[Discussion] - Improvement of the auction system for Ceres hardfork

I voted, and my ideas should also already be represented above, but TLDR: Yes, shorter auctions is a good idea, I would probably divide the length in three groups short (2-6 characters), medium (7-12 characters), and long (13- characters). No auction for long names, like 2 days for medium names and maybe 5 days for short names. Bump the auction time up to about an hour (20 generations?) if there is a bid closer to the end of the auction.

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I am also fine with that. just shouldn’t be a month or even more. few days are ok I think.

I think I remember we discussed a short period for the bumping already somehow. I just have a fear that people get distracted and thus very frustrated if they have to wait for a long time period for the auction to finish as they might miss the opportunity to place a new bid if they do not have a bidding service running for them.

what’s the risk / downside with a small bump time of e.g. 3 keyblocks again? :thinking:

The opposite of getting distracted, i.e. that you don’t have time to react (can be mitigated by tools to a large extent). Generations don’t have fixed length, and 3 generations could happen in a minute… Also the discussion on finality - but forks of length 3 are not common, agreed.

Also you don’t have to wait until the last generation to overbid :sweat_smile:

that’s not the point. I am more worried about people not noticing outbids as they move away (from) the phone / tablet / desktop. you need to wait for the auction to finally end. you want to know if you won the auction or if somebody outbids you.

forks could certainly happen but that’s also sth. for tools to support the user in such cases. in worst case the auction ended without noticing and some other party winning it :sweat_smile:

I can only repeat.

yani.chain
contributor
I don’t see any problem with the timeframes nor with the pricing. If people want to get a short name quick they can put a very high initial bid so that nobody wants to start a bidding war with them because it feels already overpriced. If people want to get started quick they can select a bit longer name like alexanderthegreat and get it instantly. Short names should be difficult to get by design to prevent squatting. I also don’t see a problem with the price being driven up to the max amount people are willing to pay for a name since the fee gets burned and this way the total AE supply gets reduced effectively acting as a donation to the aeternity community.

As an alternative we could create another namespace like “.space” to have very cheap short instant domain names. Could also be solved with an establishment of a new naming prefix and as well introduction of syntax for this, like “shortnames—alex.chain” or “a___l___e___x.chain” could be translated to alex.space so that even no hard fork is required for this, just some UX work. More “.TLDs” could be introduced this way. And it is backwards compatible.

A marketplace for the dot chain names would great as well! There people could buy instantly short dot chain names. But introduction of a new name space and addition to the existing UX should be the quickest way to solve the problem perceived by some of the users. Which .namespace do you suggest?

Let’s not change anything about the auction mechanism without that it is not absolutely needed. Better create another namespace with whatever rules you want. Open source rocks.

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@YaniUnchained but there are people that think it is needed :thinking:

at least the bumping of auctions for another 3 months on each bid should be re-considered IMO. but if this is being touched we might be able to make a few more improvements.

I thought you were also supporting this back then. I just checked the initial discussion on github:

it is not a year. but a last minute bid could currently cause an extension of the auction for ~ 3 months. this sounds really crazy to me and makes the auction mechanism for short names quite unnattractive.

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meanwhile @hanssv.chain provided a PR to change the behavior :slight_smile:

I asked about the params and currently the PR sets:

  1. auction duration of 5 days (2-4 characters names), 2 days (5-8 characters), 1 day (9-12 characters)
  2. a general bump to 12 hours auction time in case the remaining time is shorther than 12 hours

is that correct @hanssv.chain or did I missunderstand sth. in regards to the “bump” time? of course all time-related stuff is measured in keyblocks on protocol level which means it can vary

personally I think a bump to ~30mins (10 keyblocks) would be better. I would even favor maximum ~15mins (5 keyblocks) for the bump.

for the initial auction time I am fine with the params that are currently set.

the question is how we define the exact params now. maybe just via forum vote? :grin:

nobody will be able to react to this, if its not needed it can be removed, I think 48-24h is an absolute minumum.

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everybody watches the end of an auction or uses an automated tool to bid until their personal max-price is reached.

having async auctions in terms of time is nonsense to me. this is why I think it should be as short as possible. having to look at the same auction every now and then to finally see it settled kind of sucks. I am really wondering how you come to the conclusion that nobody can react to this

note: I hope it is clear enough that the initial auction time will never be less than ~24hours (according to the current params set). I am referring to the actual expected end of an auction.

Yes @marco.chain your description looks on point to me. I am with @philipp.chain on this one, 12h which I set is an absolute minimum in my eyes. Automatic tools are great, but we need to give humans a fair chance to react WHEN the tools break :sweat_smile:

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this is exactly what I want to achieve. nobody wants to check the end of an auction every 12 hours. humans get distracted if it takes too long. auction-ends are typically happening in a very short time period. I am really wondering where your point of views are coming from :sweat_smile:

I think we should more discuss which events you expect to happen that would hinder “humans” to react within 5 keyblocks. I would say in 99,99% of the cases 3 keyblocks should even be enough time to react.

but anyway, I am fine with everything. I just want to see the auction system improved in general what we (almost) achieved now :sweat_smile:

Not everyone is in the same time zone, so 15 minutes would be a bit awkward I think… But let’s just agree to disagree here :joy:

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I think we have a complete different understanding about how auctions work.

if I wanna watch a UFC fight or a formula 1 race I stand up to be watching (or participating in) the event live (human) early or I record it (bot) to make sure I can watch it.

same for the end of an auction :man_shrugging:

so yes, let’s agree to disagree :rofl:

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agree to disagree. I think core developers should be working on reducing the rolling checkpoint time and launching hyperchains and decentralization instead of changing the economics of the naming system. I find it a big blocker for adoption of aeternity mainnet to wait for 100 blocks so that transactions are considered confirmed. with bitcoin its usually 30 minutes wait time. what is planned to improve this? other ceres improvements?

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I think we all agree on this. at least I for myself can confirm this is a big blocker for adoption

aens is only a small number of domain name holders such as Dashu in China have a strong demand; They want to sell their domain names. I don’t know why the team took the time to improve this? Aren’t core functions and hyperlinks more important? How long has the hyperchain been delayed; The hyperchain release promise has been delayed。

Blockquote

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I bet it’s just a matter of time until we see it. trading AENS names is sth. many people in the community want to see :slight_smile:

I think we have a complete different understanding about how auctions work...

You have to stop this from happening. Please think about it.
Arternity only has around 30,000 followers on X, and earlier, it hadn’t cracked that.
At around 10:15 on March 16, 2024, we compared some data on X.
The Ethereum Foundation has 3,332,978 followers,
Solana has 2504,765 followers,
Polkadot has 1,474,255 followers,
Dogecoin has 3,944,919 followers,
Binance has 1,534,971 followers,
Coinbase has 5,986,255 followers,
The Aeternity Foundation has 31,044 followers.
Obviously, Aeternity has very few users, and if Aeternity has more than 1 million attention in the future, it means that there are more than 900,000 new people who have not yet participated.
Greatly shortening the auction time of domain names now will cause short domain names to be monopolized by a few people in a very short period of time, which is unfair to the new people in the future, because they are left with only a long long domain name, which is very bad.
Maybe someone will come up with a new proposal as an alternative, such as creating another namespace, such as ".space ", but ".chain “will become worthless, which will be a great loss for the people who invested in”.chain ".
If this were to happen, how many new people would be willing to jump into Aeternity’s arms?
Aeternity is going into the light, there may be 1 million, 2 million, even 10 million followers in the future, please don’t leave the worst for them (newcomers).

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Attract more people to participate in the auction and give participants a chance to get AE rewards, for example: when there is a higher bid, if it is the highest bidder, successfully get the name, after the auction is over, the previous bidder can get 20% of the AE rewards.

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