I like this idea, I think this will benefit the Ergo ecosystems long-term growth and stability - Lukas
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If an extension to emissions is to take place, it is in the best interest the Ergo platform for it to be done in such a way as to avoid manipulating the original emission contract and reject this fork as proposed.
A similar emission curve can be achieved using a crowdfunding contract and require no forking.
From Ergo’s Social Contract:
…Anyone can join the network and participate in the protocol without permission. Unlike the traditional financial system, no bailouts, blacklists, or other forms of discrimination should be possible on the core level of Ergo protocol. Insider advantage should be minimized…
And again from the Social Contract:
This might be referred to as “Ergo’s Social Contract”.
In case of intentional violation of any of these principles, the resulting protocol should not be called Ergo.
If this change is pushed, miners that are unwilling will have their transactions effectively censored. A fork should occur: real Ergo will be the one that did not accept EIP 0027, those that accept the change will lose the right to the name as per the social contract.
u/fantoboyXX9’s claims about censorship are valid: If a miner who does not accept this change later (after reduced emmisions) mines a block and them attempts to spend the ERG in the emission box, nodes that accept EIP 27 will ignore that miners transaction.
Accepting this proposal is accepting censorship at the core level, it is accepting an existential fork: the resulting blockchain will not be Ergo as outlined in it’s Core Principals/Social Contract. It will have to choose a new name.
I am still in support of the extension of emissions, but not hastily, and not such that the original emission contract is modified. This proposal is not something that miners should need consider or that warrants a soft fork; extending emissions is possible using crowdfunding.
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Crowdfunded re-emission could follow a similar proposed emission curve and include simple incentivization for donors. It would serve the same purposes of incentivizing network security in the long term, reducing the total available supply for a long period, while at the same time providing the everyday people Ergo is designed to benefit access to a long position.
Incentivizing donors could be done a few ways, I think awarding them anywhere between 0.01% to ~4.4% (same as the foundation) of future emissions from their crowdfund could be fair.
In this scheme a secondary token is created representing the stake of their donation in relation to the entire donated sum (similar to a liquidity token). Call it xERG or EFD (Ergo Futures Donation) or something. xERG is automatically burnt as the re-emission contract awards block rewards (to miners and donors).
If the future token is designed to be fungible using a centralized re-emission contract or some standard defining factors, it would inherent some useful properties:
-
It could be used as collateral in a collateralized smart contract mining pool as outlined in this research paper from Ergo’s first Hackathon, and as proven by Bypassing Non-Outsourceable Proof-of-Work
Schemes Using Collateralized Smart Contracts. -
It could be used by any other dApps that would like to provide loans, or prove their long term commitment to the health of their dApp and the Ergo Platform.
With such a scheme, crowdfunds could be created as often as the market/community deemed it adequate to prolong the emission of ERG. There is no need for a fork, Ergo can already support this prolonging of emissions.
As a miner, my hashrate will not be in favour of this existential change to the network and abolishment of fundamentals.
As an ERG holder, I would happily donate to a futures fund that pays for prolonged block reward emissions. I recognise that the long term value of the asset I am holding is dependant on the profitability of miners. I also recognize that it will be essentially worthless if EIP 27 is accepted and it is forces to change it’s name to notERG as per the social contract.
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The problem with the EIP-0027 proposal is that on close inspection it is shown to infringe on some very basic principles laid out in the Manifesto. I urge the community to pay close attention to this. This is not a small change. It’s fundamental to what ergo is about. It is not a change to be taken lightly.
It introduces censorship and the freezing of coins
This soft-fork cannot be compared to soft forks as seen in the Bitcoins’ ‘SegWit’ soft-fork. Unlike that one, this one actually forces non-upgraded nodes to send their money against their will. This is much, much worse.
"Ergo protocol does not restrict or limit any categories of usage . This is necessary to remain resilient. We certainly can advocate cooperation, trade , and human values; however, we do not enforce them. " - Ergo Basic Principles
‘Mining’ is a form of trade . Miners offer work and in return get a payment as stipulated in Section 6.1 of the White paper. The soft fork introduces new consensus rules which will force all miners (even those that don’t want) to enter a trade in the form of a new contract which some may not voluntarily wish to enter.
This creates censorship . The soft fork makes it so that if a miner refuses to participate in the new trade/contract, he is punished by having his entire reward from the original issuance contract censored by the network if it is confirmed that he “dared” make a transaction that ignores the new contract.
From the perspective of this (" I’m free to not enter contract ") miner, the second he finds a solution, he now has a claim to 67.5 ERG inside the emission box. it’s his right to send 67.5 from the box to his address, It’s his money , Just as it would be his right to send 10 ERG from any other address he controls. If the network rejects the sending of one’s money (in the name of ’ forced ’ trade) it is censorship .
In my opinion, this puts the whole concept of coin ownership on the platform in jeopardy. We shouldn’t touch people’s money. We shouldn’t infringe on coin ownership.
Ergo should first and foremost be a safe and reliable place to store one’s money. Let’s keep it that way.
It makes ERG no longer ‘public money’
“Ergo is committed to being a tool for Regular People . Ergo is a platform for ordinary people , and their interests should not be infringed upon in favor of big parties.” - Ergo Basic Principles
Ergo is meant for regular people. Not just “community members”, regular people i.e. the public .
If the money is to remain public , it must not deviate from the issuance contract that was first publicly announced . If it doesn’t follow the contract, as law , and is later changed by the ‘community’ it becomes “managed money”.
If the core developers can “renegotiate” the contract with the community, then the contract is no longer between the public and devs at all, it is now a private matter between devs and ‘community members’ and thus, the money - ERG is not public anymore. From the perspective of the public, the money is now “privately managed”
community managed money means you need to trust the community members to manage the money wisely. This can involve researching the hierarchy (who’s " popular " who’s the " leader ") to learn who has the most influence on the money and whether it is safe to put one’s savings on the platform.
I believe Ergo should be just like Bitcoin (in terms of money reliability ). Nobody “manages” monetary policy in bitcoin. There is no “community” that “tweaks” the supply curve. Bitcoin is public, that’s the point.
Looking at everything together, (EIP-0027) is going to turn ERG from a reliable, stable, and ‘public’ form of money that respects ownership and the right of free trade into a community-managed money where the money is not public and not contractual, but simply managed privately by a community who may even restrict or freeze the trading of one’s money based on some “community majority votes” and other internal considerations.
It would be very sad if that happens. Let’s keep Ergo a reliable , safe , fair , and stable platform for money. That’s what people want! The public wants public money, not private money .
There are alternatives to the EIP-0027 soft-fork
I believe that if the community gets together while sticking to the core ‘Ergo Basic Principles’ we can come up with something much better while preserving ERG as reliable stable money.
The best way to do so would be to create an entirely new emission contract with a new token of some kind.
This new contract should be a ’ voluntary open public contract ’ just like the original emission contract.
For this new emission to not be considered inflation, the new emission must ‘emit’ something that is sufficiently different in terms of utility and meaning from the platform’s main token (ERG).
This is where we get creative. This new token can be for anything! We just need to think of some new usage that will require a new token.
I’ve personally thought about NFTs. What if we have NFT’s that can be mined and are supported by Proof of Work. This will create real scarce NFT’s backed by the real physical world, how about that? That doesn’t exist anywhere as far as I know.
Or maybe this new token will be needed for some application or service on the Ergo platform. Something cool and innovative. I’m sure we can find something.
We can also attempt to reduce the current supply of ERG by offering the miners something new and valuable in the future if they voluntarily (as individuals) each, on their own, agree to lock up ERG tokens in a contract.
At the end of the day, The miners don’t need ERG specifically. All they need is some type of reward with a monetary value. Let’s not ruin ERG’s value to fix the emission curve, let us instead create a new value on top of ERG in the form of something new that the Miners can be rewarded with.
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I agree with everything that you have said here, @Oleg.
The censorship implied by this EIP is the core issue. It is more like a delayed hard-fork than a soft fork. As you have said, nodes that do not upgrade will have their transactions censored. The first time a miner attempts to claim their block reward after they should have sent 12 ERG of it to a different box we will have two different chains: The original chain with the right to the name Ergo (as per the manifesto) and the new chain that accepts EIP 27.
I don’t want to see this community split in half over fear that the emission contract is too aggressive, and I don’t want to see any devs leave or have to split their resources to support two different chains.
There is so much room within the time frame of the next ~6 years for us to find better solutions for Ergo.
Sidechains, crowdfunded block bounties, new tokens, Smart Pools features any of these things…
Lets build the tools we need, and have the discussions we need to have to make Ergo work.
When I wrote (with a lot of help) this paper on Crowdfunded Smart Contract Pools for Ergo, I did so inspired by the unique need to creatively prolong emissions. We don’t need to destroy what ERG is, and what Ergo represents.
If anyone after reading the entirety of this thread is still convinced that EIP 27 is the best or only way to prolong emissions I will beg you to instead consider attempting to fork Ergo directly. Make a new chain, make a new asset, I’ll mine both because I know the tech is good. Ergo comes with a social contract, it is of vital importance that we work within it.
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Yes, it’s sad to see people just throw law and consistency out the window. They don’t seem to understand why it is important.
That said, I just thought about something concerning. Doesn’t this soft-fork create a persistent reward and reason to 51% the chain? Right now if you 51% attack, at most you may be able to double spend. But with this fork, you could 51% out of the re-emission contract and get a higher reward per block! The “attacker/saver” could even claim he is not “attacking” but simply collecting his miners’ reward as stated in the White paper.
So this fork creates both a reward and legitimacy for attacking/saving the chain by 51% work. We could be seeing constant chain splits all the time due to this soft-fork.
This debate may not even end at block 699,393, it could be ongoing, with one side claiming “principles” and “no censorship” and the other claiming “majority vote” amongst other reasons; and the chain keeps splitting…
This could hurt stability. Just because a consensus may be reached now, doesn’t mean it will remain so in the future. The supply curve could literally be shaped by community back and forth conflicts.
Going further, this could also make actual malicious 51% reorg attacks more feasible. We are literally funding the attacking side with more money than the honest network. This allows him to spend more on hardware and electricity than the main network. The attacker could calculate that if he wins, the community and miners on the “anti-censorship” side may join in, since it is an opportunity to abounded the re-emission contract. This is bad security design. It breaks a key aspect of PoW security.
There should not be need of extending emission if project believes in their initial-vision values. Drastic reduction at this magnitude in rewards will be only attractive for early adopters or ergo foundation members as they will be holding large volumes and price rise will help them but NO ONE ELSE.
Do you think Bitcoin would have gathered the same amount of trust that it has if Bitcoin has, one day, drastically deviated from its supply and emission schedule just to raise price for short term?
Ergo foundation should stick to it’s foundational stones and should start working out storage rent economy rather than TRYING TO FIX WHICH IS NOT BROKEN, and not to mention, end up creating havoc and uncertainty towards whole project and their believers.
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I can’t see how changing the emissions schedule with a soft fork changes the values of Ergo. I can’t see how they relate.
Only half of the coins are in circulation and people can still mine it. The reduction is not drastic at all (minus 12 erg). This coin can be perfectly distributed among all society without any issues. I don’t get your point. It might even distribute better later as more miners will join.
It will take a many more months to be listed in major exchanges so less people have access to Ergo now. If we slow down the emissions more people will be able to access it while still on emissions.
Also, Ergo will be the first PoW coin to have to solve the problem of after emissions even with the soft fork. Not many papers exist targeting this issue and real-life conditions are often different than experiment models. Ergo took example of Bitcoin and it seemed like storage rent would work. However Bitcoin is a completely different case being the first cryptocurrency so all the calculations are on a wrong basis.
Also it’s good to notice that it is not “one dev” that does any changes. It is a proposal and in the end it is the miners they will decide the outcome.
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Not the miners, pools mining Ergo will vote not individuals.
How come it doesn’t reflect foundational values? Supply and emission does not come under foundational values of project? Foundations on which Ergo went public, now what developers no longer believe in that?
Bitcoin is the first crypto currency but Ergo is not, It had studied and see many crypto projects and learned from them, so why extending emission schedule by more than 3 times came up now after 2+ years?
How come emission schedule went 29+ years from 8 years is not radical and drastic? is more than 3 times change does not qualify it for drastic?
Rather than changing emission 3 times and cheap middle-out, they will be focusing on finding answers for storage rent structure in next 6 years and prove their mettle as unique crypto solution in the world.
Ergo is following a research based path but there is no research about alternative ways of rewarding miners.
Right now all the developers are focused on the growth of the ecosystem and not on research. Dapps, dexes, smart contracts, bridges, wallets, marketing, listing on exchanges, partnerships etc. This will go on very intensively for at least one year or maybe more. The ecosystem must expand during this year.
If we don’t have all that there is no point researching rewarding of miners after emissions end. To not be pressured about emissions and focus on other things, this soft fork proposal helps. As long as there are emissions, there will be miners.
I find the proposed SF to be quite mild. The reduction is by 12 ergo. I don’t think we will have any price impact as it is too low. We would have this reduction in a few months anyway. Then when we reach 15 erg we will have a standard reward of 3 ERG.
As for the values, the tokenomics don’t change. The percentage is the same, the public distribution is the same but in more length.
Although I see your point, I also see that Ergo needs to focus on other things right now than trying to find a solution for a problem that is not yet here. There are other things that need to be focused on in order to reach adoption.
Full node is required for voting & is not limited to only mining pool operators.
Anyone can run a full node if they wish.
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I think users should never be beholden to developers or miners while I respect all Core Dev team and their decisions. I think we should leave the re-emissions the way it is to not disturb monitory policy as a lot of users I have spoken to about the re-emissions believe if its that easy to change the monitory policy it would also be as easy to enlarge or lower the overall supply cap. Ergo was advertised for a long time as a short tail emissions block chain and if a long tail emissions schedule is added it goes against one of Ergos core fundamentals.
Ergo Foundation - " Economically Sustainable
Unlike Bitcoin, where block reward is halved every four years - which leads to a long tail of emissions - Ergo block reward will fall to zero after 8 years. After 8 years, a max supply (100 million) will be set for good.
Miners will be paid from transaction fees and storage fees once the block reward falls to zero in 8 years after launch date."
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I’m a miner and created an account just to reply to this topic.
I say that Ergo current emission is very high, the emission curve is very unusual, I say that if nothing is done and there is no buying force soon (and there won’t be) the price will go below $1 in some months, as miners need to miner and pay costs, so some who stopped believing in the long-term project and started dumping their mined coins months ago, I myself have hundreds of coins on hold believing in a rally, but looking at In the current scenario, with the current issuance of ergo per mined block, I see prices going down further until the tier 1 exchange listing is seen (and it will take a year and a half yet).
In addition to being a miner, I was a Dev of some crypto coins and I say that the emission line is the key to the success of the coin, coins with low supply for example tend to appreciate more, coins with low emission per mined block also have more chances of success when there is buying force, Ergo is making mistakes in having a very abrupt emission line, with many reward coins per mined block, the miners will take this and sell it as soon as they receive the reward to pay their costs, mainly with electricity, don’t blame the miners for this as they always do this in any currency, if you find this wrong then it’s good to leave the world of cryptocurrencies as miners have a lot of work, costs and problems just like anyone else has (just like traders ).
If you sit there and think that only development and good news are relevant to the project, I say you will fail, the emission line of this coin has to be changed, lower the current ergo amount to 5 per mined block, this in short period of time will have a huge impact on prices, as fewer miners will have ergo and less ergo in the market which will lead to a rise in prices when there is buying force (when erg is listed on a new exchange), I am a miner and I am in favor of a reduction in the emission of ergo per block mined, I will earn less coins mining but these few coins will have a value much higher than before and therefore, there will be no changes for me, but for the market this will be very good, remember the law of supply x demand.
I have seen people commenting here without really understanding the process that leads to success, I suggest that those who understand little do not have an opinion as they can manipulate other people who do not understand also to make a bad decision, so it is good to see people well qualified interacting here, and another point, changes are important, don’t be afraid, soft-fork or hard-fork is inevitable over time, bitcoin is an example.
Greetings from Brazil to the world.
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Thanks for your reply. Good read. It seems that most are in favor of the soft-fork proposal and the major consideration is the immediate block reward reduction amount and the subsequent pace that it’ll support with the 3 month reward taper moving downward. Now that the Foundation does not receive any more Ergo from block rewards, this is the perfect time to consider this type of proposal and the implementation of a vote as soon as possible to make it happen. Excited and optimistic about the results. This is the best thing to do for Ergo short and long-term. Best of both worlds. A movement in the right direction while keeping miners’ voices front-and-center. Emission right now is aggressively inflationary (about 47,520ERG/per day currently) and it is diluting the value of each token already in circulation. That creates a dangerous situation in terms of profitability for miners as you said. Emit the tokens at a better, slower pace to match the natural expansion of this diverse ecosystem that is being fostered. I think most people are on the same page that this is necessary and imperative to do as soon as possible.
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I don’t agree with you and how are you able to decide most are in favor? Based on what?
If you ask me, I see more people are against it (Including miners). So don’t pass judgements.
Ergo was built and advertised with tagline of no long tail emission-small carbon footprint etc. And question needs to be asked now, Why as soon as contribution to dev foundation ended they want to go from small-tail to long-tail emission? Just increase price of their gathered volume? Why didn’t dev team thought of this 2 years ago and implemented it?
This play which is happening to just bump the price, will gonna turn out to be quite bad in long term for Ergo as people will not put trust and faith in projects which changes their fundamentals at “Convenient times”.
Value can also be achieved by implementing use-cases which drives mass adoption and generate user activity via DeFi, NFTs, Interoperability, Smart contracts, So much more. Instead of diverting efforts of implementation team to rather UNWANTED and RADICAL ideas like changing fundamental core principal on which Ergo was created.
I am seeing people who are supporting soft fork are mostly those who already gathered ton of ERGO and now want price appreciation AT ANY COST.
Stop supporting them blindly!
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Well, you don’t understand what a long emission line is capable of providing a coin, but you see, the ergo emission line is currently very abrupt, it will end in a few years, after which miners will survive on transaction fees and other things that the Devs do, but that won’t be enough, as when the ergo emission ends there will be millions and millions of supply in the market and it will likely smudge all possible markets causing along the emission curve a steep drop in prices like we see today, what happens with expanding supply and insufficient purchasing force causes prices to fall, people seeing prices fall and soon will think there is something wrong (people are emotional), when prices fall and miners have that surviving with network transaction fees, doing a quick calculation, will cause massive drop in network hashrate and as a consequence and other unstable things, or even centralization of miners where only the big ones will manage to survive, as a long emission line of decades makes mining remain decentralized and there are small miners with few GPUs, in addition to stability and security for the network as a decentralized network in mining is effective in keeping away possible attacks from 51%.
in addition to all that mentioned, when you have a long emission curve, there will be less coins being mined and as a consequence there will be price appreciation even if there is a weak buying force, remember the law of supply x demand, what is happening with Prices on ergo today is that there is a lot of supply (many ergo per block mined) and little demand (more coins than available buyers) and this causes an eviction of coins from exchanges as miners are forced to sell their coins to pay expenses.
3 to 5 ergo per mined block will cause prices to recover in a short period (only news of this occurs I predict prices at US$10) and will provide greater long-term reliability in the network as we will have a protected and reliable network for decades with the long issuance line, so Devs don’t have to worry about ways to reward miners who will be leaving the network because the transaction fee is not enough for them to pay their costs and the Devs have to increase the transaction fee just to try to increase it. the profitability of the miners, in addition to the possible problems with new storage technologies (which will not work well).
I’d rather follow Bitcoin and be predictable when it comes to networking and mining than being an ethereum of life that I don’t know if the future will work or not (and it won’t work for them, the POS will destroy them, you’ll see what I’m talking about year next, and vitalik will suffer a lot kkkkk)
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Ergo needs to be predictable, just like Bitcoin, keep POW where it’s always worked, forget about this carbon emission and global warming bullshit, keep developing good, good community relationships, continue expanding (new listings even if it’s small/medium exchanges, having new technologies mainly in the metaverse (where will be the future, the occult elite wants this).
I won’t say anything more about the proposal, I say that I am in favor as a miner and trader, and I end my opinion here.
In short: I am in favor of increasing the ergo emission line, which as a consequence will decrease and reward per mined block, either by the proposed way (soft-fork) or even by more difficult ways (hard-fork, actually it is not so difficult so, i’ve dealt with this in cryptonight algorithms, as i said, i was a DEV a few years ago, now holding back from being a trader and miner).
Greetings from Brazil to the world.
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I don’t know if this has been mentioned before, but wouldn’t it be much simpler to not have a re-emission schedule at all and just soften the emission rate to extend the emission schedule up to the desired network height?
Not only much simpler to implement but also much simpler to explain to the current community and to new miners and user entering our space.
What am I missing?
This requires a hard fork, which we want to avoid.
I can see, you hold Ergo in large volume and just need price appreciation in short period of time (As you mentioned $10 in wake of news only). So don’t act as you care or understand about Ergo future (or for that matter Eth future). You will support anything which drives prices go up in short period, even though it will breaks credibility of project and it’s uniqueness which makes it stand out in 7000+ projects.
I don’t need to say more who just needs to make money.