RE: Thinking out loud: When should the witnesses start paying interest on SBDs in savings?
I'm not sure I really follow the argument about the relationship between this and STEEM price or witness incomes.
The amount of new STEEM produced is based on the virtual supply, according to this formula:
new_steem = ( ( virtual_supply * inflation_rate ) / (Number of blocks per year ) )
And, of course,
virtual_supply = STEEM_supply + (SBD_supply / price_of_STEEM).
So, if we increase the SBD_supply, that increases the virtual supply, and that increases the new_steem to be distributed in the form of rewards. Not just to witnesses, but to witnesses and all other participants, too.
The part about the virtual supply changing as the price of STEEM changes was introduced by @dan, here and I wrote on it here. The crux is that a rising price of STEEM decreases the 2nd term of the virtual supply equation, above, and a falling price of STEEM increases it.
In general I think they should stick to the basic premise: turn on interest when there's insufficient demand for SBDs, which doesn't seem to be the case today.
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I think some people are under the impression that having high SBD prices are good for their vote-bot businesses.
In general I would agree that interest is a tool to stimulate demand, but there seem to be other relevant factors at play in this situation (as you also note): (i) The high price for SBD on external markets is stimulating spamming at the social media layer; (ii) The SBD was intended to be stable, not to float with market rates; and of course the point I made above (iii) that being a witness needs to be profitable for the health and safety of the blockchain. In this particular case, the high external price is almost like an attack that prevents the blockchain from acting as designed. Increasing the supply with interest payments might have two effects:
- Ironically, it might drive the external price back towards the peg, which would make spamming less profitable; -or-
- It might raise the price of SBD, which would give investors a more profitable, easier to implement choice than spamming the blockchain.
I'm not arguing for SBD interest payments at this point, but I do think it deserves careful consideration, because there are more factors in play than just supply and demand for the SBD.
OK, looking at those formulas, wouldn't the SBD inflation rate need to be huge to have a non-negligible effect?
In the abstract I think the chain would probably be better if the witnesses could dynamically adjust some of the economic settings (inflation rates, how much is allocated to each pool, etc.), but obviously that's not how things currently work. Since this one is one of the few settings that currently can be altered without a fork I can see why it's worth considering whether anything useful can be done with it, but to me it seems like the wrong tool for this job.
Well, it was intended to float with market rates with the expectation the conversion mechanism would incentivize it float toward $1. Perhaps that's a pedantic point, but a lot of people seem to think there should be a centralized mechanism to maintain the peg even though the original decentralized idea is better (most of the time when I suggest we'd be better off if the price went below $1 people act like that would be a crisis rather than the normal thing that the chain is already designed to deal with). Of course the original idea was based on the premise that there would be some economic sense to what was going on, instead the prices of small-cap coins seems to be dominated by the actions of manipulators, speculators, and fads rather than conventional economics.
I haven't worked through the numbers, but I do think they'd either need to be fairly large or long lasting or both. I mean, back-of-the-envelope, 20% would double the supply of SBDs in 5 years (not counting compound interest or SBDs not in savings).
I agree with this. But yeah, not happening any time soon.
Yeah, I don't necessarily disagree. That's sort of why I titled the post and phrased the question the way I did. Basically, we have this parameter sitting out there that everyone is ignoring, and it has potentially wide-ranging influence. I don't think we should just turn it on and see what happens, but I think the witnesses and the rest of the community should start thinking about how and when to make use of it.
This is another point. The larger the market, the harder it is to manipulate. I've never traded in penny-stocks, but I have the impression that a lot of manipulation happens there, too.