Nimiq Supply Curve AMA

What’s the purpose of this AMA? Without knowing what next steps will be taken afterwards it’s hard to ask good questions.

@Rob Sure, we can extract whatever question we find in that discussion. I would appreciate however if those interested post a clear direct question here. That would help us avoid miss communication.

The purpose is to discuss directly with the community about this topic and gather more feedback and opinions on how to move forward. I think it is a necessary step for everybody to agree what is the next step. I hope the community uses this opportunity to actively share their opinion with everybody from the team, specially team members directly involved in the supply curve.

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After the community uses this opportunity to actively share their opinion with the whole team, what are the next steps that will occur?

I’m also not sure what we’re meant to post here considering it’s an AMA. Such an action seems like a weird way to handle the supply curve issue given that they’re traditionally more of a QnA.

“We look forward to constructive comments and feedback on the way to making a decision with the community on potential coin supply adjustments for Nimiq 2.0. We want to hear and discuss all your opinions throughout March and, based on that, share more information regarding the next steps in a future blog post. Stay tuned.”
From the latest blog post: https://www.nimiq.com/blog/nimiq-20-supply-curve-considerations/

Which means we have not decided what are the next steps and we want to give the community the opportunity to share their opinion of what they think those steps should be.

I don’t understand what you are going after by saying that us reaching out to the community in an AMA is a “weird way of handling it”. Please refrain from sharing complains about this effort instead of questions in this post. If you don’t want to be part of the AMA then that is alright. If you want to complain about the way the AMA is being done then please create another post with suggestions.

For this topic to stay relevant and to show an example I’ll try to summarize questions from [POLL] Should we have a vote for a potential supply curve change? that I found interesting:

  1. Is the supply curve change set in stone or is under consideration?
    1.1) Does the community have a say in the decision?
    1.2) Will a voting (or round of votes) be held to decide on the curve change & what kind of curve?
    1.3) If voting will be held, what would be the window to ensure the majority has had time to give their vote?
  2. Has team nimiq decided how a voting should be held to be fair and minimize manipulation?
    2.1) Should voting be on-chain (NIM or ETH?), or off-chain?
    2.2) So far voting with balance and voting with account age have been proposed - with both having pros and cons. There’s also an option to have balance x age, which might be more fair to early OG holders vs newcomers, but is harder to balance.
  3. Is curve change planned together with the transition to albatross?
    3.1.) If the curve change is planned before 2.0 (which might be a good idea in terms of not changing too much of protocol at once) - have you considered the impact on the network security? Majority is looking forward to reduce the inflation, thous flatten the curve. This will lead to less mining rewards and potentially miners exiting.
  4. Have you considered a dynamic reward mechanism (supply) where majority stakers vote on the reward? (I’m against)
  5. If a part of the community will be strictly against a change, does the community have an option to veto the change for an additional round of re-evaluation?

It was unexpected to hear myself being mention in the last video, but you got the proposed numbers right: https://youtu.be/AEYrQxGILYo?t=1485
I was indeed aiming for in-between to soft boundaries, albeit closer to the bottom bound. My intention was to put yearly inflation close to FIAT currencies.

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Did the valuation expert provide a ‘preferred’ supply curve or did they only provide a range of curves to decide from?

What is Team Nimiq’s view on removing the supply cap? Should it be done now or left as a decision to be made in the future?

How does the team expect the reduced emission rate to affect liquidity?

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If it is possible to share - who were the financial experts, what organization?

I second the question of @Big_Mac regarding the supply cap removal. Granted that the 21B target is in 97 years and with a lower band as example (500 nim reward) a constant reward would still give an ever-decreasing annual inflation, yet still a reward for stakers. Surely it’s impossible to imagine status of Nimiq in 100 years time, but would be interesting to hear TN view on this.

Not related to supply curve, but nevertheless: currently we have 1-minute block target and we have block rewards. In albatross the stakers produce blocks as fast as they can - how are rewards planned to be distributed/targeted? One per epoch? Dynamically by number of blocks produced during an epoch?

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If the community were to vote on a change in the supply curve I think it should be through HTLCs (aka vesting contracts) where the longer the amount of time the funds have been locked in the HTLCs after the election the more weight an account’s vote should have. There is an argument to be made that the amount of time a supporter have been in the community before the election should be taken into consideration too, but the only way for voters to be truly accountable for the consequences of their choices is to have their funds locked in a vesting contract after the election. Of course that is my personal opinion, but I’d love to hear the team’s take on that approach, and whether the team could consider adding a similar mechanism in the protocol in a future release as a way to dynamically adjust the supply.

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Has the team considered the loss of trust in the currency that may occur by changing the emission curve?

Given the challenges coming to an agreement among the community, and potentially between the community and the team on the supply curve issue, are there any plans to create a governance model for these kinds of decisions in the future?

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@Big_Mac: Has the team considered the loss of trust in the currency that may occur by changing the emission curve? -> How do you want to meassure ‘loss of trust’? There are at least two perspectives: The change from PoW to PoS is the birth of a new coin, no ordinary person will care. But I could imagine that any haters and other coins will state that Nim is not trustworthy because of such changes. So you need a really good reason to do that. And ‘the community wants it’ is not a good reason. Some people are complaining about the price drop, but they are financial noobs - now the topic is, if there is a better (perfect) emission rate for a payment protocol (currency) than we have now. So your question is one for the community as well. The team just try to find a consens right now.

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It’s not possible to quantify. Changing the emission curve means whoever makes the decision is acting similar to a central bank, affecting monetary policy to influence how the ‘ecosystem’ operates. I am in support of the change as I think it will benefit people now, and newcomers in the future. However one of the appealing things about crypto is that people cannot easily meddle with things like supply, if at all, which makes it predictable and trustworthy. If something like supply curve or total supply can be changed, what’s to stop it from happening again and again in the future? Other people in this forum have voiced similar concerns.

As far as governance, if a simple majority vote from the community is all that is needed to make this change, what’s to stop a few whales from making poor choices in order to benefit themselves in the future? If not a majority vote, then who gets to make that decision, and should they be given that much power? This also affects trustworthiness.

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This. I am stacking NIM in preparation of Albatross and am a believer in this project. However, a little fiat buys a lot of NIM right now and the threat of whale manipulation is very real. While I appreciate the community approach to this decision, I don’t see how any vote can be carried out legitimately.
Whether the goal of moving the supply curve to the left is to get more NIM on the market sooner, or the goal moving to the right is to increase scarcity and thus value my question is the same:

What is being done to better market Nimiq and encourage adoption?

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Hi to all, i interested to hear what is real range of % in POS, is this decided?!

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Hi everybody! :grinning:

Thank you for joining us and sharing your valuable feedback. We care a lot about the opinion from the community and even more so when it is about such an important decision like the change of supply curve.

I appreciate @Tammo, @Max, @jeff, @elch, @Bruno, @paberr for taking the time to join us and answer the community questions on this topic. :nerd_face:

Without further ado, let’s begin! :partying_face:

Important Resources:

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Thanks for the questions @Rob . Here are some answers for you :wink:

Is the supply curve change set in stone or is under consideration?

It is still under consideration. We want to gather opinions and feedback from the community before committing to such an important change.

Does the community have a say in the decision?

Yes, we consider following a plan related to the one shared by @Big_Mac (#1. change curve yes/no #2. select from a couple of curve options as well as option for community to come up with curve #3. depending on data from #2 final vote on curve)

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Thank you for the reply!
This is probably a repeating question, but I feel it needs to be emphasized: With upper in mind, how do you think is the best way to handle voting so it is as legitimate as possible with little opportunities to manipulate the results?

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Hi @Rob, as Richy said, thanks for your questions!

Regarding the question “Will a voting (or round of votes) be held to decide on the curve change & what kind of curve?

Yes, we will propose a set of curves options (we’re also considering feedback we got so far).

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Hello @Rob thank you for your thoughtful questions.

If voting will be held, what would be the window to ensure the majority has had time to give their vote?

We plan 10 days per round of votes. That way we keep the process moving but give it enough time for people to make up their mind. Also we would like top work towards releasing the much awaited staking calculator which becomes meaningful only after a curve decision has been made.

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Hello!

I’d like to ask one simple question. How many NIM should be staked to earn reward optimally? Thank you. :slightly_smiling_face: