My Thoughts on Creating a Bitcoin Fund From DHF to Partially Insure HBD Pegging
A few days ago a very interesting pre-proposal post was put forward by the @3Speak team, to create a 1m USD bitcoin fund by printing HIVE from DHF, to serve as as partial insurance in case the peg of HBD breaks below a certain settable-by-witnesses level.
The post was met with interesting reactions, most of them positive, but some of them questioning if bitcoin is the right choice of a coin to use to help HBD keep its peg.
The argument, which makes sense if you consider the balance sheet, is that when you'd need to sell bitcoin to push HBD towards the peg, bitcoin's price would have likely dropped, because that's when it's more likely HBD loses its peg to the downside more seriously. So, the argument says, why not use a stable coin or a basket of stable coins instead of bitcoin for the purpose of helping HBD keep its peg? That makes sense, if we don't take into account other aspects.
We often say HBD is one of the best stable coins in the crypto verse, it just needs liquidity and visibility and we will rock the world of stable coins. Ok, maybe that's a bit exaggerated.
But if we have a stable coin with great potential, using another stable coin to officially (using funds created via DHF) prevent it to go below a certain level means we implicitly accept that the other stable coin is better in some ways. So why would investors take ours? We automatically associate a higher risk to our stable coin than to the stable coin that helps ours keep the peg. We might offer a higher APR, but we also signal that there's higher risk too, even if the reality can be quite the opposite.
Ok, but why bitcoin, if it isn't a great choice to use for pegging HBD when you think at how profitable selling bitcoin to peg HBD will be?
Precisely because bitcoin is not a stable coin and there's no risk of ranking in terms of "HBD is inferior to X stable coin, because it uses X to stay pegged".
Because bitcoin is pristine collateral in the crypto verse, and soon probably in the mainstream area. And many stable coins will have a hard time regulation-wise.
Because regardless of the few pools of miners who get rewards for producing the last few millions of them, bitcoin is decentralized, unregulatable and cannot be shut down, or they would have done it by now.
And Hive praises itself to be more decentralized than most blockchains, without majority stakeholders or foundations backing it. These are some qualities many would wish for but cannot turn back time. And if we choose to create such a fund, it should follow many of these principles.
The bitcoin fund itself would probably need to have a few people entrusted to manage it using a multisig account, because making this a multisig account for top witnesses seems unpractical, as @smooth remarked:
IMO at the current scale of Hive, witnesses doing multisig is likely to be unwieldy. The witness set changes, which means the multisig would need to be updated. And getting ahold of witnesses to sign off on spending the BTC during rapidly changing market conditions (which is probably when you want it) is likely to be challenging. Some of this could be improved with software, but developing and auditing software on a limited budget (and a larger budget is unlikely to make much sense for a $1 million fund) is likely to be more risky than just doing it some other way.
I would just recruit 3-5 trusted community members for the proposal.
I leave you with this reply of 3Speak to a comment on their post, in which they explain why they chose bitcoin and not something else:
In our view, BTC is the only digital asset that should be used in the insurance backing of HBD, since it is the only one that has no VC, no seed round, no ICO, no company and no CEO behind it. Making it actually decentralised, and therefore outside of the reach of regulators. HBD has the opportunity to hold this status too and so we think only digital assets outside of the purview of regulators should be used in its insurance backing. this is one of the things that sets it completely apart from existing stable coins.
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