I voted No (let the team decide) due to the fact that PoS requires a lot of less physical work to upkeep, the blog post made an excellent statement - “The initial staking reward (adjusted and non-adjusted) should compare well within the ranges of other current PoS projects of similar maturity” in my opinion lowering the block reward to 900~ NIM per block can counter the simple difficulty of staking with the new wallet in which there is a possibility that the price won’t fluctuate as badly. (edit: we need to also count for the electricity cost will pretty much vanish, the cost of hardware, the cost of upkeep(already mentioned), and the future risk of mining NIM instead of another coin, when PoS happens most/all of these price stabilizers will vanish making NIM to possibly go downwards.
It’s a well written opinion and I’ve always loved your posts with arguments. For the latter though I would disagree, which nothing more than my point of view.
Price is a broad term, but if I’d dumb it down - it’s supply and demand. By lowering to 900 Nim per block (or even 400-500), we are cutting the supply. If the demand stays the same then price should correct to a new point. But since only stakers will be receiving the new lowered supply, there is a chance that they won’t be selling/dumping as they value their coins at a higher price, making supply even more scarce.
For demand though, we as a community need to work to spread the word, build on the ecosystem and generate interest - but that’s another topic 
I’m confused about the link between your message and having a vote-based consensus to ratify a change.
Sorry, primarily I meant on a “no” if the team would go forth with the changes listed on the blog post. I was really tired last night 
. For me its a yes and a no for some aspects its weird to describe.
You’re correct, just like some miners hold and some miners sell - it is totally dependent on what the miner/staker values their coins at.
So is this ever going anywhere? Will there be future polls? Etc…
I agree with Talleyrand on this. I drew up a flow chart for the things that need to be voted on. If I missed anything feel free to add it in.
Would it be feasible to have a vote weighted by the amount of time a person has been part of the Nimiq network/community? Like genesis wallets count as a higher number of votes than wallets made this year, regardless of NIM balance. The further back in the chain your wallet appears, the more your vote is worth.
I have distanced myself from telegram, as I don’t have time to join discussions between the tips which make up majority of chat volume. I lurk on the forum increasingly more though.
@Big_Mac I would add that community might want/suggest an option between to soft boundries, IMO such option should be included as well.
Out of all options, votes weighed by balance seems mst fair to me (although skewed to whale opinions).
For example, my original wallet was since day one, yet I destoryed the seed after migrating to a newer wallet during the netowrk upgrade. Surely there are similar guys like me.
Yup I did the same with my original key, but I do really like the idea of account age. It feels a lot more fair than vote weight by balance, and generally there’s far less room for manipulation. What if we added a reasonable cut off date, and any accounts created before then are treated the same as accounts created on that cut off date. We would be rewarding account age, but at a certain point all accounts older than X will be given the same vote weight for fairness to both new community members and old ones who switched accounts and burned the keys.
So for example an account made 10 days ago would get their 1 vote weighed x10, an account made 150 days ago x150, an account made 400 days ago (for example sake let’s say that’s also the cut off amount) would get x400, but an account made 600 days ago would still only get x400.
One small thing to consider if this method were to be done, is that some people have multiple accounts that are of a similar age. This could allow for some vote manipulation similar to what’s possible with voting by balance so it’s something to keep in mind.
I’d be wary of manipulations aka spam new accounts to vote. This i why I would weigh balance in favor of age. For example, we could make multiple accounts right now (hundreds, programmaticaly) and wait for the voting that will be probably on a later date.
(Account weight) x (age) could be another option, but then we should vote on a fair ratio for that 
Yes but those hundred accounts would only be created today. Anyone with an account before today would have more weight. Not saying it’s perfect or should be used, but it’s an interesting idea.
And I personally don’t believe balance is a fair way to vote. It doesn’t capture the opinions of the community, it captures the opinions of those willing to vote that have the most NIM. New community member are at an immediate disadvantage, and regardless of how long they’ve been in the community, voting with balance favors the wealthy.
I like the idea of multiplying together, but as you mentioned it makes things, more complicated. Could be worth looking into, but even then it may not be the best solution.
At the end of the day though, it seems likely there won’t be a vote, just the AMA and then TN will make the decision.
I agree with not having NIM balance determine voting power. It is not a fair way to represent the collective will of a diverse community. This will be especially true after the switch to proof of stake model when a handful of early adopters will hold the vast majority of NIM. Some people simply don’t have the financial or material resources that others do, yet still might be contributing to the success of the project in other ways. They should have equal vote in my opinion.
If we were to explore voting based on the age of a wallet, I think choosing a cutoff that has already passed, like March 15th for example, would prevent somebody from artificially influencing a vote by creating a bunch of new wallets. Those that have only been in the community for a few weeks will miss out on voting, but that seems fair as they don’t have the same ties to the project that long-term community members do. The problem is that it is not a sustainable voting model in the long-term as anybody could create a bunch of accounts now to influence future votes, so it would have to be a one-time use model. That being said, I still think it could be an effective framework for this particular vote.
The issue of people not having access to older accounts is something I imagine is spread fairly evenly across the community, so although it will seem unfair to a given individual, it likely won’t affect the outcome of a vote by the whole group.
The problem that was mentioned before is that we can’t democratically choose the best way to vote without having a vote on it, which just creates a loop. So maybe it is best if TN chooses what they see as a fair framework for conducting a vote on the emission curve, and then have the community do a multiple rounds of voting to determine the path forward, based on the questions discussed above and any other details that need to be decided upon?
There are downsides to any voting models. When considering the options, I was thinking of attack vendors.
*With balance the voting weight is limited by the balance (6.48 bil for the moment of writing, including vesting accounts), but having multiple accounts doesn’t give you any extra weight.
*With account age the limit is the age (certain threshold). But having multiple accounts makes you scale your weight horizontally, where the limit is infinity.
Out of both options I found balance more secure in terms of bad actors. As I said before it IS skewed towards whales nevertheless. I liked the comment that community has collaterally a lot more NIM that team nimiq, making another good equalizer in terms of TN <> community.
The list of considerations for anything different from what’s already been used for the community representatives election is endless, it seems. For instance, if account longevity was to be taken into consideration for voting, what is going to stop people from “renting” their accounts to whales, since whales could transfer funds to the voter’s account before the election takes place.
This is why I initially suggested balances be ignored. If we just went with account age there would be no issue of a few whales having too much control. I’m not saying this is the best idea, nor am I married to it, but it is better than financial power = voting power in my opinion, which is too close to the corrupt way that things are already set up in the world.
@Rob I’m not sure what you mean by scaling weight horizontally to infinity, could you clarify?
With balances the individual power is limited by his max balance
With age, individual (attacker) is limited by how many accounts he can produce.
I mentioned above having a cutoff date that has already passed (March 15th in the example). That way nobody can gain an advantage by producing more accounts. It’s already too late.
I think with 2 cut off dates we could get a good system for counting age. One to prevent people from making a ton of accounts (the one Big_Mac is talking about), another to prevent unfairness with accounts that may or may not have been ditched during the switch to the new accounts (one that would be farther back than the one Big_Mac is discussing).
If we then multiply that clipped age by the balance we could get rid of the issue of people owning multiple older accounts (though now renting accounts is an issue but 
lol). Even if you have multiple accounts of a similar age, voting with all your balance in one such account vs voting with balance spread among them would be the same (if not detrimental since one account would be older than all the others).
Introducing balance into the equation brings back the issue of favoring those that hold the most NIM and are willing to reveal that balance, but it’s better than balance alone imo.