HF Proposal: Vote to Reduce Power Down Period to 4 Weeks
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Please note there are now two proposals issued to enable the community to either vote IN FAVOUR or AGAINST the idea of a 4 week Power Down period reduction.
Vote this proposal if you are "IN FAVOUR" of reducing the Power Down period to 4 weeks.
Voting platforms:
https://steemitwallet.com/proposals
https://steempeak.com/proposals
https://steemproposals.com/proposal/53
If you are "AGAINST" the 4 week Power Down change then visit the COUNTER PROPOSAL
Be sure to read discussions on both proposal posts in order to make an informed decision and feel free to contribute towards the discussion.
Check the latest Steemitblog post for additional discussion.
Excerpt from Original proposal
This is a consensus proposal to allow witnesses and stakeholders to vote on this change being implemented in the next HF, thereby recording their approval on-chain.
The proposed change is to reduce the current 13-week power down schedule to 4 weeks. The reason for selecting 4 weeks was to still provide some lockup protection within the 30-day account recovery period.
There was talk about having different power down schedules for earned vs invested SP but that would be a much more complex code change and additional cognitive load for the user, therefore this proposal is simply for a reduction to 4 weeks and nothing else.
The changes will likely involve code to first halt all current power downs in progress and change the parameter from 13 to 4 weeks.
The premise behind this change is to reduce the barrier to entry for investment into Steem and PoB SMT's, currently it is daunting for investors to lock-up their capital for 13 weeks. While 4 weeks is still high compared to other chains like EOS, it is a positive incremental iteration in the right direction, with low risk of market sell-off. It can be further reduced in a future hardfork if proven to not have adverse market effects.
Implementation: This is likely a small code change that can be done by Steemit Inc., community developers are of course entitled to submit PR's to the public repo for these changes or submit a proposal to be remunerated for the same.
There was also a discussion about adding an instant power down by burning 5-10% of the stake, that may be more expensive to code and perhaps should not be considered for this HF, but if still desired should be voted on via a separate proposal. (EDIT: This has been found to be very dangerous, a hacked account could be instantly drained via this burn mechanism and therefor circumvents any lockup period safety benefits.)
I'm all for four weeks or even one week. I don't think it is demonstrated that these long lockups provide clear benefit at the system level. Yes there are benefits to an individual whose account gets hacked, but these come at a cost of adding dead weight (which then contributes to everyone losing 99%+ of value) to the system as a while. I'm not sure that is a good trade-off.
If people want a longer lock-up for security purposes then perhaps the savings account feature which has never been used much can be repurposed to a voluntary longer safety-focused lock up.
There are also other approaches to reducing hacks such as building in 2FA with a mobile app. Lock-up is not the way to do this.
I'm sure there are people who will deny that Steem's misfeatures such as long lockups and high inflation are responsible for its price decline but frankly speaking I think that is 99% bullshit. Yes it is a bear market and yes crypto coin prices can have a mind of their own, but most of the reasons Steem has declined from a top 10 or maybe top 20 coin to barely hanging on in the top 100 are bad design and execution decision of our own making.
I am for less than 4 weeks, like just one week. Long powerdown was coupled with high inflation rate for SP in order to disincentivize liquidating STEEM. For the current economic design, I think one week is a better choice.
Thanks @clayop, please cast your vote on the proposal if you haven't already.
@proxy.token supports your opinion, and thank you for your voice as many Korean users think, Mr.@clayop!
Funny, I don't see anyone clamouring for lock-in periods with bitcoin. Or, really, any asset in the world. This stuff has been solved a long time ago with various methods of cold storage. I'd imagine hardware wallet support will be enough for most regular people. Not to mention, there's the account recovery solution and savings account. Even beyond those, there are better solutions. What more does one need, at the cost of negating all investor appeal?
Many of these "unique features" of Steem have failed. It would be prudent to adopt what has proven to work in the crypto market. There's a $240 billion market of tokens with no lockup, how much for those with 13 week walls, again?
Glad you are of the same mindset, please will you cast your vote on the proposal @
@liberosist
My vote is negligible, but I've voted anyway. To be clear, I would prefer to have a 3 days power down period, and have the payout period reduced to 24 or 48 hours. But 4 weeks is a step in the right direction.
Why would you want payout reduced? Then you'd only have 24 or 48 hours to earn rewards. Way too short. People don't log on every day to upvote things. If anything it should be longer for payout periods. The fact that you can only earn rewards for the 1st week is kind of shitty. It should be forever with payouts being made every X amount of days or X amount of earned Steem.
Steem isn't locked up, it's liquid, just like Bitcoin.
It's only Steem Power that's locked and I think it makes sense to keep Steem and Steem Power separate and distinct.
So, you don't mind Bittrex staking its customers funds and using it to vote for witnesses, SPS and posts ?
Thanks @smooth, please cast your vote on the proposal if you haven't already.
Why I was proposing the two staking pools is to cater to both short term and longer term investors.
Shorter term investors have more liquidity while still can participate in PoB and longer term investors who are willing to give up liquidity to show commitment by locking up have more power in governance.
The silly thing about the current system imo is that 13 weeks is such a tall commitment especially on crypto space to participate in PoB, one of our "unique feature". On the other hand, people with minimal commitment voting on the future of the chain looks like recipe for disaster.
If it's deemed to be too complicated to implement I suppose it's not worth it after all.
Custom duration lockup period that works with SP would be cool but It will never be implemented because it will never be on top priority lol.
If this proposal passes as is I am actually more in favor for 1 week instead chickening on 4 weeks, maybe I am too paranoid about exchanges voting. As for security... I guess we need to be more careful with our keys.
I think staking multiple pools, variable locking periods for security, etc. might be okay but I don't think they should be at the base layer. If we had even simple smart contracts like Bitcoin or perhaps even a tiny bit more powerful, then these sorts of features could be added as applications (and this is necessary for things like cross chain swaps, payment channels, etc.). That's obviously not going to happen in the next version but once we are done playing with SMTs, maybe we will start to realize that trying to satisfy every need at the base layer with hard forks needed for each and every change is impractical and foolish.
Ideal solution to me is where staking long period is not only a security feature but also grants more power for witness voting and SPS by giving up liquidity. Ideally will be like 1 week stake have x1 vote multiplier, 2 week stake have x2 vote multiplier, and so on. If staking for a long period have no incentive whatsoever might as well have minimum stake period.
I agree that reducing the lock up period to 4 weeks is going to be a positive change. 13 weeks seems to be a huge amount of time. If an uptrend starts and you want to unstake then at the current situation would be a waste of effort but while 4 weeks might be just right.
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Agree with you @smooth
One week power down should be enough to still feel safe and secured (as a user). However somehow I like idea of 4 weeks power down much more than 1 or 13.
Yours
Piotr
This isn't a frontend vs chain development problem. It's something that needs a blended approach.
I'm for the change if:
We have to recognize that while we're aiming to improve our attractiveness to investors we're also reciting "mainstreaming" like a broken record. There's no way to mix advanced and basic. If we try we'll end up with something that doesn't work for anyone.
There are rolling waves of phishing and hacking on Steem. We recently suppressed one such wave. Accounts that are compromised may not know they are compromised as they rely on posting authority through myriad dapps, which does not inform them something is wrong when the hacker changes their keys. It usually takes up to a week for an account to notice they are hacked and their funds are being moved. If they lose a quarter of their powered up STEEM the results to those investors and to the retention of same would be devastating. There's this perception that most phishing victims are new users with no investment. That's false. Most of the victims were active for months if not years and either accumulated or invested their stake. The largest hack (irrecoverable) was about 36k STEEM and the next one down, from an account that then invested and became a whale, was 10k. The opt-in should have a timer of at least 7 days but preferably 30 days, same as other key functions, before the opt-in takes effect. That would add another layer of protection.
Other forms of exploitation that we like to call "abuse" are highly likely to occur but shouldn't preclude implementation. Removal of a capability to halt a potential minor risk isn't the correct response in my opinion. I treat phishing/hacking as a major risk, for the record. Those who haven't been victims yet may disagree but anyone can be next.
At the same time the 4 week schedule holds merit for advanced users who know how to safeguard and monitor their wallets and are active traders. Tying up capital that can be used for trading is pretty stupid. Tying up capital is however necessary to outfit projects and to obviously perform basic functions like curation with any level of enjoyment. Those same advanced users should arguably have the capability to swap their trustee account and recover themselves if compromised.
Whether a divestment schedule change can attract investors is another matter. We're assuming that it will. It's going to take developer hours and a hardfork, both of which are expensive for everyone already invested and involved. Granted it can be bundled with the next planned fork, which would make it more acceptable to the ventures. It's still going to take time from the development team no matter how the code will be approached.
We need to answer the following before we start to the best of our ability:
I don't think we need to baby customers too much, there is inherent hack risk in crypto, bitcoin is way more popular than Steem and has no such safeguards. My ideal implementation would be 4 weeks defacto but have advanced features to increase number of weeks per individual choice, however this will make the code for this HF more complex and we want to keep it light because of SMT complexity already, big risk adding complicated changes to this HF.
I would agree except we are onboarding mainstream users.
Why should it take developers time to change a number in the code "13" to the number 4, instead. I'm sorry it might be slightly more difficult than that, but not by much. Seems like it could be done in a few days, at most.
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There are things that can conflict as a result. Although it seems simple its not.
In my opinion it's a horrible idea.
When an account is compromised with 4 week powerdown worst case scenario if it's recovered on day 28+ all its stake whether it's powered up or not are stolen (Is it even worth recovering anymore?). Even if its recovered day 7+ after it's stolen it loses at least 25% of its powered up stake while with our current powerdown period at worst case when it's recovered on day 28+ it only loses 4/13 of its powered up stake, a little more than 30%. After 30 days of course you lose the account to the hacker on both cases.
Shortening powerdown is also bad because how our hardfork works. 4 weeks is not too bad (still worse than 13 weeks), but 1 week is plain horrible. If it's only 1 week exchanges will undoubtedly start voting for witnesses. You say our powerdown period is too long compared to EOS but they are having a huge governance problem. Even Dan Larimer is proposing staking pools with up to 10 years(!) lockup period and the 3 day lockup EOS tokens have 0 vote for BPs, the minimum lockup to have any vote for BPs is 3 month, pretty close with Steem right now and it seems like it won't have gradual weekly powerdown like Steem has. If an "investor" can't even commit to their "investment" for 13 weeks do they even can be counted as "invested" in the chain? If they just want to speculate on STEEM price that's what liquid STEEM is for, hold those instead.
The instant powerdown with burn fee is even more horrible idea. Now instead of losing 25% of your powered up stake each week when your account is compromised you lose 100% right away, GG!
However, I agree that in order to participate in PoB someone shouldn't be forced to lock up their capital for 13 weeks.
Here are my proposed changes instead:
Yes, these changes will be complicated to code but I think this is the way to go instead of simply reducing the powerdown period to please the so-called "investors" which in my opinion is very shortsighted .
That's my thoughts on this.
Way too complicated IMO. Just not worth even close to that level of mechanism for something (lock up) that is very minor to the platform overall.
If someone were building a system like Steem today it would not have 13 week lockup and certainly would not have the 2 year lockup that was originally there (and for which reducing to 13 weeks was proposed as a compromise). It would probably have a few days to possibly a few weeks of lockup, or maybe none.
These were experimental ideas, worth a try, but really did not demonstrate any clear benefits, did not catch on more broadly, and should be left behind.
The reasoning behind your comment is plain stupid. Sry. 99% of cryptos don't have a 13 week powerdown and they function perfectly well. Security? You offered such a fringe example that happens in 0.1% of cases here.
The 13 week powerdown is extremely detrimental to the price of steem and offers basically nothing.
Adjustment could be made for the person staking to stake for however long he wants or 2f authorization added.
All those things can be added as long as the 13 week powerdown is eliminated.
That's the single biggest culprit in steem being at 80th in mc
Do you not even notice that I propose 1 week powerdown alongside 13 weeks powerdown? I just want the 1 week lockup to not have any voting power for witnesses and proposals. if it's possible to keep PoB from being gamed without lockup at all then the 1 week powerdown can be eliminated.
In Steem we use our keys an awful lot compared to other cryptos. When this chain become more popular, if that ever happens, incentives to steal accounts will be way bigger than now, Compromised accounts will still be fringe cases but will happen a lot more often. 2F auth doesn't protect anyone that got their key(s) compromised unless it's implemented on blockchain level.
If custom stake period is implemented I want staked STEEM have vote weights for witnesses and proposals proportional to the stake period.
If someone doesn't want to stake their Steem for 13 weeks, can't they just buy liquid Steem?
I think you forgot to mention that Steem CAN be bought, just like any other liquid crypto like Bitcoin.
Steem needs to be simple for users, we cater for more normies than EOS does so we shouldn’t get too complicated, Dan tends to make things too convoluted and technical for the average user. We already have 3 currencies on Steem, adding an extra pool is akin to having 4. I don’t think a 4 week pd schedule will create a governance issue, take for example a major shareholder in a real world company stock, there is no lockup period traditionally unless that was the terms given in a buyout or something but that won’t be common, investors in such stocks still exercise their voting rights for the good of their investment same as if you own a property in s body corporate, you can sell it anytime but doesn’t mean while you hold the property you will make malicious voting decisions at meetings.
The issue with EOS and alot of crypto is the quality of investors, no matter if the lockup is short or long, a bad acting large stakeholder can still help mess up the project.
For myself a short or long time period won’t change my decision making process, my investment in Steem is my time over the years that makes me invested.
I do like your point about the burn being a huge security risk and defeats the object of the security feature of the 30 day recovery period.
I also urge users to split their stake across multiple accounts and for ease of use can delegate to the main account. Having as shorter pd period can help users decentralise their holdings in this manner for increased security.
Steem needs to be simple for users, I agree. That's why I concede at two pools instead of Dan's wacky amount of pools. Normie users actually doesn't need to learn about the extra pool at all. If SP rewards for posts and curation goes to the first pool then they don't need to learn about the second pool unless they are interested in voting for witnesses and proposals. If it goes to the second pool users don't need to learn about the first pool unless they actively don't want witness and proposal voting power and prefer faster power down and don't mind the lower security. The choice depends whether you (witnesses) consider witness and proposal voting a "normie feature" or not. Users only forced to learn about both pools if post and curation rewards goes to both pools which I'm strongly against. While we are at it, I'm also proposing disabling SBD rewards entirely on posts next hardfork as the DAO already provides constant downward pressure to SBD price regardless of the debt ratio, this way normie users don't need to know about SBD unless they are interested about holding this particular stablecoin.
This is a tangent but no lockup in most real life companies is the very reason company's shareholders prioritize short term profits over sustainability and treats their workers pretty badly knowing when in near inevitable crash they can bail right away, even worse after crashing they cry to government to get bailed out to "protect their worker's job" while they have already bailed themselves and became shareholders on other companies (or simply keep their wealth from selling the stocks). Taxpayers get screwed too even though they have nothing to do with the company.
Yes, most stocks in real life companies don't have lockup period but having lockup period for governance voting forces the stakeholder looking at the best interest of the token value at least for the duration of the lockup. We are a blockchain community not companies. We have no workers to exploit as they can simply leave and we have no government to bail us out when we make a lot of bad short term decisions. One of the main reasons we have lockup period at all is so exchanges can't vote, the lower the duration the more vulnerable we are to that and this complements with the security issues I mentioned on the previous post too. Exchanges are not in for long haul, STEEM is just one asset they hold and it's not even theirs.
You agree that quality of investors of crypto is bad but you advocate for shorter lockup? If it's implemented like I proposed we can still market the lowered (1 week) staking period to new investors and if they want to get involved in governance they only allowed to play a long game. Where's the drawback? Most of our bad stakeholders now are due to ninjamine and/or only invested because of bad economics pre-HF21 anyway.
Sure, I believe you are a good actor but you can't just project your behavior to other actors. If a system rely on all its participant to act good it's garbage. Why are you even advocating shorter powerdown period if it doesn't affect your behavior whatsoever?
Yeah, keeping multiple private keys for multiple accounts where an account already have multiple private keys is totally user friendly. How about having a single account with higher security where 100% (or at least significant portion) of your stake doesn't get stolen within the account recovery window?
Steemit just needs to stay decentralised and thats pretty much it, oh and keep going. As for the power down i say keep it at 13 weeks. No reason other than in the real world 13 weeks lock up of your investment is nothing and second why encourage volatility in the Steem price.
Who is steem's greatest offender? It is @themarkymark. Read this post to understand why you should never support him nor whoever he supports.
I'm supporting this and also think the proposal that @theycallmedan has made repeatedly of allowing a penalised quick power down is well worth implementing if the security implications can be thought through properly.
The quick powerdown based on burn was at first glance a cool idea but after more thought it totally circumvents any lockup period security, you might as well not have a lockup period for safety then if a hacker can get into your account and initiate a burn to get all your funds out.
Surely there could be a simple opt in and people who feel confident in their own ability to secure their accounts can sign up for high speed power down. Obviously after a 13 week wait that would kick and and the account would be marked as available for quicker power downs.
Sure anything is possible but adds to complexity of the chain because now you have to store the opt-in state of each account.
What if you would have to use the Owner Key instead of Active in order to make an instant power down with a burn? This way you wouldn't have to be worried of losing all your funds in case of some getting their hands on your Active Key.
We @proxy.token and KR community actively support your proposal ! Actually we want shorter powerdown period, but the four weeks you suggest could be the first step of that.
Thank you so much for your proposal, @thecrytodrive !!
An absolute pleasure, I think 4 weeks is a number most people can get behind and later we can reduce if this proves to be successful. Appreciate your support.
You did good job, @thecryptodrive. I'm happy I could support you with that proposal.
.... from Mr.Salmon.
Thanks so much for your support!
Your proposal must be passed at last! You did it! Congratuations!
We @proxy.token and KR community are all happy with it.
Thank u, @thecryptodrive.
Yes it has passed with your help, much appreciated. It would be good if a majority of top20 witnesses had also voted it, so far only 8/20 have voted for the change, ultimately witnesses govern the outcome, the purpose of this post was to create a central point to collect votes from both witnesses and the community. The fact that it is at the top of the list shows witnesses that haven't voted that the community is seriously behind such a change. I saw there was a user threatening to unvote witnesses who support the change, perhaps your community could support and vote for witnesses that do vote for the change.
Hi @proxy.token I saw you voted some new witnesses which moved my rank out of the top20. I was surprised I didn’t get your vote since we are aligned in improving Steem with the shorter powerdown period and my recent efforts with the @sbdpotato project to try fix the SBD peg. I can’t influence changes if I am not in the top20 so I ask that you consider voting me as well.
I am on board. Bottom line is this issue needs to be addressed because all new SMTs created will have the same power down time. If we already know we are going to reduce it from 13 weeks, we need to do it now as opposed to having a SMT Nightmare involving recreating SMTs and trying to airdrop new tokens, etc when we finally shorten the power down period.
Yes agreed we need to make the change on the SMT HF.
4 weeks is a good idea in my opinion 😀
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What is the need of decreasing the Power Down period when investors can always invest in liquid Steem at any time if they don't want it locked for 13 weeks?
This would certainly alleviate some fears for potential investors!
Great to have you here building, promoting and guiding Steem @thecryptodrive!
Thank u @kus-knee.
glad to see u back bro here is 1 peosp @peos privacy on eos token
Good stuff!
Can't investors buy liquid Steem at any time without ever having their Steem "locked up for long periods of time"?
I wouldn’t mind if it was reduced to 2 weeks tbh. Or even a week only
We can’t go less than one week otherwise can powerdown transfer to another account and vote twice. Some stakeholders don’t feel 2 weeks is enough for funds protection incase of a hack. Personally i would like to see a min period like one week with user defined longer lengths for those who want to lockup funds longer. For simplicity we won’t put that on the table for this HF.
I feel we could reduce the voting time. Given all of the experiments we've done (12 hours, 24 hours, 30 days, 7 days), the one that seems to have worked the best is 24 hours.
7 days isn't nearly long enough for people who want evergreen rewards, so they need to come up with another solution anyway, and after the first day or two of 7 days, diminishing returns kicks in and the amount of voting goes way down. Later votes are probably disproportionately used by scammers too.
i think 3 days is good enough to cover all timezones and people being offline on weekends.
Sure we can go to one week. Or even less. All it would take is the implementation of a rule that wouldn’t allow anyone to delegate nor to start a power down procedure unless they have been sitting on 100% VP. Sounds crazy?
100% VP is not easy to get to, especially if you delegate regularly, each time i delegate on dlease my VP reduces. But in any event we are wanting to keep the code overhead low for the upcoming HF, it is already very complicated with SMTs being added.
The savings on the wallet can be acting like the current powerdown system I think they should just switch it. Once one save fund come in 13 weeks while power down should be 3days
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You never addressed the issue of exchanges using some of their deposits to vote on witnesses if the Power Down length is to short.
You also failed to state that investors can invest in liquid Steem, just like any other cryptocurrency like Bitcoin without having to even stake 1 Steem.
The best proposal outhere. It can attract many new people that just don't like having their money frozen for so long.
Nice, glad u like it!
Can't people buy liquid Steem without ever having it locked in Steem Power?