Bible Pay

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  • Rob Andrews
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Automatic Price Mooning
« on: July 21, 2020, 09:28:10 AM »
I'd like to discuss the design and viability of a new feature, something that might be called Automatic Price Mooning, or Moon Ratcheting or maybe something catchier.

The idea stems from the question, What will make investors most interested in buying and holding BBP?
I thought of creating a built in trading mechanism that requires BBP to buy coins off the open market each month, (with the intent that if we have an increasing volume and an increasing price, it would provide impetus), but the downside to that idea is that in order to raise capital to pay sancs to buy on the open market we have to sell our own currency which further exacerbates a bigger sell wall on SX (which imho, we need to get rid of at this point, not make it worse).

So the best idea I have at this point is to make an algorithm that Records our current price in Satoshi (down to the 9th digit), so today for example our price is .000000015 at the daily GSC superblock height, once per day.  (And, we will remember the last 7 days of prices in memory also).

What we would do is simply have two rules:

If the snapshot price is Less than Yesterdays snapshot price, OR Unchanged from Yesterdays snapshot price, we pay all blocks at 7 BBP for that day.  (Meaning that the sanctuaries and the miners get shorted by 99% of their reward that day).
Otoh, if the snapshot price is HIGHER than yesterdays snapshot price, even by .01 satoshi, we emit our normal rewards for that day.


So the marketing on this is IF BBP does not have a continually increasing price in Satoshi, we pay 99% less rewards to the Sanctuaries and to the Miners.
This would give an impetus for someone to step in to SX and buy up at least enough to get us to the next satoshi higher.

I think its a pretty strong impetus to keep the price rising (hence the name Automatic Price Mooning).

Obviously when we hit a high barrier like 7 Satoshi, we would waver for a couple weeks at 7 to break through to 7.1 etc.
Of course the downside is the sanctuaries would get strong cuts along the way, but remember since everything is relative, a higher price per coin * existing supply is still equal to a higher reward than more coins * less price (VALUE = COUNT_OWNED * PRICE).

The main viability of this idea is actually on the question, will more net miners and project participants enter BBP as they see the price rising to real levels - levels where people take this project seriously.

I don't believe this idea will in any way hurt our security, because we are rolling out fully locked LLMQs with chainlocks in testnet (this means the sancs constantly monitor the order of the blocks), so lack of payment with merge-mined blocks should not pose any security risk to the chain.  I think the entire effect will be on those who receive rewards wondering why they got 1 bbp instead of 3000 etc.

And lets think of a really bright outcome:  What if this wild idea gains national attention?  Price Mooning?  What if a lot of people jump in and say, BiblePay is breaking through with this strange feature.

On a side note, we would leave the monthly governance emissions the same during the variable emissions phases - simply because we do not want fork risk.  The gov emissions are precalculated in many places and shorting those proposals down to 1 bbp causes too many problems.  However note that we will have proposal in soon to reduce Governance expenses down dramatically (since governance is no longer paying for charity) and we can give that portion to the coinbase reward so the sancs get more of a reward (and that helps them pay for POOS).


Please, if you have improvement or suggestions or downsides, please let us know.  Im willing to change the idea, but obviously it has to be able to work without fork risk.

EDIT:
Btw, BBP would save 1.8MM per day on emissions when implemented (or 45MM per month).  So there is a real theoretical impetus for a rising price when less coins are minted that would ultimately be sold.

« Last Edit: July 22, 2020, 12:00:05 PM by Rob Andrews »


  • talisman
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Re: Automatic Price Mooning
« Reply #1 on: July 21, 2020, 11:25:11 AM »
Hi Rob,

Interesting idea. I believe in a correlation between scarcity of anything and value attached to it. Here comes my first question:

RandomX miners are sacrificing a percentage of their XMR income in return for BBP they get paid. Assuming these guys are good in calculating their best interests, and many (if not all) are driven here by their greed - I am afraid we will observe a swift reduction in RandomX hashrate once they see they are not getting paid as much as they did until now. That, inturn, will reduce the charity funds generated via dual mining?


  • Rob Andrews
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Re: Automatic Price Mooning
« Reply #2 on: July 21, 2020, 12:29:29 PM »
Hi Rob,

Interesting idea. I believe in a correlation between scarcity of anything and value attached to it. Here comes my first question:

RandomX miners are sacrificing a percentage of their XMR income in return for BBP they get paid. Assuming these guys are good in calculating their best interests, and many (if not all) are driven here by their greed - I am afraid we will observe a swift reduction in RandomX hashrate once they see they are not getting paid as much as they did until now. That, inturn, will reduce the charity funds generated via dual mining?

Hi Talisman!

Great question, great point.

Its certainly a consideration, especially since the RX miner is contributing about 10% of the charity to this project currently, and also --  in a very short time since the POOS proposal passed, the Sancs will be paying the lions share of the charity expenses.

But I think realistically, lets say hypothetically the RX miners do jump ship the moment they see 1 bbp reward (IE one particular day they see this, so they shut the miners off), I think this will work both ways however -- lets say we lose miners for a couple days and then our price does rise back up to say 3 satoshi, then mining is re-enabled, wouldn't we see an influx of RX miners due to the reward increasing by 300%, possibly?  So I think someone [some miners] will have to fill the void.

Most likely the real life scenario will be that they program the miner to only participate on days that its profitable.  Thats actually a very good outcome that we would enjoy also because then we save money on electricity the days that our price drops and then we pay more (at a higher price) the day we rise.

It might also cause them to be motivated to re-enable mining (by buying some extra coins to force BBPs system back on) - maybe.

But it does like sound like a conservative idea over all - its certainly not reckless to save money.  Its sort of similar to what we would want the federal reserve to do in hard times (in contrast to wasting the money flow constantly).

Im thinking the plus for investors is rather strong;  we cant really brag about investing in BBP if we dont have something unique; this is one of those potential features to brag about.
I wonder if you went to a 90 year old Christian grandma and asked her to invest in cryptocurrency if this would make her feel more at ease?




  • talisman
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Re: Automatic Price Mooning
« Reply #3 on: July 21, 2020, 01:50:06 PM »
That makes sense. Now that vanilla XMRIG is used, miners could easily automate pool switching based on BBP price of the day.

I predict this start-stop pattern would yield an oscillating curve in our prices (i.e., every down-tick would trigger an up-tick and vice versa).

Then we can actually stall in a narrow band. I mean, system would have one vulnerability: Let's say price is 1.8 sat today, and mining is profitable. Tomorrow morning, some miners liquidate and price is recorded as 1.7 sat. Tough luck, one day with no BBP mining incentive. But then, the day after, the price is ticked up to 1.8 sat again, and miners will be motivated to run XMR+BBP. Yes, we have succeded in reducing the emission by half (over a 2-day period), but price is still lingering where it was.

Can you think of a precaution to prevent this?


  • Rob Andrews
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Re: Automatic Price Mooning
« Reply #4 on: July 21, 2020, 05:04:35 PM »
That makes sense. Now that vanilla XMRIG is used, miners could easily automate pool switching based on BBP price of the day.

I predict this start-stop pattern would yield an oscillating curve in our prices (i.e., every down-tick would trigger an up-tick and vice versa).

Then we can actually stall in a narrow band. I mean, system would have one vulnerability: Let's say price is 1.8 sat today, and mining is profitable. Tomorrow morning, some miners liquidate and price is recorded as 1.7 sat. Tough luck, one day with no BBP mining incentive. But then, the day after, the price is ticked up to 1.8 sat again, and miners will be motivated to run XMR+BBP. Yes, we have succeded in reducing the emission by half (over a 2-day period), but price is still lingering where it was.

Can you think of a precaution to prevent this?

I was thinking the same thing but for a different reason earlier (I was thinking about people trying to manipulate the price right before the cutoff time).  Then I thought you know its going to be very hard to manipulate once a buy wall or sell wall appears at a certain price.  So I think manipulation is not really a concern especially since the ATM (at-the-money) price has the least chance of being manipulated.

But as far as the wallet cycling over and over in a narrow band (2 milli-satoshis) I think we will need to defend the price.  Although I said 6am in the proposal I believe the price snapshot would be taken at the daily GSC superblock height (thats actually the height the sancs vote for the daily contract).  So I think we will need to manually defend the price we want to hit during the 6 hours before the GSC height each day.

For example in my case Id like to see the price be at its highest to make it harder to go down the next day.  The higher the locked in price the more chance someone will need to buy even higher to continue mining the next day.

Once it gets locked in really low (like 4 satoshis lower than the prior day) then we only need to see +1 the next day etc. 






  • Rob Andrews
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Re: Automatic Price Mooning
« Reply #5 on: July 21, 2020, 05:42:28 PM »
That makes sense. Now that vanilla XMRIG is used, miners could easily automate pool switching based on BBP price of the day.

I predict this start-stop pattern would yield an oscillating curve in our prices (i.e., every down-tick would trigger an up-tick and vice versa).

Then we can actually stall in a narrow band. I mean, system would have one vulnerability: Let's say price is 1.8 sat today, and mining is profitable. Tomorrow morning, some miners liquidate and price is recorded as 1.7 sat. Tough luck, one day with no BBP mining incentive. But then, the day after, the price is ticked up to 1.8 sat again, and miners will be motivated to run XMR+BBP. Yes, we have succeded in reducing the emission by half (over a 2-day period), but price is still lingering where it was.

Can you think of a precaution to prevent this?

One more thing, btw, for the price quote, we use the midpoint of the price, so for example right now our bid is 1.3 sat ask is 1.4 sat (midpoint = 1.35 sat).

So in the case of trading in a tight range - IE a last sale on SX at 1.3 or a last buy at 1.4, the GSC contract would still have recorded 1.35 -- and day over day 1.35 to 1.35 is considered unchanged.

Right now in the initial design, I have unchanged (or the price increasing) as behavior where we emit coins.
But -- only when we have a drop in price from the prior day (IE midpoint drops from 1.35 to 1.25) that is when our emissions stop for that day until the next signal is assessed.

In the core wallet today you can type 'exec price' and you should see the mid @ 1.35 for example.


  • talisman
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Re: Automatic Price Mooning
« Reply #6 on: July 22, 2020, 03:48:40 AM »
Check and check. Emission freeze will aply to GSC contracts such as PoDC as well, right?


  • Rob Andrews
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Re: Automatic Price Mooning
« Reply #7 on: July 22, 2020, 09:58:41 AM »
Check and check. Emission freeze will aply to GSC contracts such as PoDC as well, right?

It would not apply to GSC or PODC as those are too risky to limit (they have DWS embedded in them also, btw).  So, we would just limit the normal coinbase transactions (sanc + RX reward).

I believe it would be better for us to freeze emissions on both Unchanged days, and Price drops.  I think we should make this as effective as possible, with the most propensity to pump the price Up daily.

Ill edit the OP now to clarify the block vote height and the signal.



  • sunk818
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Re: Automatic Price Mooning
« Reply #8 on: July 26, 2020, 12:23:37 AM »
I think the mining rewards for BBP should be left alone. Changing the reward based on the BTC price is too disruptive.  Changing the emission schedule will make newcomers feel unwelcome and not give a fair opportunity for newer community members that have invested in hardware and electricity. The mining mechanic is well established with all cryptocurrencies and I see more downsides to a feature like this. [/size]Miners will HODL if they feel they can sell for more later. Give miners a compelling reason to HODL (e.g. sanctuary or DWS) and they won't sell the BBP.
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  • Rob Andrews
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Re: Automatic Price Mooning
« Reply #9 on: July 26, 2020, 09:02:07 AM »
I think the mining rewards for BBP should be left alone. Changing the reward based on the BTC price is too disruptive.  Changing the emission schedule will make newcomers feel unwelcome and not give a fair opportunity for newer community members that have invested in hardware and electricity. The mining mechanic is well established with all cryptocurrencies and I see more downsides to a feature like this. [/size]Miners will HODL if they feel they can sell for more later. Give miners a compelling reason to HODL (e.g. sanctuary or DWS) and they won't sell the BBP.

One problem I see with BiblePay though in its current state, is I think everyone feels hopeless.  I look at the sell wall (of 80 million coins) on SX, and thats what we got with conventional mining and conventional sell pressure.

One thing about APM that I really like is it gives us hope.  I feel like if I wake up every morning, and any one of say 5,000 of us (pretending we have a bigger community by then) could go on SX and move us up one satoshi to keep the mining going, that is 'hopeful' compared to 'bleak'.

I actually feel the current ecosystem is 'bleak' unless we had a proposal in that guaranteed 5 new users per day - but I cant dream one up that actually works.  We started talking about referrals and DWS, but we stopped.  If we can blend in one that works, maybe conventional would still work.

Additionally to these feelings I actually feel like maybe APS could actually cause a sharp rise in price if ever break through the resistance (IE if the wall is ever sold).


  • earlzmoade
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Re: Automatic Price Mooning
« Reply #10 on: July 28, 2020, 11:39:50 AM »
I like the incentive for people to buy biblepay tokens and not just mine and sell.
So yeah for sure sounds like a intresting plan.
Joshua 1:9
Have i not commanded you?
Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid;
do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God
will be with you wherever you go.


  • sunk818
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Re: Automatic Price Mooning
« Reply #11 on: July 30, 2020, 12:20:05 AM »
One problem I see with BiblePay though in its current state, is I think everyone feels hopeless.  I look at the sell wall (of 80 million coins) on SX, and thats what we got with conventional mining and conventional sell pressure.

One thing about APM that I really like is it gives us hope.  I feel like if I wake up every morning, and any one of say 5,000 of us (pretending we have a bigger community by then) could go on SX and move us up one satoshi to keep the mining going, that is 'hopeful' compared to 'bleak'.

I actually feel the current ecosystem is 'bleak' unless we had a proposal in that guaranteed 5 new users per day - but I cant dream one up that actually works.  We started talking about referrals and DWS, but we stopped.  If we can blend in one that works, maybe conventional would still work.

Additionally to these feelings I actually feel like maybe APS could actually cause a sharp rise in price if ever break through the resistance (IE if the wall is ever sold).


Offering hope is always a good thing. I bought 5M BBP as BTC pumped. Hopefully, that helped.


RE: APM


1) I worry offering no miner reward will turn off miners permanently especially with a 10% XMR charity tax. Any momentum gained with new XMR might encourage abandoning BBP permanently. Seems like more miners are joining every day so that's a good change for BBP isn't it?


2) If you want more users, is the solution more of a marketing and advertising challenge than a technical code change?
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