@cuevasm If you only care to read about how to address this problem, then please scroll to the end of this comment. I can't let most of what you wrote go unaddressed, however, since there are more than just you and me reading this.

@cuevasm I think you may be missing a key point here, and this is perhaps our fault for not being more clear, this entire push IS coming from the community and from other key stakeholders.

Re-quoting myself, since I've already answered this point:

@jcnelson A few posts on Github isn't consensus -- we need to see that miners will overwhelmingly vote for the change with their blocks and users will overwhelmingly vote for it with their STX. And to do that, we need to come up with and ratify a protocol for doing so, which would require its own governance-track SIP.

@cuevasm None of us is making unilateral decisions here and we didn't wake up hoping to have to push a hard fork or wanting to battle anyone about the merits or philosophy of one.

Re-quoting myself, since I've already answered this point too:

@jcnelson Hard-forking the blockchain to change its monetary policy is supposed to be hard -- so hard that it can only be done with overwhelming consensus, instead of on the whims of a few people.

Also:

@jcnelson The whole point of selling a financial product manifested as a blockchain is to make it extremely difficult for a few well-connected people to change the rules on a whim.

And don't forget:

@jcnelson no one wants to use a blockchain whose monetary policy can be changed overnight. Like, what's the point of having a blockchain then? Why would anyone invest in its token, if the caprices of its developers and exchange partners can change the monetary policy overnight? Even if the change is beneficial now, the same muscles that make the change today can be flexed to enact harmful changes later.

@cuevasm Alex and I are really the messengers here and are trying to drive this forward because folks are unclear or still learning how to push something like this forward.

The codebase is open source. No one needs our permission to make a fork of the Stacks blockchain with new rules. They don't even need to tell us that they're doing it. I find it highly unlikely that these two things are simultaneously true:

There is an overriding, overwhelming desire to change the Stacking rules before Stacks 2.1
No one besides the core developers has the time and competence to actually go out and do it.

But as you point out later in your comment, a hard fork isn't the only option.

@cuevasm We are the two that are the most on the frontlines here and have the vantage point between infrastructure providers, users, and the blockchain team and have been asked by a growing number of people to see what's possible sooner than the scheduled hard fork.

As I said above, these people aren't helpless. They can speak for themselves, and some of these people can even submit SIPs and PRs that make the changes they want to see in the world.

Trying to route around this by claiming to be their unelected representative is going to get you nowhere in the governance process. To be clear, "you" here isn't just you, @cuevasm; it's everyone who reads this in the future.

@cuevasm The continuous Stacking issue is a universal problem/impediment to overall growth. You can count my and Alex's representation on this for multiple miners, multiple exchanges, 5-10 community members, and a handful of other integrators and partners of the ecosystem.

A few things:

Miners are making a profit by mining, so I doubt that they're that unhappy. The only things miners have talked to me about are fixing bugs in the mining code.
I know of only one exchange that has privately expressed displeasure from Stacking (can't name them publicly), but as I said above, it was their choice to implement it in a way that set themselves up for pain. Also, I haven't heard them call for a hard fork.
I know that hundreds of thousands of STX holders from the Reg D token sale and blockchain.com airdrop have been completely silent on this issue, so 5-10 community members isn't anywhere close to "overwhelming" community desire.
I've also spoken with other integrators and partners of the ecosystem 1-on-1 (can't name names unfortunately), and successfully convinced them that waiting until Stacks 2.1 was their best bet.

Okay, this is the part where I talk about altering Stacking without doing a hard fork.

@cuevasm Fundamentally, can this issue of continuous Stacking be solved without a hard fork? I have heard talk of a series of smart contracts that might make this possible with the current structure.

Yes, it can! I wrote about some of these solutions in the original forum post.

As @314159265359879 points out, you can write a smart contract that keeps users liquid while their STX are locked (through a stx-future derivative). Instead of Stacking directly, I Stack through a smart contract that mints me a stx-future token for each STX I Stack. The contract takes possession of my STX, executes the PoX stack-stx function with them, and it mints me an equivalent amount of stx-future tokens.

Now, instead of having to miss a reward cycle, I can trade my stx-future tokens for real STX on the open market and re-Stack those STX anytime before my locked STX tokens unlock. Since there are just as many stx-future tokens in circulation as there are locked STX, and since the only purpose of the stx-future contract is to use them to reclaim STX tokens that were locked up by the stx-future contract, the price of a stx-future should should follow the market price of STX.

Recall that once my real STX tokens unlock, they will be owned by the stx-future contract that I Stacked them through. We'll use this to ensure that whoever holds a number of stx-future tokens can go to this smart contract and redeem them for the same number of now-unlocked STX (thereby decreasing the supply of stx-future tokens). It doesn't matter who currently owns the stx-future tokens when this happens -- it could be me coming back to the contract and redeeming my stx-future tokens (if I didn't trade them), or it could be whoever I traded them to coming back and getting their due STX.

This is way, way easier and far, far less risky than a hard fork, and it can be done today. Also, no one in the ecosystem is blocked on implementing this. In fact, when I mentioned the possibility of doing this on the Stacks discord, a couple of prominent community members said they were already working on it!

So, please stop asking for a hard fork, and stop making unfalsifiable representations that there is a desire for a hard fork, when far safer and far easier options exist.

Stacks 2.1: Support continuous stacking #6

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