Delegate - NOVAX

Bitocracy Delegates
1

NAME:
NOVAX [Block To The Future blog] / AKA r0bs0l33t

I just created this NOVAX account on this forum so that I’m more recognizable across platforms, however, you can find my earlier posts in this forum under the username, r0bs0l33t. I’ve been posting here since February 24: Profile - r0bs0l33t - Sovryn

DELEGATE ADDRESS:
0xcbebCF4fd59E082d8F95F8C9a7D2585C3229DA84

OCCUPATION:
I was formerly a “financial advisor” with a large broker-dealer. I held Series 6, Series 63, and Life & Disability Insurance Licenses in the State of California. I started out in the field of pension planning and defined contribution supplemental retirement accounts. My agency sold a lot of mutual funds and annuities. I left that business after 7 years, having worked my way from the back office, to managing the boiler room teams of a dozen college student telemarketers, to finally becoming a licensed financial advisor. However, by the time I had achieved my goal, I was disillusioned with the centralized financial system. I had begun to perceive conventional “financial advisors” as being mostly ignorant salespeople serving the purposes of a very large machine that was fundamentally broken. Ultimately, it was the onset of a chronic illness that forced me to quit that awful job. If I hadn’t gotten deeply involved in health freedom activism and videography at that time, I almost certainly would have been learning about and mining Bitcoin because I was thoroughly disillusioned with the central banking system.

Now I’m a professional parent and investor. I’m a homeschooling father, value investor, and entrepreneur. I don’t have a 9-5 “job”. I am able to focus a lot of my energies into my involvement in the Sovryn community, the Babelfish community, and a handful of other projects which I’m only peripherally involved with. I would like to become a more active Sovryn community contributor and for that to become a form of “occupation” for me. This is what I love doing. I’ve earned 4,200% in my investments since March of 2018 and now I’m all about building and participating in decentralized communities. I’m writing a blog post about a blockchain idea that I’d like to see built, maybe you’re someone who wants to join me in that effort too.

RELEVANT EXPERIENCE:
Humility, failure, perseverance, and success. I jumped into crypto with every fiber of my being a few years ago. I was editing video professionally and finishing my undergraduate degree at the time. So I had just built this amazing Alienware desktop PC with 2 NVidia GTX 1070s connected via SLI. That thing is my video editing monster. It was super expensive but worth every penny… until my primary video editing gig dried up and I had less use for my $5,000 machine. My mentioned that I might try some GPU mining with it and within minutes I had Claymore miner up and running.

I began building 6 and 8 GPU mining rigs within a month. I’ve written extensively about many of my crypto experiences on my Publish0x blog, Block To The Future. So, if you want to vet me more thoroughly as a delegate, I suppose you could read my blog posts. I have a Bachelor’s of Science in Technological Entrepreneurship & Management [TEM] from Arizona State University’s Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering. I’m not an engineer, but I’m fairly technical. My expertise is more with databases, hardware, networking, linux CLI, some SQL, and some CSS & JQuery. So, I’m not a software developer, but I do understand the conceptual principles of OOP and I’ve helped to write some very primitive scripts with Python. So, in theory, I could make the transition to become a test-net dev with a whole lot of focused attention.

I entered the blockchain market for the first time as a student in a tech entrepreneurship program, and I was frequently the only one talking about crypto in my classes. The curiosity and freedom to experiment that my studies contributed to my experience of crypto have been instrumental to my continued exploration. That’s probably why I’m here on the RSK Network and not contributing to projects on Ethereum or Binance Smart Chain. This is where the people I most respect are hanging out, and this is where the real decentralists are building something even greater than I could ever have imagined back in 2017, so this is where I spend most of my time. If you want to know anything else, please ask.

WHY I WANT TO BE A BITOCRACY DELEGATE:
I’m inspired to participate in the governance of this community in a meaningful way for a variety of reasons. Ever since I made my first trades on IDEX and EtherDelta several years ago, I have been fascinated by the prospect of the decentralized exchange. However, I experienced the liquidity desert of P2P “barter” style exchanges and I felt that the technology was promising, but incomplete. As the vision for decentralized finance is finally being realized, I must participate in helping to steward it’s sustainability, resilience, and adoption

I suffered a life-changing disability due to a neuro-degenerative condition about 2 years ago. By nothing short of a miracle, I have made money during this time. Through COVID lockdowns, learning how to be a “disabled person”, and having no gainful employment, unemployment insurance, or even a government disability check. By the grace of God, I not only survived, but prospered. In my condition of chronic pain, I began directing my attention to the markets as a sort of neuro-hack. If I’m paying attention to the monitor and engaging my mind in complex tasks, then I don’t feel as much pain.

So I started really diving deep in my market research and community participation and it’s been both financially rewarding and personally gratifying. I’ve begun to identify with Bran Starke from Game of Thrones, because my disability has become a sort of strength. Entrust me as the custodian of your Bitocracy votes and I pledge to use my warg-like handicapped crypto super powers in the defense and expansion of this Sovryn community.

PLATFORM AND VALUES:
My studies at ASU trained me formally to be an associative thinker. I am conditioned to recognize value in the market and to identify disruptive technology. I’ve done a little of everything in crypto. I’ve gone through various phases of discovery since 2017, when I first began mining Ethereum and squandering it on crap ICOs. I’ve participated in a lot of airdrops and I’ve used nearly every centralized and decentralized exchange, so I’ve lost funds to KYC and insolvency on more exchanges than most people have heard of… including Poloniex, Nanex, Yobit, Huobi, HitBTC, Binance.com, Cryptopia, CryptoHub, CryptoBridge, COSS, and Cobinhood. I probably only lost about $2,000 USD value in total, so it’s not the end of the world, but it does sting, because some of those alts are worth a lot more now! I mostly only lost dust and some small balances, but please believe me when I say that I understand how important it is to stay Sovryn and HODL your keys!

I’m a proponent of balance between the various heroes within the Sovryn community. I participate in the Sovryn platform in several ways as a Bitocracy staker, and liquidity provider in V1 AMM and V2 DAMM. I understand Impermanent Loss well enough to be really concerned about the profitability of liquidity mining. The importance of the sustainable profitability of liquidity mining is not just a self-interested personal greed thing for me. I recognize that the entirety of the fragile DeFi ecosystem rests on the market’s ability to sustain the motivation for market-makers to continue staking liquidity into these AMMs. If there’s no LPs, then there are no DEXs. If there are no DEXs, then we’re right back in 2017 bartering on primitive P2P DEXs again. So, if AMMs fail for enough Loki’s, then there’s nothing left for Thor to trade. If you’re Odin, you’re probably wiser and wealthier than most of us, so congratulations on that.

I’m using the platform fairly rigorously with a (very small) 3x long rBTC position on Sovryn, I’m staking half my $SOV from the Origins presale in the Bitocracy, and I’m liquidity mining both pools as well. I didn’t realize the voting power was associated with the staking period when I staked my $SOV. So, I may decide to lock mine up for a little longer to increase my vote weight. If you guys want me to increase my staking duration indefinitely I’ll consider doing that if it’s a deciding factor for people. Just let me know. I started off with a 1 year stake because I wanted to leave open the possibility of unstaking the bitocracy for other potentially more profitable opportunities on the platform.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION / LINKS:

DISCORD: NOVAX (Block To The Future)#9930

GPU Mining video I made for my college senior project!

TWITTER: https://twitter.com/block2future

PUBLISH0X: https://www.publish0x.com/block-to-the-future?a=pnel5Q4VaK

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hi!

I congratulate you on your life story, as well as on your professional and personal growth.
I love the way you have presented yourself through this text.

I would like to ask you a question: What is your position on the next Babelfish sale? What requirements do you think a sov holder has to meet to be able to participate on day 1 or day 2?

Thanks!

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Solid stuff NOVAX - great to know you better. I’m waiting for your next blog :slight_smile:

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Hi @lactarius! Thank you, I know it’s not super conventional to “go deep” like this with mostly anonymous decentralized communities. However, I thought it was relevant to convey my intent and experience thoroughly while seeking Bitocracy staking delegations. I have been getting active in the Babelfish community recently and having a great time connecting with the core community management contributors on Discord and Telegram. I’m in favor of a pretty wide open $FISH offering to Sovryn community members. I have commented in several places on this forum about how I want us to ensure that Bitocracy stakers aren’t favored over market-markers (and visa versa) with regard to accessing this initial Sovryn $FISH sale.

I am not in favor of high minimum $FISH sale requirements, like saying we have to buy a minimum of 0.25 BTC worth of $FISH in order to participate. And I’m not in favor of setting a very high minimum $SOV Bitocracy staking requirement either, like saying we need to stake 1,000 SOV in Bitocracy to qualify for $FISH sale. I probably represent the “little guy” to some extent on this platform. I know I’m standing among some crypto giants over here, so I will often represent the views of our community members with smaller crypto net worth (but not necessarily a whole lot less crypto experience or commitment to the cause of decentralization and freedom of information, etc.). I usually agree a lot with @exiledsurfer’s more altruistic perspectives. But I also see merit in appealing to the big wallets to juice up liquidity and market cap. It’s a balance isn’t it?

There are so many ways to potentially incentivize and structure token pre-sales on the Sovryn platform in the future. @yago was on the Babelfish community call with us on Monday: BabelFish Community Call - 03.05.2021 - YouTube
He mentioned some ideas that are pretty interesting. In particular, I think he was talking about the possibility of developing the Sovryn Bitocracy staking incentivization model to correlate with level of access to new token pre-sales on Sovryn. This would presumably be a future thing, and not for the $FISH pre-sale because it’s just an idea now and would need a SIP. However, since the value of that type of structure is most accessible to higher crypto net worth community members, we must revisit the question of what type of community we want to build here on Sovryn. I know we have varying degrees of altruistic and egalitarian perspectives. However, it is important to consider that juicy incentives for high net worth investors can also potentially help inject a lot of value into the platform which can serve everyone.

Ultimately, I prefer the more egalitarian approach that is open to all with a hard cap on buy-in, just like with Origins. We couldn’t drop more than 0.1 BTC into the pre-sale without trying to Sybil attack the email lottery using multiple wallets with the the app. That’s the sort of Pre-Sale restriction direction I prefer. Caps on enormously large buys. Maybe 0.1 BTC was too small for Origin. I don’t know. I like it though… it gave me a chance to “play with the big boys”. There’s actually a lot of psychological allure in that for marketing the platform. We want people to feel like Sovryn is a premium platform for “black card holders”, but also a place where everyone can have success. It has something to do with the psychology of guilt and luxury.

I’m not trying to avoid the question, I’m just really thinking it through because it is a really important one. Some type of wallet limit is important to me. That’s a protection against huge net worth from buying up the whole supply. But limiting smaller net worth community members doesn’t feel right at this early stage. So I’m generally not in favor of restricting access to our Sovryns because they didn’t stake the Bitocracy “enough”. Any wallet staking any amount of SOV in the Bitocracy or the V1 rBTC/SOV AMM by a retroactive snapshot date should have equal access to pre-sale. But so should all of our market-makers. Perhaps all wallets which have interacted with Sovryn Bitocracy or Market-Making any time before the approval of the upcoming SIP should have access to FISH sale. What are your thoughts on the matter? Have I failed to consider any important considerations?

I could discuss this all day and night, but I think at this point I just need to view the amended SIP proposal from @wolverine and listen to the Babelfish community input on Monday’s community call. Then I’ll have a better idea what the specifics looks like and we can discuss them here again before voting.

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Thank you, @Commstark! I really appreciate the encouragement. I have a ton of blog posts in draft form that I need to get out ASAP. What are the important considerations about this Babelfish Pre-Sale SIP for you?

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Thank you very much Novax for your detailed reply.

It is not so important what I think, but what you propose for the sov holders.
As you are standing as a candidate for delegate, I thought it was necessary to make your opinion known before the SIP, whatever it may be.

Again, thank you very much and good luck with your candidacy!

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Thanks @lactarius! I’m trying to be really thorough in my consideration of all potential perspectives. My goal is not to represent only a single particular segment of the ecosystem, but rather to consider the impact of SIPs for all Sovryns, whether using the platform as Thor, Loki, Odin, or a combination of these.

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Two of my recent forum comments that explain my personal views in even more painfully long detail:

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Hi NOVAX, are you part of the premium Bitcoin Whisperers group?

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No I’m not, @HalfStack. But I wish now that I was! Honestly it does seem like pretty interesting exclusive community. Seems like Sovryn and BabelFish projects have roots with BCW so that alone peaks my curiousity. But I don’t know anything about it beyond that. I heard that the premium membership used to cost about $500 per year, and it’s gone up to $2,500 or so. I’m not sure if that’s accurate because the BCW group isn’t accepting new premium subscriptions at this time.

I have become very active in the BabelFish community within the past few weeks since I became aware of the project. With regard to Sovryn, I staked 1/2 my SOV from Origins Presale in the Bitocracy and 1/2 in the V1 AMM LP. So I deliberately allocated in a way that would give me insight into the relative risk, profitability, and opportunity cost of each. I think I can be a fairly impartial representative for the success of Sovryn and not exclusively a representative of the interests of LPs or Bitocracy Stakers. I think these interests should be continually evaluated and re-aligned when they seem to diverge as has been occurring the last few days.

I’m just going to paste a couple of comments I wrote in the BabelFish Discord about BabelFish dropping to Bitocracy “Voters” as opposed to “stakers”. I think that distinction is worth examining.

Let me know if you have any other questions for me! I’ve been staying in contact with Dark Knight and I’m convinced he’s the real deal. Then I joined the BabelFish community on Discord and it’s obvious that this project is on the path of long-term growth and market cap in the billions.

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Thank you for the thoughtful and thorough response.

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Novax - I love your post and and very encouraged to see Sovryns coming forth as delegates.

I would like to see a way for people to see the delegate options in the staking UI - but making this possible without creating biases is not trivial.

I’d be interested in other ideas of how delegates can showcase themselves?

Also, i think we should add a way for delegates to be incentivised for their role.

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Outstanding! Thanks, @yago! Figured I would just put it all out there so people know what they’re getting when they delegate to my wallet :smiley:

It’s an interesting idea to incorporate some sort of delegate candidate list into the Bitocracy UI… but, yeah, I can conceive of some challenges that arise when trying to build a UI to effectively communicate actionable information for several hundred or even a thousand delegates. Something to think on as we grow… maybe look at state and national election information websites and see if there are any good UI formats we can adapt?

As for delegate self-promotion, I guess it’s really on us to a large extent and rightfully so. Delegates should be feeling obligated to participate in community calls, this forum, and the Discord. That’s a minimum level involvement IMO to establish credibility within Sovryn community as a delegate. So, to an extent, we almost don’t want to make it too easy for anyone to be showcased in the Bitocracy UI because it may undermine the value of real community participation and involvement in the places that are most important to understanding the relevant considerations as a voting delegate.

For example, I wouldn’t want a UI that conveys no differential value between delegate candidates who are active participants on forum, discord, and community calls, as compared to delegates who simply put their name in a hat to possibly “mek big dolarz!” If those two candidates are displayed side by side in a UI that is being used by an increasing volume of retail investors who may just arbitrarily select a delegate so they can earn more staking rewards… that may incentivize the wrong actions.

Sovryn could feature a sort of “delegate round table”, where delegates have the opportunity to answer the same questions on a panel. However, written responses would scale better. How about a written response to a handful of questions determined by the community? We can start by creating a shared doc to add quetions:

I’m thinking on this some more, let’s keep brainstorming on this because there’s a lot to consider. I was thinking that Sovryn community could feature a blog post once every few months including updated list of delegates and each of their answers to 1 of the community questions. That could help community members get to know the delegate pool slowly as it shifts over time and different issues carry more or less significance.

I have ideas about delegate incentivization as well. But there are really important considerations there too. Does the protocol only pay full staking rewards to stakers who actively vote? Can we offer highest staking reward to Bitocracy stakers who vote for themselves, and a slightly reduced staking reward to stakers who stake the bitocracy and delegate their votes? How does this impact the market-makers? Interesting to consider.

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This is great! Well done.

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I wrote up a reply in a new thread here since these questions aren’t directly related to NOVAX’s delegate candidacy :slight_smile: All are welcome to continue the conversation on these points over in that thread.

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