RE: Hive's Dilemma: To Network State or Not to Network State?
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Agree with you HIVE need a story, a vision. Are we a social network chain/ecosystem? A gaming ecosystem? A dApp ecosystem, ie a general purpose chain? Maybe a future payment chain? From the feature we have in the base layer, we are a social network. That said, I dont think we have conpeling enough social network experience. To many UIs are not sexy, and even not easy to use (think FB, Twiiter, Instagram look and feel with tremendous fast UIs and totally optimised UX experences). For a general purpose chain we 1) miss smart contract on base layer 2) we need to move blogging rewards away from base layer. Though for some time I was inclined to go general purpose full swing, these days I feel we shall stay social network chain. Though whatever we choose as a collective, we shall up our game in creating the services that will play with the masses. And yes, I do believe we shall select one course and all dev shall be fousing on contributing to rhat one course we selected. Whatever that course maybe.
The trick is to choose narrative which is sexy, not limiting in any way and possibly simple. I believe network state fullfils these premises and makes Hive stand out of the crowd.
I just believe we are far off becoming a Network State. Dont know the exact theory of such, but feel we need direct influence on governance, not through witnesses of which most are not looking at as as a society but just focus on technicals. Added to that, we need mucho better governance tools and perhaps also governance itself need to be more democratic on quite a number of aspects. Though I agree, maybe heading towards Network State may be a great road to walk.
The theory is a vision in one man's head. There is no official council of accepting or rejecting Network States. There is no need for constitution and say now we are this or that.
If it looks like a duck and it sounds like a duck its a duck.
We need to dump old mental maps about statehood. Network states might vary, have different modes of operating, different governance model, different level of identification with the whole idea. I believe it's more about story at this level.
Noone know what network states will turn out to be in 10 or 50 years. We have one highly not institutionalised, organicly grown, very transparent, tested and open. There might be different ones. The basic thing is: we are group of people acting in coordination for a common interest with monetary independence and a governance model and set of rules.
I didn't realise The Network State is so fresh. Just found the podcast channel over on YT; Started a month or so ago. Also found the book itself. Bookmarked both for later reading and listening.
Interestingly, when I first joined the network of which I won't say the name; The one that preceded us, from which we were born; I ended up in conversation with more than a few peeps about what may be called Network State.
True, a network state doesn't have to go by the concepts we know from nation states. That said, I can imagine The Network State requires some to more of the governance models we use in the nation-state model. For years I didn't really think about this topic anymore. I suppose, need to get my head around it again, since I do very much like experimentation with anything that is out of the norm, or even completely new and undiscovered. I suppose the reason why am hanging in with the HIVE community for the last 6 years 😎
To the note of HIVE being the only one, or part of a few projects that could be, or become a Network State: I think many more projects can be classified as such or heading towards such. Many projects have their communities, and many of them do allow community voting in some way, even if these are polls in a Telegram Group or on Discord. Many do allow at least influence on other governance aspects of things.
Thanks for posting about this, and our conversation, since it did spark renewed interest in digging into this topic. Maybe I should also re-connect with a community formed around this crypto community building a Network State and Nation-State in one, the crypto way 😉
I see this idea being brought up from time to time and I wonder what for? I have not seen it explained. As in, for what purpose would such change serve? What benefit would come from it and conversely, what problems are caused now by having author rewards on the base layer?
I'm not saying I agree or disagree, literally that I don't know and am curious, and wonder if you can share the reasoning?
Even when HIVE should stay and/or focus on being a social chain powering different forms of social networks, the HIVE distribution to content on the base layer focusses many users on earning HIVE instead of second-layer tokens linked to new social network initiatives. I think that prevents other tokens to become successful, or at least, makes it more difficult. Added to that, plenty of HIVE is distributed in auto voting manner, or blindly manual voting. Both are kinda not how proof-of-brain should work.
However, I do very much like the distribution of HIVE to whomever, large or small players. So maybe we shall not remove the distribution of HIVE to whomever, but implement a mechanism to distribute HIVE to those contributing to the HIVE eco-system. One of the ideas I have is to establish a kinda distributed governance system which decides on HIVE distributions to users based on all sorts of criteria, not posts or comments though. Such a governance system shall be very active, reviewing on high frequency who should get some of the HIVE we mint every single day. Criteria should be dynamically determined by the community. Those who decide how to distribute should be elected constantly. Many different decision-makers, in independent groups, should be established. How to implement such a governance system, I didn't really detail yet. Somehow I like the set-up of EdenOS, a multi-layer election system with randomness included and the need for re-elections every couple of months. Other governance systems can be thought of as well, of course. But the trick is, those elected should be easily removed when they do 'wrong', whatever we decide is wrong. Added to all of that, we need the proper tools to support such a governance system. I suppose we shall experiment hell out all this before moving into such a new system 😉
When we removed content awarding on the base layer, I believe 2nd layer social tokens get more chances. Plus we reduce the fights over how HIVE is currently distributed. The aforementioned big blind manual votes, the auto votes to lazy authors and all that. And it also helps to position HIVE chain as a true general-purpose chain since the content-rewarding aspects aren't part of the base layer anymore.
That is interesting. For your first point, I see what you mean. I suppose there would be a disincentive to earning second-layer tokens but that's because there's actual value to be made in earning HIVE and HBD, as it can be sold for local currency which can then be exchanged for goods or services that people need. As far as I know, that can't be done with second-layer tokens. Or it can, but not directly. In fact, doing so just adds another layer to the process so it's simpler to focus on earning HIVE and HBD.
Also, there are already a few different front-ends that reward with HIVE, sometimes in conjunction with their own second-layer tokens and sometimes without, so the status quo hasn't prevented new front-ends from being made. There's Liketu and Reverio that are pretty recent examples. Perhaps there would be more by now if everyone moved away from wanting HIVE and HBD towards wanting second-layer tokens, but then the question becomes how would that be done? I don't think it could or should be forced. If this whole experiment is truly decentralised than I assume forcing a change like that isn't possible except with witness consensus and a hard fork.
It would have to be a voluntary thing that each Hive account owner chooses to do, and so the real question is why would anyone do that? There would have to be an incentive to do so, but the incentive (the value proposition) cannot be built until enough people move away from the base layer and toward the second-layers. A real chicken-egg problem. Maybe if second-layer tokens were listed on exchanges independently to HIVE and HBD? I guess there's no technical reason preventing this, as there's already ERC-20 tokens listed in places which if I'm not mistaken are second-layer tokens on the Ethereum blockchain.
What you write about auto-voting and blind voting, I absolutely agree. I don't participate in those two things. I prefer manual voting. I wonder though, would using second-layer tokens actually stop these two things? If people decide to, they could still do both on the second-layer, couldn't they? I don't believe there's a technical way to prevent auto-voting without removing voting altogether, except maybe forcing the solution of a CAPTCHA before every vote. Possible but could you imagine... it would make voting pretty onerous.
Sounds like you you've got some ideas for a front-end of your own.
That's the difficult part for sure. Though when you post about those details, please make sure you tag me, I'll be interested to read your ideas!
I went searching for EdenOS and found this:
https://www.edenelections.com/
Is that the one?
I'm far, far, far from an expert on this, but with the DPOS system of Hive, isn't this how witness voting works right now? If you disagree with what a witness is doing, you can remove your vote. You can share your issues, change minds, persuade others to do the same if there's genuine, demonstrable reasons. All governance votes have the same value.
I think the fights would just move to being over the second-layer token distribution if this were the case, rather than disappearing completely.
I really appreciate the discussion we're having, thanks for your time! 😊
Change to chain: Sure we have witnesses and yes we need 50%+1 of the witnesses to grant changes to the blockchain. If you mean such vote is the way forward to change things around our base chain, I agree, provided that we continue with this governance setup.
Witnesses: As long as I'm with our chain ecosystem, I feel most witnesses are engineers, know how to run a node. Some to more of them are not governance specialists. The latter is required to bring our ecosystem to the next level.
Governance: True, we have a governance system in place. Assuming we continue with this setup, our top witnesses allowing (or not) changes to the base chain. How do we figure out what our top witnesses want? Some post some of their ideas. Others don't. We as the users have to dig deep and spend tons of time to understand what our top witnesses want, let alone all the runner-up witnesses. We lack all sorts of tools, like a common, centralised service where we can review all the witnesses' ideas and all, to start with. And when I'm not in touch with what our witnesses want, being more involved than the majority of HIVE users, what will this large group of users do with their witnesses' votes? Also, how often do we change our witness votes? This is a governance problem that needs to be solved in one or the other way. The inventor of HIVE (Dan Larimer), probably understood the shortcoming of HIVE governance, hence I launched EdenOS with a more practical and a more fair governance implementation that forces those who get elected to be re-elected in shorter time periods. By now, he seems to have moved on again, being not in agreement with the direction of EdenOS, and launched Fractally. I never really looked into Fractally, but as far as I know, this is his next iteration of how decentralised governance can be effective. Note that governance is all about making decisions altogether in an active manner, without individuals getting too much power, and/or sitting in the same position for a long time while being not active. Governance has little to do with technology. Technology is just the enabler for governance.
I believe we really need to evaluate what we have in our ecosystem and governance and start making plans to expand on it, and perhaps even change things. Like, determining in consensus what the future of HIVE should be. Like, creating a better and more active governance system; This needs to be much more dynamic. To me, it feels like we have too few visionaries. And even if we have visionaries, we lack the ability to execute. With 'we', I mean the HIVE chain and its ecosystem ;)
An example: I just bought some tokens in presales of some Game that plans to be a massive one. They decided to bypass Ethereum as well as BSC chains for their game. While IMHO Games benefit from using feeless chains, they never heard about HIVE. Last week they brought forward their idea: Polygon. Which chain is out there the longest, by far? Which chain is perhaps better in the long for Games? And still, said project as well as so many others, aren't coming to HIVE. For many reasons, I believe.