I feel we’re really jumping the gun with all this and we’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
We’d have hit the 50% target by now (and therefore have a lower rate of issuance) if we had merely improved the information campaign. I also believe we will reach that target relatively quickly if we take a few very simple steps before considering a protocol-based solution.
Put simply, this is a marketing problem, not a protocol problem, and we shouldn’t rush into a protocol change that could end up backfiring in the long run. So far, the messaging has missed the mark completely, but that’s okay (it’s early and to be expected). It’s already being worked on by the very bright and hardworking marketing/comms people at firms like Trilitech, as well as by independent marketing efforts from members of the decentralized community.
The Real Problem:
Everything on stake.tezos.com, tezos.com, and @tezos tweets, etc., has simply prompted people to begin “staking”—without any implicit reference to (nor correction of) the fact that we’ve been using the terms ‘staking’ and ‘delegating’ interchangeably for the past six years!
So what? Well, almost every single [delegating] tez holder that has seen them believes that those ‘staking’ prompts do not apply to them and are to be overlooked—that is, they believe they have been staking all this time. Of the over 6 million funded Tezos accounts out there (people who are passively holding tez), a very tiny amount know that our tokenomics have changed; they don’t know that there is a new locked-staking mechanism and that when we say ‘staking’ we mean that, and we no longer mean liquid-PoS/‘delegating’—let alone that in order to participate in locked-staking there is something for them to do.
Those of us who are very deep into Tezos very easily miss what’s going on in the head of the normie, and so any idea that “oh wow we’re not at 50% yet, let’s control inflation by cutting the reward rates through a protocol upgrade” forgets why we had this upper bound rate where it is in the first place.
High inflation (not hitting the target) should incentivize us to improve our community marketing (methods, messaging, mediums, media) instead of immediately going for a protocol fix.
A Different Solution:
In the long run, focusing on marketing and not on a change in issuance will serve us much better because it’s not just about hitting targets and reducing the rate right now—we also want every tez holder to be aware of these new tokenomics so that they can competitively respond to the continuing incentives of adaptive issuance as the market (and staking ratio) becomes more volatile.
We need to allow time for these improved messaging efforts to be fully implemented and to take effect before considering any drastic actions. Rushing into changes now contradicts the original intent behind setting the upper bound rate where it is.
