Brainstorming: Improving Stacking UX

[shea256]

@jude

This exists because in general, Stacking can have at most two of the three properties:

• Everyone who qualifies for a reward slot is guaranteed to be scheduled for a miner payout in the reward cycle
• Everyone who qualifies for a reward slot will receive payment within a fixed amount of time (i.e. reward cycles have fixed length)
• The amount of STX to stack to qualify for a reward cycle is fixed

The reasons the system design opts for points 1 and 2 but not 3 are as follows (in no particular order):

• It was determined that a system with points 1 and 2, instead of 1 and 3 or 2 and 3, would lead to the “least-bad” user experience. A variable-length reward cycle would make it hard for stackers to reason about their yield long-term, and a reward regime that did not guarantee that all recipients who qualified for a payout received one would lead to more resentment than not qualifying at all.

Yes, this is indeed the tradeoff, and in my opinion, knowing that you’ll be able to smoothly participate across a long time horizon is way more important than whether or not you get a given amount of stacks in a given period.

Let’s refer to 1, 2 and 3 as:

1. Guaranteed Payouts
2. Fixed Cycles
3. Fixed Thresholds

Prioritizing Fixed Cycles and Fixed Thresholds over Guaranteed Payouts to me is a much better UX.

Why?

Because it still probabilistically guarantees the same payout over a larger # of cycles, and it avoids all of the confusion, UX issues, and refunding required to service a Floating Threshold.

I think we can do even better though.

If we set the Fixed Threshold somewhat high, say 200,000 STX, then we can guarantee that every stacker gets a slot for every cycle as long as the total amount stacked is under 745M STX.

Further, we should research whether it is possible to include more than one slot per Bitcoin block. I believe this is possible, and I’ve postulated a solution to this earlier:

Stacking: a New Consensus Algorithm for Blockchains

My third proposed modification is a method for significantly reducing the variance of payouts from one address to another, while also reducing the amount of data load on the blockchain. First, when we think about variance, we should consider that for any given set of eligible mining addresses, there is a fixed period it will take for the expected variance to fall below a desirable threshold. This expected variance is the same whether the rounds have an independent probability (like coin flips) …

If we can have mining service more than one slot per Bitcoin block, then we could have every Stacking address get paid out more than once per cycle per slot.

Thus, you’d have a floating # of payouts per cycle, that could shift between let’s say 4 and 5.

On average, across enough cycles, everyone would get the same amount paid out, and everyone would get paid each cycle.