Author Topic: more professional price feed?  (Read 31747 times)

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Offline Chronos

I do not like the worker proposal advice, as it depends on trustee, not decentralized enough.
I agree on this point. Though it's a bit off-topic, I'm also wary, in general, of workers that short BitUSD to pay out. It creates a complexity that may be difficult to unwind in the future.

Offline bitcrab

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whether we can call it competition is not so important, a similar thing is US President election, are there clearly defined what kind of people should be elected president? no, but is this a competition? I think so. the final result comes from competition.
to qualify witness, take the "feed price every 5 min" as an example, at the time that the market price does not change in 30 mins, why should the witness publish price every 5 min?

another example is, several witnesses removed yunbi price when they are told that yunbi price is easy to manipulate, however alt's script uses a different alogrithm: it collect orders from different exchanges, including yunbi, and simulate to put these orders together to generate a result price, so this gives each exchange the weight it should have, right? but before this script comes out, I don't know the price script can be coded like this.

in my view price feed is such an area that it is easy to judge which witness doing well but it's not easy to hard code some rules to determine which nodes is qualified.

as a proxy, in long run I think I will vote witness that
1. generate block with low block missing rate.
2. publish price that reflect market price exactly and globally enough, maybe no need to be very frequent, but when market price changes obviously, need to publish price in time.

maybe I will unvote all the witnesses that does not publish price. however I think we need first reach some conclusion on the reward issue.

I do not like the worker proposal advice, as it depends on trustee, not decentralized enough.

the voting machanisim can work without clearly defined game rule, just as a satisfactory president can comes out from the general election. of course, a lot of communication are needed here between the proxy/stakeholders and the candidates.
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Offline BunkerChainLabs-DataSecurityNode

I agree to let the competition machanisim solve the problem: obviously shareholders appreciate and would like to vote the witnesses that provide more and better service.

and AFAIK, to provide good price feed is also possible via free/open source script, for example, alt has published his script at https://pypi.python.org/pypi/btsprice/0.2.21, it's a good reference.

on the other side, I wonder whether  we need to consider one question: suppose publishing price feed become what witness must do,  shall we increase the block reward? and to how much?

now being a witness can get some reward, but the reward is not very attractive, we need to balance the responsibility and the reward, maybe we need to reestimate what a reward is more reasonable? maybe a more reasonable reward can lead to more active ecosystem?

kindly give your input on this topic.

@Bhuz sorry if I did things carelessly, I' recheck and take actions accordingly.

Competition COULD be part of the mechanism. Proxies are making choices about who to vote for for other reasons however. The way the system is now that is their right. However, we cannot claim this to be a competitive field so long as the voting is done by different rules for each proxy voter and stakeholders.

In other words, you cannot expect people to compete in a competition where the rules are not clear for being a witness. I can point to myself for example. Regardless of fulfilling what I and many consider the parameters of what is needed for a witness, I still do not get your vote. So if you want competition, you have to offer a fair playing field. It doesn't exist now. In Bitcoin mining as @btswildpig likes to keep referring to, such competition is all just mathematics. Those that enter into that play field can simply do the math and calculate the reward/risk and invest accordingly. Comparing that to what happens is DPOS is utterly futile.

Sure there are plenty of free feed scripts, however the primary issue which this thread claims is the sources being the problem. Specifically Yunbi and its thin and easily manipulated market. I have chosen to remove Yunbi entirely as a feed source thus, and have enabled some other sources for publishing CNY. My price appears to be similar to abits now in its median.

If publishing feeds are to become 'officially' part of being a witness, then the process the way it works now would be reversed. Each witness would generate blocks at random intervals as they do now, and at random intervals the blockchain would query the witness for feed data. If it is not available, then there is no 'reward' for the generated data. This would help a number of factors over the way the current way works. Right now being completely voluntary you have some witnesses publishing at different intervals than others.. some every hour or every several hours, while others more frequent like every several minutes (as I do).

Now with feeds being 'unofficially' part of what witnesses do, witnesses are disincentivized to publish data feeds because they are an expense. Some of the TOP voted for witnesses (including ones you vote for) do not publish very often only for the sake of not having to pay as much BTS fees. This is doing nothing good for the median price in my estimation. I maybe wrong, but I think having as close to real time data as possible certainly makes the DEX look more attractive and impressive than a floating median that bears no resemblance to any current pricing due to a motley crew of variable price times.

To have it something they must do as part of the job description, but increase the price, might be helpful, but only if the 'rules of the game' are clearly defined. eg. a witness MUST publish feeds at a minimum of every 5 minutes. If a witness settings are shown not to follow the rules, then votes should be removed regardless of the political implications or nepotism. That's the only way to have competition.

Increasing the block reward would certainly make for raising the bar more attractive and bring in new blood. Again though I come back to the rules of the playing field, without that, we can never attract anyone to want to play. The current compensation makes being a witness a hobby at best. It is not monetarily attractive as current compensation for running optimal nodes instead of minimal ones is break even at best. The only saving grace now is that because there is zero development happening on the blockchain and thus no new version updates due to no worker proposals, it doesn't require a lot of time.

I already know the arguments against increasing the reward are going to be that we should be willing to settle for less and work harder to increase the value of BTS so that what we get becomes more valuable. Nobody in the crypto space is going to tolerate this line of thinking for long when they can go to other projects and get paid reasonably well for even less effort than what goes into being a witness (eg. dash master nodes). So this volunteerism fantasy really needs to be considered just that, a fantasy, and we need to start presenting BTS in a unified community manner that is no nonsense, rational, exciting, and profitable.

Proposal:

Worker proposal is made to pay out to witnesses for professional feed data. The worker proposal will be administered by a trustee who operates a script. The script will take all BTS and borrow bitUSD collateralized at 300%. It will then daily distribute the bitUSD to all the witnesses based on the number of publishings done daily to a certain maximum, and the number of markets that were published too. Ideally if all witnesses are participating they should all receive the same reward. However, if some are doing better than others, they will get more. Competition keeps everyone going for the greater reward, or at least keeps everyone putting MAXIMUM effort into getting the rewards that are available for publishing feeds.

It would be more ideal if we could know just how many data feed sources are being used, but the current system doesn't support that in any transparent way. If it didn't then I would suggest rewards be distributed based on number of sources.

That is my input on this topic.
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Offline Bhuz

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Quote
@Bhuz sorry if I did things carelessly, I' recheck and take actions accordingly.
No problem

on the other side, I wonder whether  we need to consider one question: suppose publishing price feed become what witness must do,  shall we increase the block reward? and to how much?

now being a witness can get some reward, but the reward is not very attractive, we need to balance the responsibility and the reward, maybe we need to reestimate what a reward is more reasonable? maybe a more reasonable reward can lead to more active ecosystem?
+1

Offline bitcrab

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I agree to let the competition machanisim solve the problem: obviously shareholders appreciate and would like to vote the witnesses that provide more and better service.

and AFAIK, to provide good price feed is also possible via free/open source script, for example, alt has published his script at https://pypi.python.org/pypi/btsprice/0.2.21, it's a good reference.

on the other side, I wonder whether  we need to consider one question: suppose publishing price feed become what witness must do,  shall we increase the block reward? and to how much?

now being a witness can get some reward, but the reward is not very attractive, we need to balance the responsibility and the reward, maybe we need to reestimate what a reward is more reasonable? maybe a more reasonable reward can lead to more active ecosystem?

kindly give your input on this topic.

@Bhuz sorry if I did things carelessly, I' recheck and take actions accordingly.
Email:bitcrab@qq.com

Offline btswildpig

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i have a idea.
witness that does not provide a professional feed should be voted out .

So, for the ones who actually want to be a witness, they should buy professional price feed from capable script suppliers and managers. Then there will be incomes for the ones who can write a good feed.
(if they do not want to be buy one, just learn how to write a good one themselves. )


Just like how Bitcoin miners need to buy good mining machines in order to participate in block production, and they can not ask the blockchain in advance to pay for the mining machines.

Let the market handles the incentives instead of assuming everything should be paid by the blockchain via worker dilution.

这个是私人账号,表达的一切言论均不代表任何团队和任何人。This is my personal account , anything I said with this account will be my opinion alone and has nothing to do with any group.

Offline xeroc

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I'm glad to see many new witness begin to  join us and promise to provide more professional price feed
it's the vote proxy's responsibility to vote out the lazy witness

stand out if you want take more responsibility, witnesses
choose the responsible witness, proxies
and give your vote to the proxies who can make a better choice, share holders.
This .. lets bring in some fresh and motivated blood .. i will do my due diligence on new witnesses over the weekend and update my votes on monday ..

I am not very impressed on how current witnesses (except for very few) do not participate in improving the price feed scripts that are available but assume that @xeroc does all the work for them for free ... hopefully the new python libs will help out and make it easier for people to generate a price feed ..

Offline Bhuz

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today a man made margin call happened again for bitCNY, about 50K bitCNY margin called, someone did price manipulation just by selling a little quantity of BTS in yunbi.

proxy bitcrab decided to unvote below witnesses, until they implement professional enough bitCNY price feeding.
spectral delegate-clayop bhuz bue delegate.ihashfury spartako fox elmato rnglab datasecuritynode

don't tell me btc38 always fail to provide price, don't ask me how to generate good price feed, you are witnesses, you should find ways to make that done.

I don't take price from yunbi for weeks now, so why my name is still there?

I "fixed" the issue with cny as soon as it was pointed out to our witnesses telegram group.

Offline btswildpig

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I start to see the attractiveness in Bitcoin.

Miners have to put in chuck load of money to fight for the job of block production without demanding "reasonable market fee" because market principle and competition are the only factors that matters .

You think you can be be guaranteed fixed incomes ? Fine , don't do mining, others will do it .

There is no job security in Bitcoin. No guaranteed  status, even the big miners have to purchase more advanced mining machines from time to time to be at the top of the food chain.

As for technical advancement, I think seg-wit will come to fruition. Once you have enough capital in the field, all "issues" will be fixed overtime as time have shown.

It's not about how many dilution you can give to developers that matters.
It's about how people and capital keep rushing in regardless of the slim the chance of guaranteed of profit in the field. When you buy a mining machine, no one in the network will promise you that it will  be worth your while, but you know in your heart that the potential will be well worth the risks and efforts . 

BTS is not growing rapidly is not because we don't have enough worker dilution to pay for this and that .
It's because despite of having a suppose "high pay market salary" daily in their respective jobs , developers still feels like if you don't take BTS from the system fast enough and sell it fast enough , the ship may not be there, and it will be stupid to buy BTS with actual money while the price is low to bet on the potential of its future like the rest of the market participants.

If you trust your work will be beneficial to BTS, buy it more than the ordinary folks who have no such "in sight", hold it , develop your work , and enjoy more potentials than the ones who are not aware of the huge significance of your work.  if you are thinking about risks , sorry , that means all the talk about your work's value is pure fiction. 

Imagine if Bitcoin miners were to ask at day one to be compensated for their mining cost and guaranteed  income, will Bitcoin be where it is today ?

The same goes to witness who want to be compensated for providing a good price feed

Those are some interesting observations.. but they have nothing to do with my assertion that if you want to have any kind of professional trading going on Bitshares then we better have reliable feed data. Witnesses are not the source of that data. They can only provide as good as what is available. Taking a median of a few free sources that can and do come and go works sometimes but not all the time, and that is the issue.

I'm calling for raising the bar... I think everyone might have even forgotten when 2.0 launched that bytemaster talked about the need for more feed providers. He envisioned it as being another element in the network that would be a paid opportunity, similar to how being a hosted wallet provider was supposed to be.

Nobody ever created one though. So 'good enough' became the montra for what few free datafeeds are available. Now though, nobody would dream of creating such a service because the response would be similar to this volunteerism expectation of providing critical always on data to the price feeds.

Do high pay professional price feed compensate for the losses of traders if their feed were wrong ? Or just simply getting voted out like the low pay ordinary feeds ?
这个是私人账号,表达的一切言论均不代表任何团队和任何人。This is my personal account , anything I said with this account will be my opinion alone and has nothing to do with any group.

Offline BunkerChainLabs-DataSecurityNode

I start to see the attractiveness in Bitcoin.

Miners have to put in chuck load of money to fight for the job of block production without demanding "reasonable market fee" because market principle and competition are the only factors that matters .

You think you can be be guaranteed fixed incomes ? Fine , don't do mining, others will do it .

There is no job security in Bitcoin. No guaranteed  status, even the big miners have to purchase more advanced mining machines from time to time to be at the top of the food chain.

As for technical advancement, I think seg-wit will come to fruition. Once you have enough capital in the field, all "issues" will be fixed overtime as time have shown.

It's not about how many dilution you can give to developers that matters.
It's about how people and capital keep rushing in regardless of the slim the chance of guaranteed of profit in the field. When you buy a mining machine, no one in the network will promise you that it will  be worth your while, but you know in your heart that the potential will be well worth the risks and efforts . 

BTS is not growing rapidly is not because we don't have enough worker dilution to pay for this and that .
It's because despite of having a suppose "high pay market salary" daily in their respective jobs , developers still feels like if you don't take BTS from the system fast enough and sell it fast enough , the ship may not be there, and it will be stupid to buy BTS with actual money while the price is low to bet on the potential of its future like the rest of the market participants.

If you trust your work will be beneficial to BTS, buy it more than the ordinary folks who have no such "in sight", hold it , develop your work , and enjoy more potentials than the ones who are not aware of the huge significance of your work.  if you are thinking about risks , sorry , that means all the talk about your work's value is pure fiction. 

Imagine if Bitcoin miners were to ask at day one to be compensated for their mining cost and guaranteed  income, will Bitcoin be where it is today ?

The same goes to witness who want to be compensated for providing a good price feed

Those are some interesting observations.. but they have nothing to do with my assertion that if you want to have any kind of professional trading going on Bitshares then we better have reliable feed data. Witnesses are not the source of that data. They can only provide as good as what is available. Taking a median of a few free sources that can and do come and go works sometimes but not all the time, and that is the issue.

I'm calling for raising the bar... I think everyone might have even forgotten when 2.0 launched that bytemaster talked about the need for more feed providers. He envisioned it as being another element in the network that would be a paid opportunity, similar to how being a hosted wallet provider was supposed to be.

Nobody ever created one though. So 'good enough' became the montra for what few free datafeeds are available. Now though, nobody would dream of creating such a service because the response would be similar to this volunteerism expectation of providing critical always on data to the price feeds.
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Offline alt

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I'm glad to see many new witness begin to  join us and promise to provide more professional price feed
it's the vote proxy's responsibility to vote out the lazy witness

stand out if you want take more responsibility, witnesses
choose the responsible witness, proxies
and give your vote to the proxies who can make a better choice, share holders.

Offline btswildpig

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I start to see the attractiveness in Bitcoin.

Miners have to put in chuck load of money to fight for the job of block production without demanding "reasonable market fee" because market principle and competition are the only factors that matters .

You think you can be be guaranteed fixed incomes ? Fine , don't do mining, others will do it .

There is no job security in Bitcoin. No guaranteed  status, even the big miners have to purchase more advanced mining machines from time to time to be at the top of the food chain.

As for technical advancement, I think seg-wit will come to fruition. Once you have enough capital in the field, all "issues" will be fixed overtime as time have shown.

It's not about how many dilution you can give to developers that matters.
It's about how people and capital keep rushing in regardless of the slim the chance of guaranteed of profit in the field. When you buy a mining machine, no one in the network will promise you that it will  be worth your while, but you know in your heart that the potential will be well worth the risks and efforts . 

BTS is not growing rapidly is not because we don't have enough worker dilution to pay for this and that .
It's because despite of having a suppose "high pay market salary" daily in their respective jobs , developers still feels like if you don't take BTS from the system fast enough and sell it fast enough , the ship may not be there, and it will be stupid to buy BTS with actual money while the price is low to bet on the potential of its future like the rest of the market participants.

If you trust your work will be beneficial to BTS, buy it more than the ordinary folks who have no such "in sight", hold it , develop your work , and enjoy more potentials than the ones who are not aware of the huge significance of your work.  if you are thinking about risks , sorry , that means all the talk about your work's value is pure fiction. 

Imagine if Bitcoin miners were to ask at day one to be compensated for their mining cost and guaranteed  income, will Bitcoin be where it is today ?

The same goes to witness who want to be compensated for providing a good price feed
« Last Edit: January 07, 2017, 03:09:15 am by btswildpig »
这个是私人账号,表达的一切言论均不代表任何团队和任何人。This is my personal account , anything I said with this account will be my opinion alone and has nothing to do with any group.

Offline kimziv

hi, @xeroc, my witness feed price have removed yunbi serveral days ago.
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Offline yvv

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It actually makes sense to pay separately for producing blocks and for publishing price feeds, because these are two different jobs which require different efforts. 

Offline BunkerChainLabs-DataSecurityNode

I think what bitcrab is getting at is that witness's should provide a quality robust price feed.  They are being paid by the blockchain to produce blocks and provide a reliable feed. Providing this reliable feed is well within the scope and responsibility of the witness and shouldn't be subsidized by a worker proposal.

That said, I know feeds for assets can be expensive.  Right now, a witness would run at a net loss if they were to subscribe to a professional price feed like Bloomberg.

The witness's that can find a balance between robustness and cost effectiveness of the price feeds are going to be the ones that get and stay elected.

Witnesses are NOT paid to produce feeds... it is an ongoing expense to witnesses. Some do not publish as often as others as a result.

If you want to have 'reliable feeds' then what I am saying is relying on free sources is by no means reliable. Those that are using a few other sources are by no means providing real 'robustness' to the network. It is paper thin now even with others publishing. So we have a choice to make. We continue to treat bitassets like a hobby, or get them to a level that is robust and reliable.

I am proposing a fix instead of a bandaide in my estimation.

In the interim I am going to stop publishing CNY as suggested and following suit with other witnesses until there are enough reliable markets available to support it.

Personally I have expected that if a witness wants to get voted in, providing price feeds is part of the deal.  The better the price feed the more satisfied I am with the witness I'm voting for.  If a witness is going to knowingly provide bad data, then all the more reason to vote them out in favor of one who will take the job more seriously.  I get that problems can occur, but this has been brought to the at fault witness's in the past and in most cases there has been little to no response.

There may not be any requirement that witness's provide price feeds, but the shareholders should and most likely will vote in witness's who provide the most value... It's capitalism and competion. And it's a better solution than having BTS pay for it.  There are already witness's out there doing a good job with the price feeds.

Plus having BTS pay for a feed that all the witness's end up using kind of goes against the whole decentralization principles.


In that case increase the block reward in consideration of feed subscriptions. I just see the worker as a quicker path.

Though if we increase the block reward and we see witnesses still not increasing their feed data then I guess that would certainly qualify them for getting voted out.

Anyways.. its not my fight anymore since the recent vote manipulations have reduced our decentralization from 27 down to 21. I am not longer a witness. My feeds on standby though are no longer going to publish CNY as I said until this is resolved. I had 5 sources and of the 5 only one is currently responding. If myself or other witnesses has reliable paid data sources this would be a nonissue. Fixed.

Maybe voting out all witnesses and leaving the 13 or so who are publishing CNY is the way to go.. lets consolidate the witness count even more to make sure we can get a good CNY price for free. If I see others agreeing with this I will turn my proxy to vote only for those 13 witnesses. Lets make Bitshares great again! <s/c>
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