More on Increasing the Peg of HBD to Account for Inflation
As predicted...
I've ruffled some feathers with my claim that we should be increasing the value of HBD to account for inflation and make our stable coin more stable (essentially a stable store of value). Apparently my responses to criticism had a dickish, entitled, and know-it-all tone as they often do. This is not my intent but is a common occurrence. My ability to deescalate is very poor, to say the least.
Ultimately, I wish to understand these issues in their entirety. This is clearly impossible, as macro economics are impossible for anyone to understand as there are far too many moving parts and variables. However, we do the best we can and try to make the best guesses we can based on our knowledge of the situation. This is all we can really hope for.
Some misunderstandings I'm trying to clear up.
What is the definition of a "stable-coin"?
My definition of a "stable-coin" is a coin that doesn't gain or lose value relative to other assets. It's value comes from the extreme volatility of crypto. Most crypto projects are subject to extreme gains and losses, so stable-coins are required to provide a safe haven for those not looking to gamble.
@donald.porter writes:
Not a good idea. That would no longer make it a stable coin by definition.
This was in response to me saying that the value of HBD would go up over time relative to fiat. I wonder if the same argument could be made if I had simply worded the sentence differently:
Instead of:
Increasing the value of HBD will make a lot more people want to hold it. In fact, it would make HBD the all-time go-to stable coin,
as it would be the only stable-coin that increases in value over timeto account for inflation.
I could have wrote:
Stabilizing the value of HBD relative to goods and services (rather than fiat) will make it a lot more tempting to hold.
There, now we see that HBD hasn't gained or lost any value and it fits the definition of a stable coin. Nothing has changed except for the semantics of my wording.
Furthermore burning capless coins (worse stable coins) to raise their value is where tokenomics gets quite misleading.
I found this argument to be extremely problematic. HBD is already being sent to @null for paid post promotions. Even the whitepaper confirms that the ability to send money to @null is a feature that we should be striving to build around.
More reasons to send money to @null are going to pop up. That is a fact. These reasons are going to appear on frontends and 2nd-layer solutions, so even if the network wanted to stop it from happening, they would not be able to. No one needs to ask permission to create these services. This is not a consensus issue.
If this network does not provide a solution to dynamically generate HBD supply to meet demand (CDP loans) HBD absolutely will break its peg and trade vastly over $1, completely undermining its own stability once again and breaking the whole system. This is guaranteed to happen again if we don't do something. It's only a matter of time. Another round of dumb money into crypto will prove this over the next 12-18 months.
By use (and experience), Stable coins attract merchant services and puts Hive in position to facilitate business operational costs ie safely storing staff and supplier payments without speculative risk.
The system I propose has infinitely less speculative risk.
The current setup is tried, true and battle tested. Major changes and burning may lead to more problems than solutions. Introducing speculation ("it may rise") will also imply risk, making it less attractive as a stable coin.
You see, I'm really struggling with these arguments because we have a history of SBD going to $13 and then crashing to $0.50. This is not "tried, true, and battle tested". This is a joke. Honestly, to make the claim that implementing my system could somehow make our 'stable-coin' even less stable than it already is? Like wow, that's pretty offensive. You can't have a worse track record than we do. HBD/SBD is the laughing-stock of stable-coins. That is a fact.
Let's move on.
@apofis writes:
There already exists a mechanism that can modify the conversion rate of HBD, it's called the Price Feed Bias:
One of the tools that witnesses have the option to use is a price feed bias. Essentially they can intentionally tell the blockchain that the price of STEEM is higher or lower than it actually is.
Okay well that is an extremely short-term hackish solution that can not be sustained over long periods of time. Although I really do value this information because I forgot that this strategy could be employed. Pretty cool.
For a currency to be a stable store of value it neither has to be inflationary nor deflationary, in other words the amount in circulation has to increase or decrease with the cycles of the economy.
Exactly! Yes! This is exactly what I am proposing! With extremely overcollateralized CDP loans we can indeed create a stable asset that cycles with the economy to inflate and deflate the currency as is required to maintain stability. I truly do not understand why this is such a novel concept, and the extreme value of such an asset is undeniable. Trust me, if we don't do it first someone else will, and then we will copy that project and miss out on first move advantage. Maybe that's for the best to let them be the guinea pig, who knows. I personally want to be on the forefront.
For the above reason the best that you can hope for is to have relative stability. Unfortunately any attempt to peg HBD to the inflation rate of the USD will either deteriorate the debt ratio or will destabilize the inflation schedule for HIVE.
Okay this is the crux of the situation.
The statement above is the most valid argument against raising the conversion rate of HBD. Although I'm beginning to realize that both of these problems are not going to happen. We would not increase the debt ratio unless the debt ratio was clearly lowered by USD inflation. We would not destabilize the inflation schedule because we still have a haircut limit.
Example
Hive is trading at $0.25, HBD at $1. Rampant hyperinflation hits USD and pushes the value of all relative assets up by x2. Apples cost twice as much. Cars cost twice as much. Hive costs twice as much, now trading at $0.50. Assuming our debt ratio was 4% before inflation, after hyperinflation our debt ratio is now 2%, because HBD is still trading at $1, we haven't printed more (in fact users might burn it because it's no longer safe), and our Hive market cap has doubled while the HBD market cap is theoretically static during this time. Increasing the peg of HBD to $2 in this situation simply brings us back to the debt ratio we're supposed to be at and allows users to keep holding HBD without the worry of USD continuing to hyperinflate.
I don't see that the USD inflation and the HIVE marketcap are directly correlated. For this to happen some of the extra USD money supply has to flow to HIVE but it's more plausible that it will go to BTC instead over a long enough period.
Okay so I really just can't even with this statement. In this scenario, EVERYTHING in the world has increased in price by double due to rampant hyperinflation capitol injections... except Hive... because... reasons. Capitol is flying everywhere, except into Hive because "extra USD money supply has to flow to Hive" to increase the market cap. The statement itself is inherently false.
Liquidty
Liquidity again.
I've been compelled to talk about the concept of liquidity over and over and over again because most people in this space (even super smart and educated folks) seem to completely misunderstand the issue.
Simply put, we don't need capitol to flow into Hive to increase the market cap. All we need is for users to stop selling and providing liquidity to the market at the current price. In fact, if lots of sell liquidity is being provided at a certain level, lots of money can get dumped in at that price and not increase the market cap at all. It goes both ways.
What's going to happen if USD starts hyperinflating? Are you going to sell you Hive into USD? Fuck no you're not. Like me, you'll be running around screaming HOLY FUCK IT'S HAPPENING GET INTO CRYPTO AND PRECIOUS METALS BEFORE YOU LOSE ALL YOUR MONEY!!!!!111@
So not only is money going to flow into Hive in the case of hyperinflation, the value of Hive will go up even more because Hive literally competes with fiat. If fiat is doing bad, Hive gains (or more accurately Bitcoin gains and we gain from Bitcoin). This is a cooperative space, and Bitcoin's gain is every crypto's gain. If USD hyperinflates x2, I posit that Hive will gain x2 just from the extra money floating around, and then another x2 because users no longer want to sell back into fiat. Major price discoveries will have to happen. It could even be as high as x10 to x100. We have no idea. USD has never hyperinflated before.
So you can imagine my frustration when I have smart competent people disagreeing with me saying my ideas are going to fuck up the system by increasing our debt cap too much when exactly the opposite thing is going to happen.
Hive gains the benefit of exploitative central banking tactics.
The more I come to think about it, the more I realize this fact. Users who hold HBD for stable value are going to get fucked in the exact same way that USD holders get fucked by the Fed: slow inflation devaluing the currency. What I am proposing here is that we pass the savings on to HBD holders rather than exploit them like a central bank.
Make no mistake, I stand to benefit (in the short term) if we don't increase the value of HBD over time to account for inflation. Why? Because I don't hold HBD. Therefore the value that the network leeches from HBD (via the Fed's own monetary policy) is going to put more money into my pockets and everyone else who holds Hive.
However, on the long term I posit that we should end this exploitation. We should eliminate this usurious dilution and create a better stable-coin than any fiat currency could ever hope to create.
What we need to remember is that this is THE ONLY WAY a fiat currency can make money. They provide a product and charge interest for their service and can print more money whenever they want. As long as their product is "good enough" people are going to keep using it and trust in the system.
Meanwhile, on Hive, we literally have programmable money. We have a million different ways of generating value that a central bank couldn't even dream of. Plain and simple: We don't need to be fucking over stable-coin holders and leeching value from them like the central banks do.
This post is clearly ahead of it's time.
And I'm not saying that because I think I'm some kind of fuckin' genius over here or something; Poor me no one wants to support my amazing idea! No, what I mean by this is that we might have to be in the moment before a lot of what I'm saying makes sense. We might have to confirm for sure that USD is hyper-inflating, that this is adversely lowering our debt cap and making HBD holders abandon ship, that increasing the conversion rate is the only way to keep the system afloat to counterbalance the Fed's failures. Until then, it's all speculation.
My reasoning is that since the price of hive is not directly correlated to the inflation of the US dollar changing the peg to match it will create an incentive to permanently convert HBD to HIVE at an increasing rate which is not in the best interest of HIVE holders as this creates extra selling pressure on it.
Again I would make the exact opposite argument. By increasing the conversion rate of HBD to mitigate inflation we vastly increase the demand to hold HBD. If the demand to hold HBD is vastly increased then it's literally impossible for there to be selling pressure. In fact, the opposite is true. Holding pressure is created on both sides (HBD & Hive).
Because demand for HBD must be met with dynamic supply created by extremely over-collateralized interest-free loans (say 300% collateral required) three times as much Hive must be locked up just in order to supply the demand of HBD. This dynamic skyrockets the market cap of Hive and further lowers the debt cap. The higher the required collateral percentage, the more HBD will be worth due to how many coins are collateralizing them (instead of using bullshit interest rates like everyone else).
From this perspective we could abandon the conversion peg altogether and simply use the collateralization ratio to set the prices. By making this process interest-free (unlike all the other exploitative crypto loan services out there) we guarantee that users will be willing to take the deal and set the network up for first-move advantage.
Conclusion
The demand for HBD at the moment is 6M tokens. That is a joke. To say it is working properly is a joke. We can increase the demand for HBD massively if we work toward stabilizing it. Doing so will vastly increase the value of the network at large.
Sorry not sorry?
I hope that my tone regarding criticism doesn't scare people way, but surely this is wishful thinking on my part. I'm sure a lot of people see my reactions and do have some reservations with what I'm saying but conclude: "I'm not touching that mess with a 10 foot pole."
In the end I enjoy the arguments and find them very enlightening, even if I personally view the points presented as completely and obviously false. For every one person that presents a view to me, I know that 100 others agree. Sometimes perception is reality.
It becomes obvious to me that if I really want some of these things to happen, I need to do them myself in a contained centralized environment at first to prove their usefulness and reliability, and that's fine. Either that or I have to prove myself in other ways so more people on the network take me seriously. Fair enough.
Thanks for giving your two cents!
Apologies to both @donald.porter and @apofis for my tone!
I will never make the claim that I'm good at talking/working with others.
That being said, I challenge anyone reading my suggestions to come up with real-world examples with actual math showing how my implementations could break down on a fundamental level. I'm currently not seeing any of that; simply vague speculation as to why it might not work based off of uninformed opinions that may apply to economics at large but not this network in particular.
Here's an example of an example I don't want to see:
USD hyperinflates, but somehow Hive has not gained in market cap and the network wrongfully and blindly disregards this information and votes to raise the conversion rate of HBD. This causes our inflation schedule to be disrupted and too much Hive to get printed.
This was literally one of the arguments used against me, and it is not an example that will ever materialize in the real world under any circumstances. Speculate better, please.
Again, thanks for the input and sorry for the tone. The opinions thus far against my proposal are enlightening, but I still feel that most of them are not based in reality or they simply lack the kind of vision I'm looking for when connecting all these moving parts together (CDP loans, interest rates to bank account, increased conversion rates, burning HBD to create hard assets or gain reputation/visibility).
