Recently there was a hangout with a guy from Dash. One really interesting concept was masternodes that Dash has. Especially the collateral that is demanded for masternode seemed to be very successful idea.
Every masternode has to have 1000 dash that they lock for so long as they are a masternode. This has been very helpful for dash price because it has sucked a lot of dash away from market liquidity.
It's more profitable for dash owners to lock it up and get rewarded rather than trade on exchanges: they get an interest for the collateral and dash price goes up because there is less to sell.
What would be the best way for Bitshares to implement something like this?
First and most obvious option is of course that we will have a worker that will pay interest for accounts that have locked a certain amount of BTS. And of course there will be the old antidilution argument... but in this case, the funds from reseve pool are not going to liquid markets, they are going to be locked away from markets.
Those funds are not increasing the current supply and they incentivize people to reduce current supply. That would be pure win for everyone. In addition that will incentivize people to move their BTS from exchanges to their own wallets. So the "antidilution" argument doesn't apply in this case.
Couple of questions:
- Should there be a minimum amount of BTS that is entitled to the interest? 1000 dash is approximately 1 000 000 BTS.
- How often interest is paid? Once a month? When funds are unlocked?
- How much is the interest?
- Is there some minimum time for locking? If user unlocks before that, they need to pay a fine, which is added to the interest pot and divided for those who keep their funds locked?
Another possibility is
"savings club" that
@Empirical1.2 suggested a while ago.
Users will deposit assets to an account where they sit for a year (or some other time). When year is over, they need perform "proof of life" to get their assets back. If they don't, they lose the assets and those are divided for other users as an interest. So it's like a mild form of gambling.
Originally Empirical proposed that this would be for BitUSD but I think it would work best with BTS. We want BitUSD to be liquid, so there is not much reason to lock it away from markets. Instead we want BTS to be locked away from current supply to make it more valuable.
This could be funded with fee backed assets so there is no need to use reserve pool funds.