Noticed today a witness mentioned in chat that they had changed their APR to 15% and that it meant the majority were now signaling the same which places the APR from HBD into effect to change.
Now before I start talking about my thoughts on this, I'd like to preface this post with saying that this isn't me opening up a discussion to talk about the change with you all - you can of course feel free to discuss it amongst yourselves in the comment section - but I'm kind of really busy lately working on @holozing and HBD APR is something that's been discussed heavily over the years so it's not something I'd like to spend more time on right now.
This may seem like a cop-out, but I'd like it to be known that @ocd-witness hasn't lowered their APR, in fact they were one of the first to increase it all the way to 15% back when it was 6-8. So in my opinion I just believe we should never have gotten to as high as 20% thus I hope this "excuse" is enough and maybe you can take it up with those who actively changed it recently if you'd like to discuss it more.
Now here's some of the reasons why I didn't think it warranted 20% to begin with.
#1 We never really marketed it outside of the space.
Daily you can see ads and previous failed experiments receive millions if not billions of locked liquidity into currencies promising 20%+ and most of the time it's not something innovative or sustainable. While we have managed to sustain it and keep hbd pegged, mostly I assume thanks to @hbdstabilizer ran by @smooth, you have to start wondering where this value is being extracted from.
Had we had a marketing proposal going, a way to verify that people are actually finding out about this and bringing in value to our ecosystem, then sure, 20% would've been okay, and we could've even increased it because we know we have a real thing going on here with a real community - not a "stablecoin" that's been depegged on the upper side for years or a coin awaiting a giant downfall cause the money's just coming out of thin air or late incoming value keeping it up,
This marketing would've served hive well, if they understood hbd, how to get it and how to stake it then they may have learned about Hive as well and had close to 2 if not more years to take advantage of the 20% APR and maybe make some choices down the line if they wanna invest in Hive and the future of the network. Marketing is marketing, doesn't matter who funds it or which dapp is causing it, it'd would've helped Hive become stronger and more distributed.
I'm kind of struggling to think about a potential #2 reason here while I'm continuing on the lack of marketing/awareness front, but a high APR on a stablecoin isn't something that many legitimate currencies offer. Many of you may remember when @queenbee (I'm not sure if that's the correct user, excuse me if not, a lot has happened lately so I may misremember) randomly mentioned the HBD APR and it spurred discussion of it being a scam. This was of course challenged and many voiced their opinions on the matter that Hive and HBD is different but the point is after the downfall of a billion dollar currency it leaves a bad taste in people's mouths whether they want to believe there's a real one that does work and can't break the same way. Meaning the 20% APR had its handicap before it even started, kind of similar with the name of our blockchain being Hive which has shown to be a bit too popular out there.
Okay I may have something.
#2 APR compared to HP
People holding HP lock their stake in for up to 3 months compared to HBD's 3 day withdrawal time, people with HP only receive up to 8.5% (average curation APR)+ 3.2% (current APR on just holding HP (vests)). Accounts voting also face the risk of having lower APR if they're voting on "bad posts/authors" or trailing the wrong curators, but most importantly they're there for the swings of the value of Hive and are active in the network's growth and distribution of new Hive.
Why should HBD be higher than the potential 12% of HP?
You may look at my wallet and think "figures, he has no HBD" but keep in mind that I am actively voting manually and prefer the voting power over updating my savings wallet once a month to see number go up.
Again, I am not against HBD APR but I believe it never should've gone that high, in my mind I thought we'd try 15% and see what it does for the influx of value and even wanted to lower it back eventually to at least match HP so people could pick and choose or diversify but everyone would be seeing that number grow evenly.
Looking at top HBD holder accounts I am not that convinced that these are "new people" who found out about Hive through HBD and decided to park some of their value here. I was a bit disappointed in that and I realize it'd be easy to just create a new account and trade back and forth onto that to make it seem like a new account but I kind of doubt many even bothered to protect their hive identity for that or to attempt to fake that data. I don't think there's anyone to blame for this, many tried to get the word out on Twitter, etc, and it was nice to see that, I just don't think the high APR was warranted without plans and an effective marketing strategy in place to effectively get the word out about it.
Alright, lastly, after reading some comments about the matter, one from @deeanndmathews here: @deeanndmathews/re-lbi-token-shy0he, which was also one of the reasons I decided to write this post as I was a bit on the fence about it or unsure if the 15% was going to hold. I'd like people to understand that it's hard to know when the HBD APR was going to change, it had been 11/20 witnesses signaling 20% for a long time (I believe) and a few weeks ago it changed but a witness decided to get it back to 20 swiftly. Concerning the comment, it's not something we as witnesses can known when it is going to occur, these changes happen in real-time and without one of the 11 witnesses mentioning before-hand his plans to change his signal it's impossible to know the timing of it. Regarding another part of the comment and the post (haven't read the post fully), building a project around the APR of HBD or that it may fail/disappoint people invested in said project. If it was set in stone I'm sure you would've seen many other projects follow suit like for instance Splinterlands which is one of the biggest projects on Hive (just an example, not saying they in particular should have or shouldn't have).
Anyway, I'm happy to hear your thoughts on the matter but I'd appreciate it if you'd respect my decision not to debate it again and that my excuse of "never having signaled 20% to begin with" and "I'm just really busy lately else I'd be posting more about random thoughts" gives me room to ignore debates around the matter.
Thanks for reading!