Yesterday @blocktrades came out with a post informing us about the development of a Steem proposal system that has already been approved and will be paid for by Steemit Inc.
A proposal system is in a nutshell:
A system where anyone can propose to do work for X amount of Steem. Anyone with Steempower can then vote according to stake on these proposals and the most voted for (by stake) will be funded and build.
Example of proposals taken from this post from @blocktrades
A) Blockchain Curation Worker: wants 300 SBD per day for 14 days to improve the curation code
B) Marketing worker: wants 100 SBD per day for a year to run ads for Steem on a cryptocurrency site
C) Refund worker: represents stakeholders who don’t want to spend funds on any proposal with less stake weight than the refund worker. It wants 100,000,000 SBD that will “refund” the SBD back to the funding account (effectively, any funds this worker receives don’t get spent but are instead held in reserve in the funding account for possible use in the future).
Steemit Inc. will pay the cost to develop the system but not to fund the actual proposals (they might donate some STEEM).
Where the real money/STEEM is going to come from is now up for debate.
Some say it should come from donations and others say it should come from the reward pool (wether it is from author rewards, witness rewards or curation rewards).
If it comes from the reward pool this proposal will also require a hard fork. And as you know a hard fork requires consensus from the top 20 witnesses.
The first real simple question:
Do we even need this system?
I know it's already being talked about like it's going to happen but so far I have not read any good argument why this system would be beneficial to Steem.
This is the main argument for this system:
To speed up and to decentralize the development of the Steem blockchain
mmm....
Decentralisation is already happening. RocksDB is being rolled out pretty smoothly and when it's done I'm expecting full nodes left right and centre. So that argument doesn't fly.
Speed up development? The last I checked we have an insane amount of development going on on the blockchain already without a worker proposal system.
Did a worker proposal system make d.tube? Actifit? Steem Monsters? Steem Engine? Partiko? Steem Hunt? Steemify?
Did a worker proposal system make onboarding ramps with FIAT like steem.ninja and Steem Wallet?
No it did not. Entrepreneurs did it. Risk takers did it. People that get shit done did it.
Not people that want to secure funds first before they move an inch.
But let's say I'm wrong:
We can easily verify wether the proposals from the proposal system will be so amazing that we absolutely need this sytem.
How?
Before building anything we can ask the community before hand to propose work. Let's get some real examples.
If the examples or awesome, cool! That's a good pro argument for the system.
If they are so so....mmm...maybe not go through with it.
Is there already consensus from the witnesses?
A hardfork requires consensus from the top 20. This can't be guaranteed beforehand.
The most talk about hard fork will take a cut from he inflation of author rewards and put it to the Steem proposal system.
I understand that. 50% of the inflation of STEEM goes to authors but I also would like to see Witnesses take a small hit just to make sure they are not too biased towards the idea. It's simply too easy going along with things that don't hurt you. A 0.5-1%% cut doesn't seem unreasonable.
But if there is no consensus for the hard fork where is the money going to come from then?
Donations.
Yeah right. It will never happen and it's not reliable enough anway.
Me? I love to donate to developers that have projects I actually want to use. Like Steem Monsters. I donated by buying card packs. Or Partiko, I delegated some Steempower because I love the app and if they ever come out with a paid version I'd buy it too.
When the system is in place who gets to decide which proposals are going to be build?
Let's be honest here. We have several huge accounts on the blockchain that can easily decide which proposals get through and which won't simply by the stake that they have.
Even if there is enormous support for a project by the community resulting in thousands of votes. One single vote of these guys can stop it dead in its track.
And also the other way around.
The stake is currently simply not spread out enough.
That's it.
My first reaction when I heard about the worker proposal was enthusiasm.
Then I started to think about it deeper and I can't see the extra value it will have for Steem for the above reasons.
I would also love to see some examples (proposals) of what to expect before we hard fork anything.
Maybe I'm completely wrong and I'm happily proven wrong too.
I just don't see it right now. Maybe I'm missing something.
Please proof me wrong.
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