[HN Gopher] Decred proposal: Change PoW/PoS Subsidy Split From 6...
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       Decred proposal: Change PoW/PoS Subsidy Split From 60/30 to 10/80
        
       Author : 100001_100011
       Score  : 38 points
       Date   : 2021-12-12 14:56 UTC (8 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (proposals.decred.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (proposals.decred.org)
        
       | kzrdude wrote:
       | What's decred? What's special about it and is it one of the
       | bigger cryptos?
        
         | rolltotheriver wrote:
         | Decred is a SOV crypto. It has governance, a treasury fund,
         | staking rewards. It has a very low supply. So much of it is
         | locked into the staking pool.
        
           | SahAssar wrote:
           | What is SOV crypto?
           | 
           | Searching for it seems to bring up a specific coin
           | (https://sov.foundation/) but I'm guessing that is not what
           | you mean.
        
             | tromp wrote:
             | SoV = Store of Value.
             | 
             | It's often used to describe a capped supply.
             | 
             | As if that implies preservation of value.
        
         | chizhik-pyzhik wrote:
         | Decred was created in 2013 as "bitcoin but with governance".
         | You can earn it through both proof-of-work AND proof-of-stake
         | mining. Users who participate in proof-of-stake mining can vote
         | on proposals such as this one. (Their voting power is roughly
         | equivalent to how many DCR they've locked up.)
         | 
         | It got a lot of attention when Bitcoin was having its block
         | size limit controversy around 2015 (which led to the fork
         | between bitcoin/bitcoin cash).
        
         | tracedddd wrote:
         | Decred is a cryptocurrency who's core offering is an expanded
         | governance system. Although at the top it's pretty much run by
         | the company right now.
        
       | ryanlol wrote:
       | This is kind of hilarious. They seem to be upset that the miners
       | are selling their coins and therefore are sabotaging the
       | cryptocurrency by pushing the price down.
        
         | paulgb wrote:
         | Yes, I'm curious to know more context on why they see miners
         | selling the coins as proof that they are malicious actors
         | trying to keep the price down. The very nature of PoW is that
         | miners typically have high expenses, and need to sell coins to
         | pay their power/hardware bills. To the extent that this _hasn
         | 't_ happened in bitcoin, it's because capital is currently
         | cheap enough that some of the big miners prefer to hold the
         | bitcoin and borrow against it to cover expenses.
        
           | gitfan86 wrote:
           | The utility of Bitcoin is that it allows you to bypass
           | government and regulations and high cost money transfer
           | services. The price should reflect that utility and anything
           | beyond that is day trading or beanie baby style speculating
        
         | mgraczyk wrote:
         | And worth stating that the "other side" is the proof of stake
         | participants, who hold the currency and want the price to stay
         | high.
        
           | Grimburger wrote:
           | Both groups have just as much incentive for the price to be
           | higher, it's a moot point.
        
             | mgraczyk wrote:
             | That's not true. The miners have a large capital investment
             | in mining equipment which can be used for other purposes
             | (or they rent, in which case the same reasoning holds).
             | Proof of stake participants have their capital in the
             | system's currency. The PoW are less sensitive to price
             | because they lose less capital for the same change in price
             | as compare to PoS participants.
        
               | Grimburger wrote:
               | > Proof of stake participants have their capital in the
               | system's currency.
               | 
               | Their capital can also be moved to other proof-of-stake
               | coins with complete ease, I'd argue that's far less
               | friction than repurposing your mining ASIC's for other
               | coins on a whim. An ASIC is useless unless it runs the
               | same algorithm, which in Decred's case is basically no
               | other coins.
               | 
               | > The PoW are less sensitive to price
               | 
               | Yes, and as such more likely to ride the out fluctuations
               | rather than create a self-sustaining wave of those who
               | secure the network selling out all their holdings and
               | moving elsewhere.
        
               | mgraczyk wrote:
               | This and paulgb's reply are both good points, but I think
               | that we can do a very simple analysis to explain most of
               | what is going on.
               | 
               | Suppose that miners only mine and stakers only stake.
               | Maybe we could justify why that is the case, but for
               | simplicity we can start with a model where that's just
               | taken as given.
               | 
               | Also suppose that participants do only two things with
               | their mining and staking rewards. They take profit by
               | selling, or reinvest.
               | 
               | Miner's reinvest by selling the token and buying more
               | equipment or funding operations. Stakers reinvest by
               | staking more token without selling.
               | 
               | All else being equal between the two except for the fact
               | that one is mining and the other staking, the miners will
               | sell more of the currency.
               | 
               | Under this simple model, it's easy to see why miners are
               | more sensitive to price in the short term and are more
               | likely to sell. Of course this model isn't perfect, but I
               | think it's close enough to explain the structure of the
               | debate.
        
               | paulgb wrote:
               | Decred has ASICs available, and (hardware) miners are
               | usually the largest fixed cost for miners, so Decred
               | miners do have a fairly large interest in keeping the
               | price high at least in the medium-term of their
               | hardware's lifetime. Unless other cryptos of similar size
               | are also using BLAKE-256 as their hash algorithm.
        
             | lozenge wrote:
             | PoW can jump to another coin without writing off their
             | investment (into hardware), PoS can't.
        
               | koolba wrote:
               | With PoS it's even more liquid as you can dump your
               | tokens and buy them on a new network to stake their.
               | Assuming the tokens are worth anything.
        
               | mgraczyk wrote:
               | I don't know how decred works, but typically there are
               | consensus level barriers to this to mitigate "nothing at
               | stake" attacks. For example you may need to lock the
               | tokens for weeks or months to use them as stake, and it
               | may be impossible to trustlessly transfer ownership of
               | locked tokens.
        
               | tracedddd wrote:
               | Decred has ASICs and there is nothing they can
               | realistically jump to.
        
               | [deleted]
        
         | tivra wrote:
         | It's not because miners are selling but because HOW they are
         | selling. I recommend reading these two well-researched blog
         | posts if you want to know the details:
         | https://medium.com/@tacorevenge
        
         | TheAdamist wrote:
         | If there's nothing else the coins can be used for, selling is
         | the logical conclusion, holding is just being the sucker who
         | sells last.
        
           | young_unixer wrote:
           | (also applies to dollars)
        
             | ohgodplsno wrote:
             | The sucker who sells the last dollar has other problems,
             | most likely the total collapse of a superpower means that
             | not being able to trade your dollar is not going to be the
             | most preoccupying thing on your mind.
        
             | [deleted]
        
             | KarlKemp wrote:
             | Sure, in the sense that both this potted plant and this
             | currently inactive volcano could soon start ejecting red-
             | hot magma. Because one of every x billion "things" are
             | active volcanoes, and these are both "things".
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | rolltotheriver wrote:
       | The large mining groups are mining Decred just to sell it for
       | Bitcoin. They are helping Decred at all. This didn't happen to
       | Bitcoin during its early days, if so it wouldn't have survived.
        
         | rolltotheriver wrote:
         | Edit. They are NOT helping Decred at all
        
           | WJW wrote:
           | Miners being in it for the money instead of for the ideology?
           | What a shocker.
        
             | paulgb wrote:
             | It's a store of value!*
             | 
             | * as long as miners are benevolent and don't sell it
        
             | tracedddd wrote:
             | There's nothing wrong with a neutral, politically
             | uninterested party running the infrastructure for profit
             | reasons. In fact it's probably better than a bunch of
             | charged and opinionated members trying to sway influence
             | one way or another.
        
             | cblconfederate wrote:
             | miners are supposed to be in it for the money
        
       | mikeiz404 wrote:
       | Wouldn't it be roughly equivalent for a miner to put the amount
       | spent on overhead and recurring cost such as electricity into
       | staking and then sell or "dump" the staking rewards assuming the
       | % payout is the same? It seems given enough time, with all be it
       | potentially new entities, you risk being back at where you
       | started.
       | 
       | However I'm not familiar with Decred and only have a general idea
       | of PoS.
        
         | chizhik-pyzhik wrote:
         | I imagine that the difference in profitability between PoW and
         | PoS is arbitraged away over time. If it's a lot more profitable
         | to PoS mine, some of the PoW miners would just switch over,
         | which in turn makes PoW slightly more profitable for everyone
         | still doing it.
        
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       (page generated 2021-12-12 23:01 UTC)