This post will provide updates on some important issues related to the Verify Your Brain tribe and the VYB token. In particular, this post will address the following:
- Changes to the VYB rewards-pool smart-contract configuration (as of about 24 hours ago)
- Rewards-pool is now issuing VYB at the full rate (9 VYB every 2 minutes, which is 6,480 VYB per day)
- Voting window has been increased from 4 days to 8 days
- Proof of Brain’s official tribe tags have been added as VYB inclusionary tags
- Exclusionary tags have been added
- VYB Project Fund has been created and funded with 128,000 VYB
See below for details.
Recent Changes to the VYB Rewards-Pool Smart Contract Configuration
The Hive-Engine team has completed their review and deployment of the changes to the ‘comments’ contract (which we have been referring to as the ‘rewards-pool’ smart contract).
With those changes in place, we have updated the VYB rewards-pool configuration (which can be viewed here) with the following changes:
- Increased the rewards-pool rate from its previous 2/3 rate (6 VYB every 2 minutes) to its full rate (9 VYB every 2 minutes, which is 6,480 VYB per day). VYB will maintain this rate through February 2025, at which time it will be reduced by 50%, commensurate with POB’s 50% rate reduction (scheduled to occur on POB’s 4th birthday).
- Increased the voting window from 4 days to 8 days.
- The VYB admin team has chosen a slight departure from the Hive ecosystem’s standard 7-day voting window. In keeping with VYB’s ethos as a downvote-free zone, we want to give VYB stakeholders an opportunity to counter HIVE downvotes (even last-second DVs) with VYB upvotes. An extra day of VYB voting will allow for that.
- At some point in the future, if the price of VYB becomes high enough, the Verify Your Brain tribe could conceivably counter 100% of all HIVE malicious downvotes (with USD-equivalent in VYB upvotes).
- Added the following inclusionary tags (in addition to vyb & verifyyourbrain):
- pob
- proofofbrain
- hive-150329 (i.e. the Proof of Brain 'Hive community' tag)
- Added the following exclusionary tags:
- no-vyb, novyb
- these tags are for accountholders who want to self-vote and still want to post to the Proof of Brain tribe
- this is because self-voting is prohibited on Verify Your Brain (doing so will eventually result in post-level and/or account-level muting)
- whereas VYB tokens will be awarded to posts that use any of the Proof of Brain tags, the only way Hive accountholders can self-vote on Proof of Brain and not find themselves getting muted from Verify Your Brain is to include one of the Proof of Brain tags AND include either the #no-vyb or #novyb tag
- (the VYB anti-abuse team will implement a warning system before they commence muting posts and/or accounts due to self-voting)
- hive-193084 (i.e. posts made via D.Buzz)
- hive-193552 (i.e. posts made via Actifit)
- actifit
- no-vyb, novyb
- Added the following account as the ‘promoted post’ account: @vyb.fund
NOTE: At the present time, even though the Verify Your Brain tribe recognizes the Proof of Brain tribe's tags, the reverse is not true. As such, if you use ONLY a POB tag (and no VYB tag) you will earn both POB and VYB, but if you ONLY use a VYB tag (and no POB tag), you will earn VYB but not POB.
A Note about Exclusionary Tags
Exclusionary tags on VYB serve at least three purposes.
First and foremost, we have created the exclusionary tags #no-vyb and #novyb so that those who publish a post to the Proof of Brain tribe (i.e. via the official POB front-end, via the official POB Hive community, or using any of the official POB tags, which are #pob, #proofofbrain, and #hive-150329) and who also want to self-vote on that post, can do so (without fear of being muted from VYB). However, they won’t receive any VYB for those self-voted posts. As such, they will need to weigh the benefit of the self-vote with the potential loss of VYB upvotes.
Second, exclusionary tags are an effective way to pre-emptively guard against VYB rewards going to low-effort posts, by excluding tags that are commonly associated with low-effort posts. This is particularly important with VYB because VYB is a downvote-free zone. As such, guarding against upvote abuse will be admittedly more difficult. Pre-emptive measures will help keep VYB’s anti-abuse team from being overwhelmed with responding to such low-effort posts. At present, VYB is excluding Actifit and D.Buzz tags (which are also excluded by Proof of Brain and LeoFinance). The Hive-Engine ‘comments’ contract currently limits the number of exclusionary tags to five. After that limit is increased, additional low-effort tags may be added to the exclusionary tag list -- such actions will be guided by the VYB Stewardship Board (VSB).
Third, as discussed in a previous announcement, adding all other general-content-tribe tags (other than POB’s) to VYB’s exclusionary tag list will eventually be done. The purpose of that action will be to establish a competitive environment for layer-2 general-content tribes (which will hopefully limit the frequency of tag-spamming and also reduce the incentive to incessantly create general-content tribes that offer nothing ‘new’ other than a new token). However, community feedback has led the VYB admin team to conclude that this action should be postponed until a future date. As such, this feature will not be implemented until at least two separate thresholds have been met: [1] a clear definition is established with respect to what constitutes a general-content tribe and [2] an automated comment-bot is configured to clearly explain to folks who use multiple general-content-tribe tags why they are not receiving VYB rewards when they do so.
In addition, as some members of the community have pointed out, it may be prudent to establish a third threshold (i.e. wait until after VYB has itself become better established) before embarking on the bold move of requiring authors to choose one (and only one) general-content tribe to tag. In that regard, one approach could be to wait until the median post payout (in VYB + POB) is worth more (in USD) than the median post payout for all other general-content tribes. This and other options will be explored and discussed over the coming weeks and months.
VYB Project Fund
As mentioned in a previous post:
The official launch date for VYB (December 18, 2021), was chosen to coincide with the point in time wherein the total number of POB tokens ever issued would exactly equal the total number of VYB tokens being pre-issued (2,042,042). Those 2,042,042 VYB tokens were pre-issued as follows:
- 1,000,000 VYB to airdrop recipients
- 1,000,000 VYB available to be claimed via the POB-for-VYB claim procedure
- 42,042 VYB to be earned by participants in the various @vyb.earn contests
However, when the decision was made to slowly ramp-up the rewards-pool distribution rate (as described above), this resulted in fewer VYB tokens being issued each day, relative to the number of POB tokens being issued. As such, more POB tokens than VYB tokens have been issued to-date. That differential is currently in excess of 80,000 tokens.
As soon as the VYB rewards-pool distribution is adjusted to its ‘full’ rate (which will occur as soon as the exclusionary-tag capability is fully tested and enabled, as mentioned above), enough VYB tokens will be issued to @vyb.fund to make up for the differential between total POB tokens issued and total VYB tokens issued.
The dispensation of those tokens will be at the sole discretion of the VSB. A separate post will be made to more fully explain the VYB Project Fund and its proposal submission and ratification procedures.
In keeping with the above, 128,000 VYB tokens have been issued to the VYB Project Fund (@vyb.fund). A future post will detail the procedure by which VYB Project Fund proposals can be submitted and voted upon. The proposal procedure will be similar to the one used for the DHF (Decentralized Hive Fund). However, the VSB balloting process will be one vote per VSB member. We will start with a 2/3 threshold (i.e. 2/3 of all VSB members who vote on a given proposal must vote affirmative). However, if the VSB itself wants to reduce that threshold, they will be free to do so (i.e. if 2/3 of the VSB votes to reduce the threshold to 1/2, then the threshold will remain 1/2 until at least 1/2 the VSB votes to change it to something else).
The VYB admin team will provide guidance and input, and will oversee the VSB balloting process, which will be fully transparent, but anonymous. Decisions regarding approval of proposals and the disbursement of VYB Project Funds will be made exclusively by the VYB Stewardship Board (VSB).
