SOME SERIOUS ISSUES exposed by recent PRICE HIKE [discussion, only PH core team members]

INTRODUCTION

Good morning,

The reason behind me writing that publication is to "brainstorm" some issues and problems with PH economy. Problems which have been exposed lately, while the price of STEEM and HIVE tokens reached recently such high levels. Those are problems in the fundamental structure of PH economy, which I organized during different times. Problems, which need to be acknowledged and addressed asap.

INITIAL PH ECONOMY ASSUMPTIONS

From the very beginning, my idea has been to build a business/community model where people who participate in its growth would be rewarded. I didn't want only authors and curators to enjoy benefits.

I knew that in order to attract the attention and support of large stakeholders - we need to build a strong, healthy and active community core team: engaging people, who love collaborating with others. Delegators, content creators, curators etc -> they would gravitate towards us if we could establish a strong team within our community.

I decided to introduce a model where authors are setting up beneficiaries to @ph-fund and those resources have been used by me to cover a number of expenses. A huge part of that budget has been allocated to support the most active and engaging members of our community and I've been currently supporting approx 30 people with some amount of STEEM tokens ("weekly support").

And it has been working fine. Till now.
The recent price hike exposed some real issues of this model. Let me explain it in more detail.

FLAW IN Project.hope economy model

Around a year ago, when we've started the idea of supporting our core team (which has been way smaller at that time) with some weekly STEEM - I assumed that it would be wise to allocate some % of all received beneficiaries.

My assumption has been, that amount of STEEM coming to ph-fund will be increasing and I will work with budget growing every month. And for almost a year - that assumption has been very correct. As we progressed, there have been indeed more funds coming to our budget and a daily average of STEEM flowing into ph-fund has been growing as planned and predicted.

So I decided to allocate a large % of all those funds for that one purpose: so we could use it to support financially our most active core team members. And as long as the price has been low - the average amount of STEEM tokens "earned" by PH has been increasing. Slowly but steadily.

It is not the case anymore

The recent price jump resulted in me learning something new. And it's quite a worrying lesson. Allow me please to quote part of the conversation I had about this topic with @alokkumar121:

crypto.piotr — 03/04/2021
reality is, that I need liquid STEEM - partly to cover PH expenses (since I'm using approx 5k steem monthly to support our core team)
I used to get 5-6 steem for each SBD, and now it's little more ... .but if SBD will drop down then 1 SBD will be 1 STEEM
also amount of received steem in rewards is less (since price is higher)
so average there was >100 steem coming daily in form of beneficiaries
right now it dropped to approx 60 steem daily
which is already 40% drop

---

so imagine how difficult position I may end up in:
steem may be worth so much more, so all authors will be happy
and that 5k steem distributed between all active members has huge value now
and in usd all funds coming to a beneficiary are growing
but overall .... amount of steem coming to beneficiaries is less and less (while price goes up - that's just an algorithm I guess)

I hope I'm making sense and everyone reading this post does understand the problem by now? Additionally, several users recently removed their delegations, and many more started powering down. People want to enjoy current high prices and sell part of their holdings. Which I totally understand.

That will result in even fewer STEEM tokens coming to our fund.

Allow me to summarize it

Currently, fixed funds used to cover various expenses within PH were approx 50% of entire STEEM beneficiaries. If the current trend continues (increasing steem price and decreasing amount of steem received in author rewards) then we will "hit the wall". Sooner or later.

Right now SBD is worth 8 steem, so I do not despair. However, once the price of SBD will drop to its the natural value of 1 USD (which will happen sooner or later), then I may end up having a real problem to deal with.

Hope I made it easy to understand so far? I would like to introduce this problem to all of you, so you would be aware of it and hopefully, we can come up with some solution together.

ADDITIONAL ISSUE

To make things worse ... I've recently realized that some members receive weekly support, and yet they do not seem to engage at all. Some of them wouldn't drop even ONE SINGLE comment within PH in recent week.

And few others are engaging (comments) strictly and only on HIVE. This is making it a little bit awkward to support them with steem tokens if their efforts are only good for the hive chain.

SEEKING SOLUTION

I strongly believe those are crucial concerns that need to be addressed ASAP. And obviously, I would love to hear what you guys have to say. You may either drop me a comment below or contact me via discord (where we can brainstorm ideas even further).

We've discussed this topic already with a few people and the solution I like the most is quite simple: to launch HOPE token and reward those members who are engaging and participate in the growth of our community with those tokens.
Only our members would receive HOPE tokens (depending on their input and efforts within PH). At the same time, some % of all revenue on both chains (beneficiaries) would be used to buy-back and burn. This way we would maintain steady and growing price of those tokens.

There would be no airdrops, we wouldn't try to sell any of those tokens to raise funds, and supply would be limited. That would create an environment with very low inflation and low selling pressure.

Personally, the more I think about that solution - the more I think that it is a natural step for our community and those issues exposed and described above are definitely a great reason to consider launching our own HOPE token.

What do you think? Please share your thoughts with me. Let's work on that together.

IMPORTANT side note:

For the time being, I will continue with current weekly support till the end of April. I will put it "on hold" the entire program starting 1st of May.

In May I will be working towards adjusting Project.hope economy. So we all could re-start the "weekly support" program again ASAP.

Yours
Piotr