RE: VYB FUD

First off, thanks for catching the fact that the vybrainium.com account registration had expired. I mistakenly believed the auto-renew feature was enabled, but it wasn't. I have renewed the domain and enabled auto-renew.

Regarding your concern about the 1-year timeframe expiring (with respect to "POB received via the above direct-exchange will be transferred to @vyb.pob and held for a minimum of 1 year"), I hereby extend that commitment for at least one additional year.

The reason for the 1-year commitment was to make it clear that VYB was not launched to compete with POB, but rather to be complementary. The reason the commitment was not longer was in recognition of the fact that long-term rigidity for a project that is admittedly experimental is not wise.

The reason for the POB-for-VYB direct exchange in the first place was to enable POB-holders to 'vote' with their POB tokens as to whether they wanted downvote protection for POB posts (in addition to VYB posts, which was already baked-in). The idea there was that, if enough POB-holders exchanged their POB for VYB, then the @vyb.pob account would be able to counter POB-based downvotes unilaterally and do so in such a way that the recipient of the downvote could be made to be BETTER OFF afterwards (not just made whole, but decidedly better off).

I had the pleasure of welcoming @starkerz to Stillwater, OK as a panelist at our Blockchain Ideas Summit last week (here on the campus of Oklahoma State University). He and I had a candid conversation after the summit about downvoting and the blunt instrument it represents. The biggest problem with downvoting as it currently exists is that the malicious DV'er has nothing to lose (DVs cost nothing) and can thus inflict constant penalties on whomever they choose to DV and their supporters. If supporters choose to counter a DV, they do so to their own detriment; there is no way to costlessly support an account that is receiving malicious DVs.

@starkerz and I were both in agreement that some other solution (to plagiarism, etc.) is needed, and that various potential solutions need to be experimented with on Layer 2. If DVs are a part of the system, the system must be able to genuinely disincentivize malicious DV'ing. One way to do that is to be able to compensate the DV'ed account MORE THAN the penalty from the DV. In other words, send the signal to potential DV'ers that if they DV a given account, the account-holder will actually end up better off than if the DV had never occurred.

We now have the ability to do that on POB. If an individual account receives a malicious POB DV, the @vyb.pob account has sufficient resources to MORE THAN offset the penalty of the DV for the DV recipient and, at the same time, to make-whole their supporters (i.e. upvoters). This creates a true disincentive to a malicious DV'er, because the net result will be the opposite of the one intended. However that process ultimately needs to be community driven, based on standards set by the community.

That's the biggest void currently with respect to VYB (not having a way for the community to set its own standards). I ran into some significant technical snags with getting the VYB Stewardship Board created (i.e. a transparent, yet anonymous, voting mechanism for the VSB). That is still on my priority list, but it is beyond my immediate technical abilities and I do not currently have any direct technical assistance.

Regarding the VYB token price, I just spent 30 HIVE to raise the price of VYB one order of magnitude (from 0.002 to 0.02) so that it is now slightly higher than the price of POB. Comparing the price of VYB to POB is not really relevant with such low levels of liquidity and volume.

With all that said, my focus of late has not been on VYB. Although I wish I had more bandwidth to devote to VYB, I am actively working on some things that will benefit Hive and VYB far greater than anything I could accomplish by focusing solely on VYB. That by no means implies that I have abandoned VYB.

I cannot comment at this moment on the specifics of what I am working on, but if it comes to fruition it will be, well, BIG, and hugely beneficial to everyone here. At least that's my hope and plan.