Wailing About Whales And Other Steemit Tales: RETRACTION

PLEASE BE AWARE—DATA IS INCOMPLETE

I had hoped my days of retracting or clarifying were over, but apparently not. I guess that's what happens when I take on a project that I wasn't fully understanding how to get all the information for. Meaning, in this specific case, I didn't account for proxy voting among whales not showing up under their own witness votes tab on Steemworld where I got the information.

Which means the numbers I cite below are off for the whales, and are probably off for the orcas, as well. It also means that my conclusions will be off, too. How off, without delving into things, I don't know, but at this point, I'm done delving.

Just For The Record

The number of actual voting whales appears to be 19, the twelve that I report below who vote for themselves and seven more who vote by proxy. Those seven add over 12 million SP, with 7.8 million of it coming from one account.

This means that a majority of whales actually do vote for witnesses, particularly if the Steemit related accounts are excluded.

Also, as far as my conclusions at the bottom of this post go, while these new numbers don't necessarily point to anything untoward going on between whales as a group, they still can point to individual whales. However, I still believe the numbers themselves can't really show intent without further investigation, which I won't be doing.

Not Deleting This Post

In deciding what to do, rather than delete this entire post, I'm leaving it with this advisement of incomplete data, mainly for myself, as a reminder that even when I think I have my ducks in a row, there might be ducks I don't know about. Hopefully, it will also let anyone else know who might go reading this to move on.

An Apology

I apologize to anyone who this might have inconvenienced or misled. Neither were my intention. My purpose for this post was to relay what I found when collecting data. It was not my intent to point it in any direction or draw any conclusions that were more favorable to one party or another. I just wanted to report my findings.

While I still intend to produce STEEM related topics when inspired, I think I will step back from any major data pulls at this point, mainly because I'm not equipped to do them quickly or accurately.

THE ORIGINAL POST STARTS HERE

The Inspiration

In a couple of fairly recent posts, @taskmaster4450 has tackled the issue of whale blame, where anything that could be bad about the STEEM platform ends up at the feet, (the tail?) of the STEEM whales. I believe they're worth reading so by all means check out those posts and others Taskmaster has written.

I'd like to expand on this whale theme and extend it to another claim: The STEEM whales are buying the Top 20 witnesses with their votes.

_{Image source—Pixabay.}

Witnesses Are Bought And Paid For

I don't know if this continues to be a prevailing thought or not, but it was bandied about in posts I read within the first few months of being here. It was easy to think that such might be the case, too. When distribution of stake is a hot topic, anything directly or indirectly related to it seems to follow suit. That doesn't make any of it true, however.

But could it be true? Are whales exercising undue influence over witnesses through their votes?

Stake Weighted Witness Voting

To set the table, let's have a brief look at how witness voting takes place here on STEEM. Like many things on the platform, witness voting is based on stake, so the more SP, or MVests you hold, the greater your vote. It's not a one account, one vote proposition. So, if you have 100,000 SP and you vote for a witness, it moves a witness up the ladder faster than a 10 SP vote does.

The Definition Of A Whale

There seems to be a few out there, and it can confuse things. In a general sense, it seems like any account that is significantly large can end up in the whale category. That would include larger minnows and dolphins. When you're a red fish or a smaller minnow, everyone else looks huge. And since by far the most active accounts fall into the red fish category, followed by minnows, I wonder if the perception of what a whale is isn't being skewed.

For the purpose of this post, I will be using the Steemitboard established nomenclature where levels are based on, again, SP or more appropriately, MVests.

To get to be a minnow, you need 1 million Vests, or 1 MVest. This equates to just under 500 SP (right now it's 494.708 SP), which is generally rounded up for convenience sake. Subsequently, to be considered a dolphin, you need 10 MVests, or not quite 5,000 SP. Orcas are 100 MVests and true STEEM whales are made at the 1,000 MVests level.

So, that account sitting at 40,000 SP that's screwing everything up for you isn't even an orca yet, let alone a whale. I know. That much SP is huge in comparison to 10 SP or less. Believe it or not, though, they're not capable in and of themselves of mucking things up as badly as you might think.

_{Image source—Steemdb.}

The Top 100 In Terms Of SP

I went and looked at the top 100 SP/MVest holders since 100 is a commonly used amount that is often considered as holding some weight.

Those who are aware of the numbers will note this means I have not only considered actual whales (there are only 36). As some of the higher orcas are near whale status, and because I wanted a weightier sample, I included 64 orcas, all of which hold over 150,000 SP.

Most Whales Don't Vote

At the time of my sampling last week, of the 36 accounts considered to be whales based on MVests, only 12 were voting at all. Of those 12, just four voted the maximum 30, while three voted for 19, 23 and 29 witnesses. The remaining five had voted for three, five, five, six and 11.

To break it down even further, of the whales with more than one million SP, representing the top 16, only four were voting (with the number of witnesses at 5, 6, 30 and 19, respectively). In other words, of the 103,145,933.07 SP among the Top 16 as of the sampling, 8,707,883.60 was being used to vote for witnesses. While 25% of the Top 16 voted, they represent 8.44% of the Top 16's SP.

It needs to be noted that the Top 3 STEEM whales are associated with Steemit Inc.—steemit, misterdelegation and steem. Combined, they held 73,511,887.57 SP, or the vast majority of the SP among the Top 16. Of that amount, most of it was held by steemit with 44,513,489.79.

A Closer Look

Drilling down more, of the collective 221 votes cast (of 360 available) by these 12 whales, 83 were for different witnesses. Only nine of these witnesses had votes of six or more, with the highest garnering eight. Three witnesses had five votes. The remaining 61 had four or less.

Of the nine witnesses with six or more whale votes, eight are in the Top 20, with one just outside. Among the 11 remaining Top 20 witnesses, three had five whale votes, and five had four.

Most Orcas Don't Vote, Either

Though a higher percentage of them do. Of the Top 64 orcas, 30 were voting. Of the latter, once again only four were using all 30 of their witness votes, while 15 voted for 17 to 29 and 10 voted for two to 14.

These 30 orcas hold 7,562,950.33 SP between them, roughly 1.14 million SP less than the 12 voting whales. Only 514 of the total 900 votes available for witnesses are being allocated.

Conclusion

If we're talking strictly whales, most don't vote, even if we exclude the Top 3 steemit related accounts. So, it's hard to blame all whales for whatever real or perceived woes might exist among the witnesses. Of the 12 whales who do vote, just seven are voting for a majority of witnesses, and only eight of the Top 20 witnesses are receiving six or more votes from those 12 whales.

While the potential for a concentration of power among witnesses is possible, and many of the Top 20 witnesses surely benefit from multiple whale votes, it's difficult to look at the numbers and say all whales are colluding. It's also impossible to look at the numbers and say the witnesses who are voted for by whales are somehow in their back pocket.

Whales seem to be voting like the rest of us. If they vote at all, they're voting for all kinds of witnesses.

Editor's Note: The numbers were taken manually from Steemit, Steemdb and Steemworld. Since whales can vote at any time just like anyone else, it's possible some of these numbers have changed since then, but probably not in a significant way. Information for this post was drawn over Thursday, September 13 to Friday, September 14, 2018.