The evergreen hive sink idea

in LeoFinance8 months ago

I talked a little bit about a Hive sink idea I had the other week. I wanted to follow up on that and check what the community thinks about potentially adding more things on top of it.

The idea is quite basic and could get interesting down the road. The idea is that an account, in this case @poshsink, would prove that it has burned all its keys except the posting keys. This is something that can be done by setting the keys to @null somehow according to a dev friend of mine. This means that without having to rely on trust, anyone can confirm that this account will never be able to use its owner key, active key or any master key, etc to change the keys back to working. That is after 30 days have passed after the "burn" of the keys since recovery feature could still work during that time.

So the idea is, eventually some of the projects I've been working on would spend part of their "profits" to buy hive back and give back to the ecosystem not just by burning the hive to @null directly, but powering it up to this account which can only use its posting key. This allows it to:

  1. Claim rewards
  2. Upvote things
  3. Leave comments and posts

This means that when sending rewards to this account, in our case when/if POSH and its "sister projects" would make a profit, they'd have to make sure to "power up" onto the account. Just sending it liquid Hive won't do much as it can't power it up itself (no active key) but for all other things it should work fine, if delegations land on this account it'll generate hivepower that can just be claimed and same goes for its own hivepower curation rewards.

Beside sending it profits, there's been other times where we as a project with @ocd have felt that voting power based on every week or period has been a bit too much and without wanting to overreward users or set wrong expectations, we've used it on @hbd.funder comments now and then. So I've been wondering if the community/others would deem it acceptable that we'd also spend some of that "extra" voting power from time to time to also upvote some posts/comments of this account that provably get "burned" by staying with the account.

The main difference between and other burnposts is that this burn doesn't remove hive from the supply, but I think there's some merit in this as well in other ways. Let's say there's 200m hivepower voting on a constant basis with 400m total hive in existance, if you're just burning hive it just means that there's less hive being printed on a weekly basis, because you're burning some of it off. What it doesn't do anything for, though, is the rewards those 200m staked hivepower holders get, those stay the same as long as that much hive is powered up. This sink would not just ensure that this hivepower can never be obtained/powered down but it will also continually keep taking a % of the daily rewards pool in terms of curation rewards.

As every account, there's plenty of unique stats that can be tracked, so you could always tell how much it has earned in post rewards and curation rewards compared to how much hivepower it has received through powerups from different venues. If people wanted to make sure to keep them separate in an effort to prove how much "profit" was generated from projects like POSH or its side-projects, one could also just create another account that would only be used for those and connect it to this one in some way. Point is I'm not trying to start generating different ways of income for it just so it would "look better" if I later say "the poshsink account has burned and taken x amount of hive from the reward pool since day 1" and try to point towards it all being from profits that have been sent to it and muddying the results.

Just checking to see if people think this would be an accepting way to "burn" rewards similar to how some other projects do it but in a less direct and more longterm way.

The next question would be, what would this account do with its voting power over time? Well, for starters and while it's growing it wouldn't do too much except for maybe trail some accounts, unsure which yet, but there could always be some general ecosystem-wide net positive ways it could be used. The important thing will be to not leak the posting key of this account in one way or another because with the other keys burned, it would be impossible to change the posting key if it has ever landed in the wrong hands. To make sure to keep it safe one could also use a proxy account that this would trail.

Anyway, just a general question about this to feel it out, let me know what you think and if you have any concerns over its longterm effects or don't like it for some other reason or maybe even come up with some other good things about it I didn't manage to.

Thanks for reading!

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Once the posting key is compromised there will be no way to recover from that.

Yeah I mentioned in the end that it'd have to be extra secured, I'm thinking giving another account permission to posting with the main account as an extra step to keep that key offline as much as possible.

Wait until smart-contracts, or instead of wiping out active/owner - spread them among trusted parties with threshold high enough so many would have to sign transaction in order to use active authority. For example 12 people, where 8 of 12 are required in order to execute transaction :-)

Hmm, that would make sense as well I suppose, but having it too high of people just in case the posting key ever lands in the wrong hands to use it to reset sounds a bit dangerous as well considering some of them may leave/go afk long term. Maybe less people as long as they're trusted in that case?

Less is less complex but more prone to collusion, you need to figure out the proper balance. Those elected trusted individuals doesn't have to be forever, they can gather every few months in order to update the list (to protect from AFK / MIA)

Sorry to jump in on the conversation, but I have a dev question for you. Is it possible to build plugin for the nodes on hive that allows for a messaging system.

Think less on instant messaging and more like inter-blockchain communication.

Is this just a pipe-dream or achievable?

It'd be a great way to utilize smart contract systems for Hive.

Could you explain what kind of messaging you have in mind?

Definitely something to this. The only negative I can think of is that it would be controlled by a person (or group of people). This would always leave some wondering if the account owner wouldn't just start (e.g.) upvoting their own posts once the account got large enough. This is in contrast to a smart contract, where theoretically anyone can verify the code/behavior for all time.

It would seem like you'd have to have some governance structure. 5-of-7. 2-of-3. etc. Or perhaps what you've stumbled on is an enDAOment? It would grow on it's own through capturing inflation and a governing board could decide how to direct it. Maybe a governance token to allow voting might be interesting.

At the end of the day though, you're still trusting people to implement the results of the vote, and with this approach, HP can only go in and never back out. So people have no recourse if the account starts being used for nefarious purposes.

Not trying to be negative, just working out potential issues. One question would be: why would I powerup HIVE to this account? I can support projects I like using my own HP/upvotes. I think the answer has to be that the owners of the account do the leg work of finding good projects. I don't want to have to follow/research everything myself but do want to support the ecosystem. But that's what delegating is for, right? Why would I power up HP to this account instead of just delegating HP to it? After all, that lets me get my HP back if the account ever starts doing things I disagree with.

Yeah I'm starting to lean more on a multi-key system instead where 3/5 or 4/6 highly reputable members have to sign messages to make changes with the keys to lock either leaked keys out or mismanagement.

Interesting concept. I’m a bit wary of having only one key and no way to ever reset it. If it ever falls into the wrong hands, there would be no way to stop mischief, short of intentionally driving and keeping its voting mana at zero, which I guess would be no different from having sent the tokens to @null to begin with.

With all that said, I’ve often wondered how the @null account is guaranteed to have no keys that can access it. If someone can give the technical overview on that, I’d be interested in hearing it.

I’ve often wondered how the @null account is guaranteed to have no keys that can access it.

That's the thing. There are no keys, so there's no way to authorize a transaction on behalf of @null account. That's for owner, active, and posting authorities. However, @null has a signing key defined, but this key is a NULL key, so there's no corresponding private key that could match it and sign transaction.

This account (defined in libraries/protocol/include/hive/protocol/config.hpp) is also special,
because it has its balance cleared, see: database::clear_null_account_balance() in libraries/chain/database.cpp

@gtg probably can. :D

I think it is an interesting idea. Do you have a way to roll it out on a smaller scale before you start heavily promoting it and going full bore with it? Just to make sure it works the way you think it will without losing a bunch of Hive?

I created the account a couple weeks ago, the keys are yet to be "burned". I mean, no one should send it anything they don't already want gone forever, it's just that instead of just sending it to @null and removing the hive from circulation, this would power it up instead and keep earning from those hive forever. The HP is still proven that no one will be able to access it ever and on top of it it continues to grow alongside everyone else that remains powered up. Imagine like 3-5 years from now if a lot of stakeholders and projects like the idea and have either sent it some hive they wanted to donate/given it beneficiaries from post rewards or delegated to it, it could become an account with hundreds of thousands of HP that will never be unstaked while it continues to compete for curation rewards among everyone else and hopefully does something good with its votes.

So there's not much "trying out", the only reason I'm asking this now is cause some times we do find ourselves with higher than expected voting power, since all of our votes are cast manual and often depends on influx of new users, quality/effort behind the posts that week, etc, so instead of just voting up hbd.funder comments like many other stakeholders already do, we could start directing some rewards towards an account like this that will work in a different way.

That makes sense, I was just curious. I know a lot of times people have good ideas on paper, but when they put them into practice they kind of blow up. I'm not saying you would do that, but it happens to the best of us. I know there has been some concern about the projects that the HBD Fund are supporting and the lack of oversight or disproportionate funds that some projects get in relation to the amount of work put in. It will be interesting to see how other people feel about it.

Yeah I get that and honestly I somewhat agree with some of the funded proposals, feels a bit "least effort" for "high pay". This would mainly use the rewardpool at random intervals and in the future rely on profits posh and other projects would send it to burn hive in exchange for the rewardpool having helped get them going in the first place.

I think it is an interesting idea. I do like how it keeps funds on chain and benefiting new users.

A very interesting idea. If the account HP builds enough, it will definitely challenge the curation rewards pool. It's like safekeeping HIVE where no one would be able to get his hands on it after the 3 keys being burnt.

It sounds good however the only concern I would have is do we need to keep restricting aka burning hive rewards or is there already far to low liquidity? Or is that something we are not concerned about?

What kind of liquidity do you mean? From the markets? Dunno tbh, considering how much of the total hive in existence is liquid I don't think that's of much concern. One thing one could argue is that current "burnposts" aren't burning the curation rewards of their upvoters, just the post rewards, so those growing in stake keep earning the same curation rewards while only part of that is burned. This one wouldn't remove hive from liquidity but instead challenge the curation reward pool.

Yep markets and honestly idk either. That's a good point about burn posts and kind of a loop hole of abuse really. Seen some of those go upwards of $50 in value. In any case I'm in support of this. You never know until you start trying something out.

Don't really know what the abuse part of the burn posts are, all of hive benefits from it in a way cause it makes the token more scarce, this would work similarly except it would also lower the curation rewards pool potential since this would take a part in that.

Yeah, burn posts seem pretty beneficial to me. Although there's a bit of game theory that could be applied here.

Really brilliant way to confine tokens from the market yet use it to better the ecosystem.

The important thing will be to not leak the posting key of this account in one way or another because with the other keys burned, it would be impossible to change the posting key if it has ever landed in the wrong hands.

This is a really scary thought depending on how much HP the account has or grows to. The hacker would also have the power to downvote stuff.

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Burn up the dance bro

Great,, I really like it

This is a nice idea, but I do not understand how this burn post work

This is a cool idea, go for it! I’m still a hive noob but learning about all the different projects and creative ways people add value to the ecosystem has been fascinating!