Author Topic: Top developers should temporarily be allowed more than one delegate  (Read 8143 times)

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Offline starspirit

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Another possibility to solve the OPs issue is for delegates who have no other use for inflation to instead make a proposal to use their inflation to fund another delegate. Stakeholders can then effectively vote for that as per normal. This method operates within all the usual rules of the system, without the need to give a developer multiple delegate positions. I prefer this because it seems to maintain a stronger control in the system.

Offline xeroc

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With turing apps you can have a app exchange your bts to bitusd and burn the rest ..

But then what happens if there are no shorts at the feed price? I guess it could be done but it would just require some more advanced logic. The thing about this I think would be most important is that voters need to be able to easily and transparently determine exactly how much money a given delegate will make, and this needs to be apparent in the same place where they cast their votes (so it should be retrievable from the blockchain)

In the short run I don't think it is vital to have salary pegging in some form, but in the long run it would definitely help a lot with governance. The biggest temptation a delegate will have is probably "forgetting" to reduce their own salary after a BTS rally.
- The delegate sets a 100% payrate and publishes a Turing Dapp on the blockchain which will receive the payouts (both can be enforce and verified on the blockchain)
- the code of the Dapp should be readable and verifiyable!
- it takes the BTS as input and puts up a market buy oder for USD (there will surely be short orders at the feed .. take a look at the current market -- that will probably never be an issue)
- the script exchanges BTS to USD send the USD to some other address so that the delegate can spend it
- the rest of the BTS can be burned in a proof-able manner

The only issue I see is that the delegate can change the payout address to point to a different Dapp doing something differently without requiring shareholder approval ..

Offline Rune

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With turing apps you can have a app exchange your bts to bitusd and burn the rest ..

But then what happens if there are no shorts at the feed price? I guess it could be done but it would just require some more advanced logic. The thing about this I think would be most important is that voters need to be able to easily and transparently determine exactly how much money a given delegate will make, and this needs to be apparent in the same place where they cast their votes (so it should be retrievable from the blockchain)

In the short run I don't think it is vital to have salary pegging in some form, but in the long run it would definitely help a lot with governance. The biggest temptation a delegate will have is probably "forgetting" to reduce their own salary after a BTS rally.

Offline xeroc

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With turing apps you can have a app exchange your bts to bitusd and burn the rest ..

Offline Rune

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Instead of capping the inflation per delegate, why don't we cap the total inflation across all delegates? That way a single delegate can earn a lot more if the community accepts it.

This would certainly help to keep the number of independent signers closer to 101.  Otherwise we might find ourselves driven toward 25 4-node employees until our market cap quadruples.

Yes. Then go just one step further and replace the pay rate percentage with a BitUSD salary as described in the proposal here and further elaborated here.

This would definitely be the best solution. 5050 BTS max dilution per round would definitely be a lot better than 50 BTS per block. The total inflated BTS since beginning of each round is stored as a variable, and if that variable hits 5050 then payments stop for that round. Paying in actual bitUSD would be impossible, I think, but the BTS payment could be tied to the current feed rate, so if a guy specifies he wants 15 cents per block he will gain 15 cents * feed of BTS per block. This would cause a bunch of problems if the BTS price fell too much though, however the salary decrease caused by hitting the round max early would be evenly spread out over all delegates in the long run, since their place in the round is chosen randomly.

Another idea I had that would allow us to pay competetively for talent without sacrificing any decentralization would be to allow "passthrough delegates", where one or more persons (nominated by the developer and accepted by the community through voting) will take their full 50 BTS per block, then subtract some tiny amount for delegate maintenance and send the rest on to the developer to complement his salary.

As long as this has to be done every week these pt delegates will never be able to steal, because if they don't make their payment transparently on the blockchain on time, they can quickly be voted out and will take a net loss since they had to invest 2 weeks of pay to register the delegate in the first place. Of course any accidents or unforeseen issues with the payments would present a significant risk to the pt delegates and they should probably be rewarded more than just delegate maintenance fees as compensation.
« Last Edit: November 01, 2014, 12:43:56 pm by Rune »

Offline arhag

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Instead of capping the inflation per delegate, why don't we cap the total inflation across all delegates? That way a single delegate can earn a lot more if the community accepts it.

This would certainly help to keep the number of independent signers closer to 101.  Otherwise we might find ourselves driven toward 25 4-node employees until our market cap quadruples.

Yes. Then go just one step further and replace the pay rate percentage with a BitUSD salary as described in the proposal here and further elaborated here.

Offline Gentso1

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Instead of capping the inflation per delegate, why don't we cap the total inflation across all delegates? That way a single delegate can earn a lot more if the community accepts it.

This would certainly help to keep the number of independent signers closer to 101.  Otherwise we might find ourselves driven toward 25 4-node employees until our market cap quadruples.

I really like this idea. It give us the flexibility to pay people what they are worth. While someone who is running a node and publishing feeds, doing updates is great we need to bring in more skilled dev's to more projects forward at a faster pace.

We certainly dont have a shortage of features or ideas for changing things we just need more people capable of making those changes.

What about using AGS funds in some way as payment option? It was discussed in the mumble that we are going to want to use them sooner as opposed to later....

Offline Rune

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It is far more important to find like-minded developers than super star developers. 

Amir is not like minded, he hates profit motive and company metaphor. 

BTC devs have a different philosophy, so we must be careful.

I agree in the sense that the individual skill or personality of a developer will mean little to their overall contribution to the project. However from a marketing and publicity perspective they are crucial. Unless we poach the hardcore bitcoin developers early(ish) we might literally never be able to make the bitcoiners understand, and they might simply go down with their ship and miss the real boat, so to speak.

Additionally the quick early influx of users and capital taking the crypto community will give us will be crucial. Both to the short term gains of investors, who will surely vote for it, and for the overall security of the system. Only if enough money is involved will we be robustly beyond destruction by authorities or criminals. We have too understand that we are going to take heat far, far beyond what bitcoin is currently getting. The western world will cling to the company metaphor and use it to justify a crackdown. China will realize how we are a fundamental threat to the regime once they start to see bitCNY adoption in any quantity.

I think it is imperative that we are as far beyond reach as we can possibly be, when they realize they have to act.

The way I see it, there's definitely nothing to be lost at attempting to cause as much of a stir as possible. As long as our fundementals are impregnable, it will be difficult to tell our story without also exposing why we are better.

If we're able to actually sift through the industry and choose the best developers it will be a massive advantage and will leave our competitors with nothing. In the end I don't see why everyone who is currently running a profitable project in the industry, shouldn't be doing that project but releasing it open source, for free, with bitshares support, and be paid a salary by the blockchain instead.

Instead of capping the inflation per delegate, why don't we cap the total inflation across all delegates? That way a single delegate can earn a lot more if the community accepts it.

This would certainly help to keep the number of independent signers closer to 101.  Otherwise we might find ourselves driven toward 25 4-node employees until our market cap quadruples.

I, for one, would definitely never ever consider of voting for anything close to that many multi person delegates. I have faith the majority of stakeholders would agree, and I'm convinced the community will be very good at constantly keeping taps on all the delegates, especially the few of them who will have more responsibility.
« Last Edit: November 01, 2014, 12:08:56 am by Rune »

Offline bytemaster

It is far more important to find like-minded developers than super star developers. 

Amir is not like minded, he hates profit motive and company metaphor. 

BTC devs have a different philosophy, so we must be careful. 
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Offline oldman

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There is more than enough dev talent at I3 to get BitShares off the ground and no need to hire additional dev talent right now.

Bringing in outside devs right now would be a disaster - 'superstars' are by nature my-way-or-the-highway.

The last thing this tech needs is a philosophical split in the dev team.

I3 needs three to six months to finish the basic tech.

Once a client, trading platform, basic on/off ramps and initial marketing are in play I3 can be disbanded and the community can start hiring new talent.

Lets not put the cart before the horse.

Offline luckybit

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Instead of capping the inflation per delegate, why don't we cap the total inflation across all delegates? That way a single delegate can earn a lot more if the community accepts it.

This would certainly help to keep the number of independent signers closer to 101.  Otherwise we might find ourselves driven toward 25 4-node employees until our market cap quadruples.

The question is "how".  We have to incentivize voting in our ecosystem (imho).  We also have to incentivize investors learning about the actual investment, both on a technological level and an economical level, so they can make the best possible decisions for everyone involved.

Perhaps voter turnout should be rewarded...

Perhaps people could designate votes in certain areas of expertise to people they trust to have similar philosophical inclinations and those who vote for them get the rewards that those for whom they vote would have received.  In this way, if an expert begins voting in ways that hurt the shareholders, the shareholders who trusted them will cease to designate them with their vote...thus impacting the expert directly.

Right now we don't have the data to know exactly whom to trust with what. I would say that I would trust Bytemaster when it comes to C++, knowledge of what decisions to make as a lead developer, etc, but that is because the data for that is obvious. What isn't obvious is how we track the reputation of people who aren't developers so that there isn't a trail of code and decisions to look back on.

I think you can trust the decision making capabilities of humans who have proven their capabilities of making good decisions but I think doing this would create super delegates which further centralize decision making in ways which could be risky.

I support algorithmic methods because if a person agrees to let an algorithm be their leader then they can only be betrayed if the algorithm produces bad results. Mathematics cannot betray as it's just a language that describes what is or what could be so if I'm trying to make decisions I want algorithmic assistance.

Bytemaster originally stated that one design axiom would be automation. I think if we can figure out how to get scripting / smart contracts then we can have decision making capabilities that the world has never seen before. I understand that it will take significant developer time to code the kind of BTS which would truly change the world but in my vision that kind of BTS requires a Turing complete scripting language.

Once we have a Turing complete scripting language then all of the problems we discuss here will be solved. Ethereum will rule the world (literally) if it has a Turing complete scripting language and BTS does not compete in that area. The moment BTS has a Turing complete scripting language then we can either write these smart contracts ourselves or we can provide the reputation incentive for the developers who write them on our behalf.

The way to incentivize voting is to reward voters who makes quantifiable good decisions. Ideally if algorithms can automate voting then whomever writes the most efficient/beautiful algorithm could be rewarded with some kind of community prize similar to prizes mathematicians win.

Reference

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKLy8uSy2SQ
« Last Edit: October 31, 2014, 04:46:55 am by luckybit »
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Offline roadscape

Instead of capping the inflation per delegate, why don't we cap the total inflation across all delegates? That way a single delegate can earn a lot more if the community accepts it.

This would certainly help to keep the number of independent signers closer to 101.  Otherwise we might find ourselves driven toward 25 4-node employees until our market cap quadruples.

The core issue is the max of 50 BTS per block... it's an arbitrary number. (Or does it prevent an attack vector?)

Can the community be trusted to not elect a delegate requesting 500k BTS per block?
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Offline BTSdac

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At 2 cents a share, a 100% paid delegate makes ~$30k USD a year.  As Rune said, this isn't enough to poach someone.

If the market cap went up a lot, one delegate would be plenty, but for now, we could potentially see a developer that we wanted create multiple delegates, and voters who wanted to hire them would vote for all their delegates.
there are many typical man can run a delegate, including developer , marketing ,big stakeholder ,exchange site. independent monitor, etc.

a good developer also can get pay from AGS fund partly.  there need some delegate just keep BTS DAC more decentralization. these delegates don`t cost much.  can donate partial BTS gained  to AGS fund.
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Offline starspirit

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Perhaps people could designate votes in certain areas of expertise to people they trust to have similar philosophical inclinations and those who vote for them get the rewards that those for whom they vote would have received.  In this way, if an expert begins voting in ways that hurt the shareholders, the shareholders who trusted them will cease to designate them with their vote...thus impacting the expert directly.
Aha! And there's a new voting paradigm to replace the one-person-one-vote-one-party traditional paradigm. VOTE DAC, take note!

Offline fuzzy

Instead of capping the inflation per delegate, why don't we cap the total inflation across all delegates? That way a single delegate can earn a lot more if the community accepts it.

This would certainly help to keep the number of independent signers closer to 101.  Otherwise we might find ourselves driven toward 25 4-node employees until our market cap quadruples.

The question is "how".  We have to incentivize voting in our ecosystem (imho).  We also have to incentivize investors learning about the actual investment, both on a technological level and an economical level, so they can make the best possible decisions for everyone involved.

Perhaps voter turnout should be rewarded...

Perhaps people could designate votes in certain areas of expertise to people they trust to have similar philosophical inclinations and those who vote for them get the rewards that those for whom they vote would have received.  In this way, if an expert begins voting in ways that hurt the shareholders, the shareholders who trusted them will cease to designate them with their vote...thus impacting the expert directly. 
« Last Edit: October 31, 2014, 02:41:34 am by fuzzy »
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