Either the project might need to cap total token supply (say 100 million) or it will be as close as saying it’s only orchestrators that’s running this show. The project will have no delegators left.
Keep in mind that delegators are only in this because they wanna see their investment flourish. There is no dividend, is there? Yield that comes with staking just to survive token inflation is not gonna cut it.
After 100 million is reached, O’s would have to make it with Ether rewards. If that isn’t enough, than maybe you are not needed for now because there is not enough demand right now.
I feel like I’m here to support Os. I’m here to keep them alive, keep them running, which is the whole point and that’s fair. Except one thing: I’m here to keep 100 of them alive when there is not even enough demand. Why is there have to be 100 of them at all times? Decentralization. Yeah well. I don’t know. Just feels unfair.
Since Orchestrators are apparently the one’s ‘running the show’ and Delegators contribute nothing to the actual growth of the project, how about we cut off Delegators from inflationary rewards? If Orchestrators are the only recipients we can reduce inflation more than tenfold right now
I’d be totally up for that. Let’s do it. I’d stop delegating, everyone would but inflation would still not be zero because O’s apparently would still need inflationary lpt rewards since most of them can’t earn a decent amount of Ether anyway when there is low demand.
At least it would look better not to have that much inflation.
From a delegator point of view, it actually doesn’t matter because what staking yield does is to just let you (almost) survive inflation. Cutting delegators off would make no difference. They wont be recieving rewards, but inflation would drop ten fold so same thing w.r.t. token price.
What would be a healthier solution though would be to still encourage participation while dropping total inflation so fewer inflationary rewards for everyone.
Actually there are 2 viable ways:
Either we put a cap on total supply, so everyone knows this high inflation is not gonna last forever.
Or we make the inflation tick number (50%) not a static but a dynamic one dependent on demand but measuring demand is not really possible so maybe 1st one is the way to go.
Well, it undermines the invested asset. A certain level of Inflation is necessary for any economy but high inflation is toxic and should be avoided imo. It erodes trust to the underlying asset. It could create a false sense of ‘free money’ for some of the value creators (orchestrators) and make some of them think “Oh you know, I’m not getting anything done, contributing little to 0 work but there is still money coming so why would I shut down.”
Just like cheap credit does in real world.
I can agree that a high inflation is something to be avoided, but it’s is currently doing exactly what it is intended to do: make it more attractive to hold LPT and participate in the network. Participation is key because in the end what drives demand is documentation, integration and features. The Web3 market is just a blip of the entire media industry and we need to move to a state where the Livepeer ecosystem is an attractive solution for powering a media pipeline, especially since actual companies don’t care about the LPT token (and ‘traditional’ companies don’t care about crypto at all). That’s not what powers their infrastructure, but the product and services we provide does
That requires work AKA people being involved and hacking on the project. LPT inflation has proven very effective to that regard. Yes there are freeloaders (combating those whould be great but that’s a whole different discussion), but that does not weigh up against the contributions being made by community; arbitrum RPC nodes to make operating nodes easier, documentation, onboarding new broadcasters and node operators, PR’s against go-livepeer, integration withing a larger media stack, and so on.
I’d rather look at ways to make LPT inflation more effective to support these kind of contributions more, like the recent Delta proposal is going to do for video builders
If we actually get to a point where there are 100 million LPT in circulation and the network is still not sustainable, that just means that there is no market for the Livepeer project. Limiting the amount of inflation or Orchestrators wouldn’t make a difference if no one wants to buy the service/product we are selling, the token would be as useless as Dogecoin