Steem Proposal System will be completed on Monday

in #blocktrades6 years ago

I’m happy to report that we’ve almost completed the work on the Steem Proposal System. As part of the work, we also developed a web page for steemitwallet.com to allow viewing proposals and voting on them.

We’re about a week over our original estimate of up to two months, due to requested changes in the implementation from Steemit Inc, plus the time to add the voting web page (which wasn’t part of our original proposal). I planned to deliver the code today, but we decided to have one more round of testing after a last minute tweak to the voting page, so we’re delaying till Monday.

We met with the Steemit development team on Tuesday of this week and we made a few more minor changes to the blockchain code based on requests from their development team.

From discussions during that meeting, I believe the proposal system will be the only major change in the new release of the blockchain code.

The UI hasn’t visually changed much since my last report, except that the default view is now “votable” which means that it initially displays any proposal that the user can currently vote on (order by vote popularity), but here’s what it looks like:

What’s Next?

Monday we’ll delivered the code to the Steemit development team, who will schedule a time for a hard fork in the near future to enable the proposal system and tag a release in their code repository.

After that, it will be up to witnesses to decide if they will choose to update to the new version of the code. At this time, I’m not aware of any top 20 witnesses that are opposed to the hardfork.

Given that it is Steemit’s standard operating procedure to give node operators a 30 day grace period to update to the code, I expect that the Steem proposal system will likely be live on the mainnet in somewhere between 5-8 weeks from now, but the timing is outside of our control. In the meantime, we’ll continue to operate the testnet for anyone who wants to develop interfaces to the proposal system.

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How exactly will this work? Will the proposals get a certain % of the total funds depending on how many votes they have or will it be more of a minimum votes needed and then they start getting paid?

There's a daily budget that will get paid out in order to the top proposals. The last such proposal will generally only get partially funded and any lower ranked proposal will not get any funding. For a better understanding of how this works, I recommend reading the original posting about it: https://steemit.com/blocktrades/@blocktrades/proposing-a-worker-proposal-system-for-steem

How similar does this work compared to Bitshare's worker proposal?

It's very similar, but there are some differences. Here's the main differences that I can think of off-hand:

  1. Voting is with staked instead of liquid tokens like in BitShares. With tokens only unstakeable over a 3 month period in Steem, this means that a centralized exchange can't reasonably vote with tokens being held on the exchange. This happened once before in BitShares, and it was a bit of a mess, IMO. This means the Steem proposal system is much safer against abuse.

  2. Payouts from proposals are made in a stable coin (SBD) instead of the native token (Steem). Although BitShares also has a stable coin, the proposal system was designed to pay out in the native coin (BTS). This almost inevitably led to issues because of the extreme price volatility: when BitShares went up in value, the payouts were larger than originally intended and the community was unhappy because devs were being overpaid, and when it went down too much, the devs were being paid enough. This issue is mostly worked around nowadays by using a 3rd party escrow agent that pays out in the BitShares stable coins (bitusd and bitcny), but it adds extra overhead to the process.

  3. Bitshares has multiple "types" of proposals (regular workers, burn workers, and refund workers). Instead of defining special types of workers, the Steem proposal system has one type of worker, but unlike a BitShares worker proposal, a Steemproposal can be created by one account and payout to a different account. This allows the Steem proposal system more flexibility than is possible in the BitShares implementation. It can mimic all three types of BitShares proposals, with a simpler implementation and also allows for additional use-cases.

  4. The funding model for the two systems is different. In BitShares, the funding "account" (it's not really an account in BitShares, but you can think of there being a virtual one) was established initially with a large amount of BitShares (about a billion, IIRC) and is funded thereafter via fees charged by the blockchain for performing operations on the blockchain. Steem doesn't charge fees, so the funding account can't be filled this way. But Steem's funding account is an actual account, so it is possible to donate funds to it and this is initially the only method it can be funded. But I expect various proposals for additional ways to fund this account, with some form of inflation being one likely mechanism (either from an existing recipient of inflation or a newly defined one).

Hey so whats going on with proposal system? can there be front ends to make it look prettier that still u ethe same steem blockchian/ Posts still show up on someones blog right?

We've delivered the code to Steemit (PR is here: https://github.com/steemit/steem/pull/3272).

Next step is the hardfork release, they're currently polling witnesses to see what if any other small changes will be included with the hardfork release.

Any frontend will be able to make a UI for the proposal system: I hope most will support it.

I can't say I understand what's going on in that picture above, I guess it's a small part of some larger conversation.

Nevermidn about the picture, and ok cool, hey if you coudl post an update ityd clear a lot fo confusioon
i ghot into an argument about how much the new worker proposal system is going to take, i didnt know you made an update and are going to do an extra 1% inflation?

COuld you PLEASE do a quick update and clear things up and give teh LATEST info on How much inflation and where its coming form, if its not being taken from author rewards anymore, are we going to add inflation now to the inflation tables?

There's no change to add inflation. There's some code there that allows for inflation to be part of the daily budget, so maybe someone saw this and assumed we had added an inflation source.

Initially, the SPS will be funded by donations (with the biggest one from Steemit), then I expect various proposals for how to fund the SPS through other mechanisms. Proposal voting will decide what those sources will be (in coordination with voting for witnesses, of course).


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Superb! Thanks for the update.

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Hey, @blocktrades.

Going an extra week past a deadline that didn't originally include extra work and more testing is more than fine as far as I'm concerned. I'd rather as smooth and complete a hard fork as possible than one that was late, not quite finished, or rushed to completion. While I'm not an expert, it seems to me like you've all done an excellent job in getting the work done, getting the work right, and having Steemit Inc cooperating/collaborating in this is awesome, too.

Maybe this can open the door to future joint projects beyond the worker proposal.

So, from the looks of things, the individual proposing some kind of work be done will also set the terms of payment and the scope of the project, then the rest of us can decide if we like it or not? I'm not clear on what the minimum vote threshold is to greenlight a job? Is there an expectation that 51% of account holders will vote for it? My guess is, there must be a smaller amount (you'll be lucky if 20% of active users even know about the proposals, let alone vote for them, the way things work around here. :)

Will it be up to the individuals proposing the work to essential market it? Aside from looking on the worker proposal website on a frequent basis, will there be any other notification when new proposals go up, or the ones that reach the minimum vote standard get greenlighted?

I'm not clear on what the minimum vote threshold is to greenlight a job?

I have not looked closely at the final code yet but I believe from earlier discussions there is a "return" item which sets the line for approval. Anything below that line will not get funding because it will instead go to the return item (returned to funds).

Will it be up to the individuals proposing the work to essential market it?

It may well be. What is not clear is how this will work out in practice (by which I mean community expectations and voting, typical sizes and granularity of proposals, etc.). As far as notifications and such, I do not believe there will be any in the basic steemit.com UI, but there are many other dapps and services available which make take that on.

Hey, @smooth.

Thanks for your reply.

Okay. I'm afraid I don't know what a return item is, though from what I get from you is, it's what sets the approval line, which means the approval line might be different for each worker proposal? Some things might require more voter weight than others? That would make sense if that's true.

re: not clear

I suppose until it's implemented there's still quite a few unknowns because human behavior needs to take hold first. :) Okay, so as far as notifications go, or getting the word out there, there may or may not be dApps on the platform to incorporate something like that, or some other service spring up. Barring that, people who are interested should be checking the website.

What smooth said was correct, but just to clarify: by default, there's a certain amount budgeted per day to be spent from the treasury fund. To spend less, you vote up a proposal that just sends part of that day's budget back to the fund. Informally, we call these "refund" workers.

So the voting level of the refund worker sets the threshold needed to for a proposal to get paid: you need to have more votes than a refund worker proposal that would otherwise eat up all the daily budget.

This means there is no fixed percentage of votes your proposal needs to get funded, it just needs to get more votes than competing proposals (including refund workers).

Hey, @blocktrades.

re: most votes

Okay. Got it. Budget is a certain amount. Until those funds are gone, the proposals with the most upvotes get funded. :)

There is one approval line for all proposals. If they are above the line they get funded, below the line they don't. "Return" is a voter-defined approval line. So, in effect, if a proposal gets more votes than "return" it is approved and if it gets fewer votes than "return" it is not approved. The line can change so if stakeholders think non-worthy proposals are making the cut they can vote for "return" raising the threshold.

EDIT: I guess from what blocktrades wrote it is possible to have more than one "return" proposal (each returning only a portion of the budget) so I guess it is possible have what amounts to different vote thresholds for different portions of the budget.

Yes, that's what I meant.

with my tiny vote I upload your comment, since the first has no relation to the post. Congratulations to @blocktrades, they have done a wonderful job and I am going to vote as witness

The fund will come out of inflation? how much percentage?

Initially all funding is via donations. I expect that some of the earliest proposals will be for additional ways to fund the proposal treasury.

Ah ok, yes, let's hope that because with donations there will not be much money and there already exists @fundition. With inflation as they said in the first post could have something more stable.

Well, it was enough to put it at the top, @danielvehe, so viva tiny upvotes! :)

The other comment was a bit off topic. Sounds like he's hoping someone will notice him. :)

re: the fund

I'm not sure if that's been totally determined, or if it will even be from the existing inflation. The last I heard, it was still up for debate. Hopefully, you'll get an answer and then both of us will know. :)

Sure when you start will clear all doubts, the truth is that it is something great for Steem and excited a lot

luv the work here

Those are great news

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I'm in favor. Thanks for being flexible during this.

Great job!

Thank you for the information update.

@blocktrades, Great work team. And Structure Proposal will write new story for Steem and it will will help in implemention in more focused way and effectively carrying out of actions as per the road maps. Keep up team and more success ahead.

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wow, good work you do! And thank you sooooooo much for your upvote! <3 I can not believe it! Many thanks! I'm speechless