Min/Max prices
Posted: Wed Aug 13, 2014 2:52 am
I believe that the main objection to the floating price proposal is manipulation of the voting mechanism. Imposing min/max prices to a floating price proposal would act as a backstop against such manipulations.
The main drawback to min/max pricing is that changing them requires a soft-fork, similar to that of hardcoded prices. They enable a range of acceptable prices, but it's impossible to create an acceptable range for all exchange rates.
I was mulling hardcoded values today and realized that the softfork could be thought of (very crudely) as a vote with a 51% threshold. We could emulate that to some degree in the voting protocol itself by simply requiring a higher threshold to change the min/max values.
As Jeremy pointed out on IRC, miners risk their profits if they rebel against a fork. Thus the questions becomes, "which is harder: getting 90% of miners to change their votes at no risk, or getting 51% of miners to change their votes at the risk of losing their mining profits if the attack is unsuccessful?"
I don't really know the answer to that question, however, we needn't resort to an "enemy of the good" situation: we can always manually override such settings using the classic 51% majority.
The main drawback to min/max pricing is that changing them requires a soft-fork, similar to that of hardcoded prices. They enable a range of acceptable prices, but it's impossible to create an acceptable range for all exchange rates.
I was mulling hardcoded values today and realized that the softfork could be thought of (very crudely) as a vote with a 51% threshold. We could emulate that to some degree in the voting protocol itself by simply requiring a higher threshold to change the min/max values.
As Jeremy pointed out on IRC, miners risk their profits if they rebel against a fork. Thus the questions becomes, "which is harder: getting 90% of miners to change their votes at no risk, or getting 51% of miners to change their votes at the risk of losing their mining profits if the attack is unsuccessful?"
I don't really know the answer to that question, however, we needn't resort to an "enemy of the good" situation: we can always manually override such settings using the classic 51% majority.