Author Topic: This is not the time to stop publishing pricefeeds!!!  (Read 4484 times)

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Offline starspirit

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I am of the personal opinion that a price feed is necessary to oblige parties to make markets at the peg price. As such, I think improving the quality of price feeds is a critical issue that we must address better.

So here's more food for thought- What if anybody were able to submit price feeds and be rewarded for their accuracy per block in doing so?

For example, it might be possible for some delegates to act as arbiters of price feed quality. Most of their delegate pay could be passed through to fund rewards to price feed submitters. The advantage of this is that delegates as a collective group are not required to be experts in price feeds or burdened with that role, but there is a source of reward now available for anybody who can offer this service the best. The arbiter delegates can easily be voted in or out according to how well the do their job of incentivising accurate and timely price feeds. (Ultimately it would be better for the arbiters to be hired by the community in some other form than delegates, so that all delegates can focus purely on their key role of blockchain integrity.)

Now the pool could be distrubuted based on a transparent, verifiable, hindsight measure of accuracy. For example, arbiters might follow a policy of taking a price history from several official and public sources, combining them in some transparent way, and periodically (e.g. daily) comparing those against all price feeds submitted in that period. The distribution algorithm would take into account the error against the official source on each block. If feed prices are poor, the available reward incentivizes better submitters to join. The incentive can also be varied as necessary by the community by voting in more or fewer arbiter delegates.

I think such a hindsight-measured system could be more robust than alternatives such as prediction markets raised in the past. The problem with rewarding people for how close they are to a median or average price, is that even if some people can provide greater accuracy, they are incentivized to submit feeds that match the average error or lagginess of everybody else. A hindsight reward against official sources avoids this.

Anyway that's just some extra ideas to throw in the mix.

[Edit: an after-thought on this is that rather than using the median price feed for the trading engine, another possibility is we could use a price feed weighted by the accuracy of all past submitters.]
« Last Edit: April 11, 2015, 11:50:47 pm by starspirit »

Offline Akado

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"i still think any delegate should publish pricefeeds"

Imo, every single delegate must provide pricefeeds. It's a requirement. The basic of the basics. I don't understand why they don't do it honestly.
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Offline Shentist

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I want to remember ALL delegates to publish pricefeeds.

In the last days the delegates on the 5 main bitAssets are down do 64/101

- i still think any delegate should publish pricefeeds, especially ALL core devs. Why are some core devs not publishing? In the past TOAST and others stated they want to code something on their own. I am fine with that, but not in 1 year! All of you had enough time, and it looks to me you have no time to do it, so just use an already existing feedscript.

maybe this is also a good time to discuss the feed idea at all. Do we really need them or can we come up with a better solution?