PTIP-23: Add The Poolside Bar

Given my objections on the Discord channel, I have, unsurprisingly, voted against this proposal for a multitude of reasons (in addition to the questions of @ageless).

  1. Given the current prizes I think the current reserve rate is too high (except maybe when it is solely used for perpetual growth as that means people eventually will win more). If we now implement an extra indirection from the reserve rate to revenue sharing to POOL holders, it will be a lot harder to tune the reserve rate down in the future because POOL holders will be used to getting a nice income stream. This is somewhat similar to the concern of @ageless.

  2. The numbers you are citing are yield numbers through farming. Picking away at the no-loss lottery concept of PoolTogether in favor of yield farming is something that I dislike because it drastically changes the core of the protocol in my opinion. Furthermore, as I mentioned several times, taking away a large portion of the prize of a small fish is vastly different from taking it away from a yield-farming whale.

  3. If we implement a high-yield drip to the POOL pool, more people will be even more inclined to join it. Given that the POOL pool currently employs a very sub-optimal voting mechanism through the multi-sig and all associated problems, I really do not like further incentivizing to join it over proper voting and vote delegation. Furthermore, I checked the last five snapshot votes and at most 30% of the current depositors actually participate in the governance process. I really do not like the idea of rewarding people who do not take part in governance and just speculatively deposit tokens in the POOL pool.

  4. To the best of my knowledge, buy-backs (almost) never lead to stabilizing the price of a share / token or increase in price. I would be very surprised if it really is as easy as we buy back POOL, the POOL price and APY will increase and we can further tune down the drip to governance pools.

  5. We cannot evaluate proposals like this in a vacuum without considering the other proposals like increasing the number of winners because they all change the prize one unique depositor can win at any given time.

In summary, I think we are way too early in the decentralized development of the PoolTogether protocol to implement such a drastic change. What I probably would support right now is a middle-ground proposal that combines tuning down the reserve rates to e.g. 25% and half of that reserve rate going to a POOL revenue sharing system (still don’t like the idea of dripping it into the POOL pool though).

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