so far, is that people will make proposals and if they receive funding, the bot will use the funds to help HBD reach peg, and when HBD is at peg the bot will simply return any funds to the Decentralized Hive Fund.

The bot sells liquid HIVE or HBD or performs conversions (HIVE->HBD or HBD->HIVE), depending on the market conditions.

This is at least the current concept. If people have ideas for variations on this concept or other approaches, share them and maybe we can experiment with some of them.

Next steps

I was also going to run a proposal myself (without taking any cut of the funds) but it seems to me unlikely to get funded. So for others out there who would like to make a proposal to fund their own hbdstabilizer bot, hopefully having the code available makes this easier. You don't have to be a developer, just someone who the community will trust enough. Give it a thought and see if you want to run one.

Verification by the community

The bot doesn't keep any funds for later use - it either sells, converts or returns back to the DHF account. (Technically, there is a minimum amount that has to be in the bot for it to take any action, but that can be set very low, even to 0.1 HIVE/HBD). This should make it pretty easy for the community to verify that the person(s) running the bot is handling the funds as intended. If not, the proposal can be unvoted right away.

To make things even easier, a verification tool can be created that checks the balances of hbdstabilizer bot accounts. If it detects that there are funds in them or that funds are sent somewhere other than the DHF, it would automatically unvote the corresponding proposal. This would really minimize the needed trust and overseeing by the community by creating an automated ongoing check of multiple bot accounts. Let me know if there is an interest in something like this being developed.

In conclusion

Your thoughts are welcome. Let's see if we can have a wider number of bots that help keep the peg.