Last week something wonderful happened. @brindleswan reached out to me about a a post I made which had earned 47 cents with 64 votes.

(Note that the dollar amount there shows money earned after the initial payout - the intial payout was 47 cents and included about seven votes from people with over 3000SP)

There is substance to the article despite the title (sorry if that offended anyone - especially the devs or my followers - I actually think your votes matter in a lot of ways, just not in the economic sense as determined by the Steem code). @officialfuzzy (aka @fuzzyvest) seemed to like it too, here's what he had to say

Whenever I read it, I thought it was a really good post to bring up here. So I upvoted it and I really liked it.

So what happened was @brindleswan got in touch with me and asked me to go on to @officialfuzzy's awesome Beyond Bitcoin audio hangout. I didn't know anything about this event. It turned out to be great. I recommend it very highly. Here's a link to the audio. The part where we talk about this post starts at 1:09 and ends at 1:39.

I made a more "factual" post right before the hangout with some more background including a screenshot from the Steem Whitepaper, which we also discussed.

Here's a link to the thread @officialfuzzy posted about the hangout

Here's what he had to say about our discussion in the post:

Thank you to everyone who upvoted the post and participated in the discussion, and to @brindleswan and @officialfuzzy for brining more attention to this issue. In this way you have all proven that your votes DO matter. I still think they should matter more in the economic sense (for many reasons, not simply "selfish" ones).

Here are a few reasons why I think it would be better for everyone if we had a voting power law which didn't favor "whale" votes disproportionately as I believe n^2 does.

• People would buy Steem Power.
• People who earn a bit of Steem Power would feel more rewarded, more part of the community, and thus post and curate more.
• Perhaps the Steem price would rise due to the increased demand for Steem Power.
• A Steem price rise right now would have the added benefit of making Steem not look
  like a pump & dump to the larger crypto community.
• Whales would still have a lot of voting power, but would not feel as much pressure to curate since dolphins and fish would have more influence.
• I believe that "featured author" posts would not be as necessary - people could post on their own blog and 'fish/dolphins' would reward them.
• I think "featured gem" posts would diminish as a wider range of original content would be curated by the many Steemians with e.g. over 1,000 SP.
• Empowering 'individuals' is what this is all about, this would achieve that.
• People could form effective guilds without having to onboard a large whale. These are just a few reasons I could think of off the top of my head but there are, I'm sure, many more - please share your thoughts in the comments.

Big Update

The man himself, @dantheman, made a quick comment on my recent n^2 voting power law post. Here it is:

Thank you Dan for responding to the post. I said it in the hangout and want to reiterate here that I think SteemIt is awesome and I appreciate everything the creators (@dantheman and @ned) and all of the other devs and early adopters have done. Thanks also to @brindleswan and of course @officialfuzzy for shining a light on this - without the exposure of this post on your show I doubt this issue would have received the attention from Dan that it did. There are a few comments in there that have gone unanswered. While I think we all totally understand how busy you are Dan, we would be very grateful if you could share some more information on the planned change. Perhaps we can provide helpful feedback.

At the Beyond Bitcoin hangout, we also talked about the fact that it would be great to be able to test changes like this to find the optimal solution. I.e. maybe try a few different functions, try changes on a sidechain or testnet, etc. Dan, can you please let us know your thoughts on this as well?

Want to talk about this on Friday?

After the hangout last friday I checked out @officialfuzzy's new post about the upcoming Beyond Bitcoin meetup this coming Friday and created a new post about this issue. Let's keep up the discussion about this issue, keeping in mind that @dantheman did say they are working on something that should improve this - maybe we'll have an update from Dan by the time this hangout happens :) Please check out the post and upvote the comment I made if you support this initiative, and I hope to hear from you at the hangout on Friday.

Thanks again and let's keep the discussion going.

Bryan Gmyrek aka @nonlinearone

p.s. I found out that @brindleswan referred @morpheustitania, who referred me to SteemIt. So, I'm here in part because of @brindleswan in the first place. Small world and thanks @brindleswan.

p.p.s On the issue of incetivzing people to buy Steem Power - I didn't bring this up in the discussion, but I wanted to mention that I had put in something like $150 USD into steem power before earning any significant money on steemit. I had noticed it made pretty much no difference compared to having only a few SP, so there seemed to be no incentive. With a different vote weighting function, this could change and people would have more incentive to purchase 100 to 1,000+ SP.

Image credits Cover

Simulposting: This post was simulcast (or, as I like to call it, simulposted(TM)) on my site at bryangmyrek.com.

About the Author

Bryan Gmyrek is a full time software developer and lives in sunny Arizona with his beautiful wife, three sons and two golden puppies. He holds a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Arizona based on the particle physics research he did at the world famous DZero Experiment at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. He has been online since 1993, into cryptocurrencies since 2013, won prizes at three Bitcoin hackathons, and co-organizes the highly technical Blockchain Meetup in Phoenix Arizona for over a year. Many of his videos are popular on YouTube, including his recent SteemIt technical talk. He also blogs about nature photography, dogs, national parks and hiking. Pay no attention to that Tardis. Read more in my top 50 introduceyourself post

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To show my support for SteemIt, I have chosen the "Pay me 100% in Steem Power" option for this post. Furthermore, I have powered up almost everything I've earned on SteemIt (including a single powerup of almost 2,000 STEEM DOLLARS at the time) and have sent the rest to others on the platform for various reasons. Once I took out 10 SD to see if it worked. This was offset by the ~150 USD I deposited before "hitting it big" with my introduceyourself. I tell you all of this to let you know that I'm committed and trying to help the community and the future of SteemIt by brining up these issues. Cheers.

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