TL;DR: your technical corrections are welcome and I appreciate you, but they barely touch the main issue. My concern is not the exact accounting label or currency of settlement. My concern is the material money flow: stake can approve liquid treasury outflows during a period where the protocol is already suppressing HBD elsewhere because of debt stress. Whether that payout is HBD or HIVE, the governance flaw remains, wheter you want to call it printing or not, it is still releasing funds, and the point is not that the majority can or not prevent it.
DHF is not printing HBD. It pays out of HBD it already has on balance.
Technically, yes. Practically, this is still the flow I am talking about. If it printed to an abandoned account would it be printing? Yes. Would it be an outward flow? No. In this case it is printing, holding and releasing, it is printing with extra steps.
The DHF is filled by inflation. While HBD sits in the DHF it is not the same as HBD circulating in the market and when it is paid out it becomes spendable HBD.
Call it printing, emission, distribution, treasury release, or payout. The label matters less than the material event which is that protocol created HBD moves from an excluded treasury bucket into accounts that can use it, convert it, sell it, or spend it or hold it liquid, that is printing, goes from untouchable to liquid.
There is already mechanism for that - return proposal.
The current rules expose a flaw.
“Vote the return proposal” answers how the current system can stop spending. It does not answer whether DHF payouts should structurally continue at 100% while hbd_print_rate is suppressed.
The existence of a voting mechanism does not mean every rule behind that mechanism is economically sound. That is a recursive argument, that is religious and self fulfilling.
If it is a flaw, and that is the argument, needing consensus to gatekeep the flaw is yet another flaw.
You mentioned the idea of paying proposals in HIVE instead of HBD when hbd_print_rate goes to zero.
That is interesting and I agree that it changes part of the problem. It would remove the specific privilege of receiving HBD while ordinary HBD emissions are suppressed but it would not remove the deeper governance issue because it would still print liquid assets for holding illiquid governance tokens.
If DHF payouts become HIVE, then large stakeholders can still use locked governance power to approve liquid assets flowing out of the treasury. The asset changes, but the structure remains: frozen stake controls liquid emissions.
In fact, paying in HIVE might make the flaw more visible. HP exists partly because governance power should be aligned with long-term stake. If that same governance power can approve liquid HIVE payouts during stress, then the stake lock is partially bypassed through the treasury.
So yes, paying in HIVE may be less bad than paying full HBD during HBD suppression but it is still not clean. It still lets stake-approved proposals receive liquid assets while the chain is under economic stress and that change makes the flaw even more obvious than HBD because now we are directly using staked governance to print liquid governance tokens.
My PR focuses on HBD because hbd_print_rate already exists as a stress signal, but the broader issue is discretionary liquid treasury outflow during crisis.
hbd_print_rate does not affect how much funds authors get for their posts - it only changes asset type.
Asset type is not a small detail. It is the whole point.
If authors receive HIVE instead of HBD, then access to HBD is being suppressed for them. They do not get to choose the stable asset. The protocol changes the asset because debt conditions are dangerous.
Meanwhile, DHF proposal receivers can still receive HBD from the treasury if enough stake supports them.
That is the asymmetry beyond the previous point about the absurdity of stake printing liquid.
And buying HBD on the internal market is not the same thing. A normal user must spend HIVE at market conditions and available liquidity. A proposal receiver gets HBD because stake approved a treasury payout. Those are materially different paths, that is two classes of citizens with two different privileges and here is where your idea of the DHF paying HIVE would lessen the problem but, as I said before, expose an even bigger governance flaw.
I have an impression that you are implying fake proposals.
No. I am not saying people are making fake proposals or maliciously exploiting the chain.
A flaw does not need active abuse to be a flaw. In fact, *if it were not coded into consensus, it would not be a protocol flaw at all.
You and blocktrades seem to imply that because it is coded it is not a bug but a feature. That is not how identifying and mitigating flaws work.
My concern is that DPoS stake can approve liquid treasury outflows during the same period where the protocol is suppressing HBD elsewhere. It can fund real work, useful work, honest work, infrastructure, events, allies, projects, coalitions, or friends. The work can be real and the mechanism can still be economically dangerous.
All proposals and everyone may be acting right, it is still a flaw that exists.
HBD does not give any gains over HP.
The issue is not only APR comparison.
The issue is liquidity and alignment.
HP is locked governance power. DHF payouts are liquid assets flowing out through governance approval. If large stakeholders can use locked stake to approve liquid HBD or even liquid HIVE while the system is under stress then that weakens the alignment that stake-based governance is supposed to create.
This is DPoS, not pure PoS. Influence does not need to benefit the voter directly to matter. It can support projects, allies, infrastructure, political coalitions, or people the voter believes are useful. That is not automatically abuse, but it is a real incentive surface.
Also it is assymetric in nature as explained before.
This is getting repetitive and I am sorry but has to be made abundantly clear to avoid further misunderstandings.
The purpose of getting funds from DHF is to pay for work.
Yes and that is a whole other discussion beyond the governance flaw.
I do not want to go into it too deep, but I posted about it before. This proposal and PR is mostly, if not wholy, about the governance flaw flaw, not the economics of the DHF.
But going into it. If proposal receivers need to pay bills, rent, servers, taxes and groceries, then DHF payouts are not theoretical. They become real sell pressure or real market demand for liquidity.
That does not make receivers bad. It means DHF spending is a real economic outflow during debt stress.
In a normal company, workers and contractors are not immune to financial distress. If revenue collapses and debt risk rises, budgets get cut. Contractors do not get paid normally forever just because it is payment for work.
Hive is not even a company with external revenue here. The DHF is inflation-funded treasury spending. So the affordability test should be stricter, not weaker.
But that goes beyond the governance flaw. Under current market conditions, the governance flaw and the economic design, which in my view is an economic flaw, converge: No more DHF funding because hbd_print_rate is zero.
Because it is financing as usual.
That is what I disagree with.
When hbd_print_rate is suppressed, it is no longer usual. The protocol is already saying the HBD situation is abnormal.
My proposal simply says treasury outflows should reflect that abnormal state too.
Maybe my specific PR is not the best implementation. Maybe paying proposals in HIVE during suppression is better. Maybe scaling only new DHF funding is better. Maybe there is a cleaner rule. Lots of maybe.
But the governance has a backdoor, the economy is making new all time lows weekly. The core point remains:
If HBD stress changes the rules for ordinary emissions, it should also change the rules for discretionary DHF payouts.
Otherwise the stress signal applies to some parts of the economy, but not to the treasury path controlled by stake and that is the inconsistency that allows for something that looks a lot like a backdoor for stake to get liquidity.
Edit:
DHF recipients are actually more affected by haircut than any other user
Now I am sorry, but that sounds like a bad joke. People getting paid by the DHF are more affected than people paying the DHF? Because the bottomline is that the DHF is materially paid, at the end of it all, by people buying HIVE! That is the bottomline! HIVE buyers finance the DHF. When all the steps and abstractions are worked out that is the bottomline! You are saying that people getting paid real money are affected more than people paying the money! That is nonsense and borderline disrespectul to people buying right now!
RE: I opened a protocol PR: scale DHF payouts when HBD printing is suppressed