RE: New Tribe & Token: Verify Your Brain || vybrainium (VYB)

"unstaking will cause their account to be temporarily blacklisted from the Verify Your Brain Community Curation Project"

What exactly this means?

For starters, I just realized that 'Community Curation Project' might be shortened to CCP and we really don't want to have any association with the CCP. So, from now on, I will refer to it as the 'VYB Curation Project', or VCP.

The intention here is to make 'earning and immediately dumping VYB' unattractive to authors. That is also why VYB will be rewarded as 100% staked.

However, we don't want restrictions that are unfriendly to outside investors who have no intention of being active content creators.

First and foremost, though, I want to be very clear that the 'blacklist' only means that the VCP would temporarily stop upvoting that author's posts. The author would still earn POB and VYB from all other curators. They would simply be missing out on the extra upvotes associated with the VCP (and any accounts that might be trailing the VCP). As such, I will refer to it as a ‘curation blacklist’ from now on (so that it is more clear that being on the ‘blacklist’ just means that your posts will simply be ignored by the VCP team -- nothing more, nothing less).

As stated above, the intention is to keep authors from 'earning then dumping’ VYB. There are already numerous authors doing that with POB and there is little we can do to stop that behavior (with POB). And, FWIW, I am not sure that we should even try. For those folks who genuinely need the income from their posts to pay their bills, it would be remiss of us to take that away from them, imho.

As I responded to a recent question I received on discord:

Q: If by unstaking/selling VYB get's you to a blacklist, we will drive away people who "live off hive" in a way. Is that good?

A: Think of VYB as an 'extra' token that you earn when you post to Proof of Brain (VYB will payout from all POB tags). As such, those who need rewards to pay the bills can still post to Proof of Brain and still use their POB (and HIVE and LEO, etc.) rewards to pay the bills. However, they will also get VYB rewards that they can bank for retirement or for a rainy day. (Authors will need to weigh the benefits of cracking open the VYB piggy bank against the potential loss of future rewards, due to the temporary blacklist. Also, note that the blacklist is temporary. It will be at least a month, maybe a bit longer.)

As you can see from my answer above, I have been thinking that the 'temporary curation blacklist’ should last at least 1 month, i.e. the curation blacklist would expire one month after the power-down is completed or stopped. However, if a compelling case can be made as to why the duration should be shorter (or longer), I am open to hearing those.

For that matter, if someone presents a more elegant way to accomplish the incentive against authors ‘earning then dumping VYB’ (that doesn't involve a 'curation blacklist'), we would love to hear that.

We are also still working out the details regarding power-down dynamics. My current thinking is to set the power-down parameters as 50 equal power downs over 50 days. That would mean 7 weeks to completely liquidate staked VYB, at the rate of 2% per day. But I am open to other suggestions (and any associated rationale).

Our goal is to be as transparent as possible. With that said, until an official post is made about community standards, everything being discussed is subject to change. In other words, if someone presents a compelling argument as to why the power-down dynamics should be 1 event over 180 days rather than 50 events over 50 days, then that change might be made -- if a compelling argument is made. Certain params, such as power-down, are unchangeable once they are set. Other issues, such as how to handle upvote abuse, are likely to be changed over time as we flesh out this experiment.

Ultimately, as with corporate investments, it comes down to the vision and the team (i.e. can they execute on the vision). We are doing our best to be fully transparent and to create something valuable and beneficial.

(And, of course, as you know, nothing I’ve said here should be construed as financial advice.)

We welcome your feedback in terms of what community standards or other parameters might make Verify Your Brain attractive for you, as an investor, curator, and author -- as you have been an asset to the POB tribe in all three respects.