Some thoughts I've been having lately

I had a friendly,jokingly while maybe a little passive aggressive chat with @aggroed today about vote buying and that the current hardfork allows it. Maybe allows it is the wrong use, let's say makes it possible.

I understand that he came from the same thought process as I have and it basically ended with us agreeing that if we not everyone buys votes and uses these services, than the few doing so will have an edge over the rest of the community. Although most people have heard the saying "if your friends jump off a cliff, would you also jump?" I'm starting to see this a bit from a different perspective.

The last hardfork that created linear rewards did make things a lot more fair in my opinion, even though it is now enabling such services and letting them exist I believe that in the end it will allow for way more services to bloom through it such as @utopian-io. I started thinking of the usecase of Bitcoin, many know that in the beginning most people that used Bitcoin only used it for purchasing illegal substances or stuff like ransom payments and we all know how often Media likes to remind us of that. Still to this day they keep pushing that into our faces in a recent The Guardian article: Since it is only widely used as a currency in drug deals or for ransom payments, there is either a huge boom in criminal activities outside the world of cryptocurrencies, or one within unregulated exchanges where these tokens are traded. Many of us understood that the underlying tech is still valid and has a lot more to offer than just this even if it enabled it.

The same way I view Steem lately and what the hardfork has enabled, although right now it looks bad with the vote selling services, if we all started using them or more people started offering them while undercutting eachother - we will probably reach an equilibrium that will also make that fair and less profitable for the few that currently use it and enable it. There is not really a way around it, non-linear curve would make things less fair again and minnows would probably not even see any rewards at all for a long time like we witnessed happening in the past.

There's also been some discussion popping up again, I think it was @ats-david mentioning the diminishing returns we once used to have on posts. If you post more than 4 within 24 hours it will cause the next ones to reward you a smaller percentage of the post rewards it receives - the rest going back to the pool. "But then people would just post on alt accounts and vote on them" would be the logical abuse/solution to the diminishing returns, depending from which perspective you see it. I think that increasing the amount of votes you have to cast daily would help with this combined with the diminishing returns. I've seen a handful of people lately post 8-10 posts per day and ride those autovotes to profits while constantly being powered down and it sure doesn't feel right nor fair to the rest of the users. Especially those being cheated off rewards that are here to witness the long term of the platform, and even worse seeing how those "abusers" use vote selling services which cause rewards to become even lower to those that don't buy votes.

We have to remember that the platform is still very young, some other currencies are struggling to switch algorithms from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake and hoping to reach and increased transaction output, while others are still trying to come up with solutions to scaling their blockchain and causing a big rift in communities supporting them.

It is important for us to stick together as a community and think of the best solutions forward and how it will be most fair for everyone and the people yet to join us. MSP recently announced a vote bidding bot so I suggest all minnows to check it out if you need assistance with visibility. OCD will still function as usual and I decided to buy some more delegation to help me with supporting it and the newcomers the awesome curation team behind it nominates. I really hope that a good chunk of the community will also support the non-profit OCD-bot that will vote on a wide variety of authors we have chosen even though they could probably earn more by selling their votes instead of settling for the curation rewards.

There are more and more services popping up due to linear rewards, even though many are focusing on vote selling and trying to maintain a big part of the market or reward pool with it I think its only the beginning much like illegal markets and gambling were for Bitcoin at the start. I am looking forward to the ideas yet to come and spring to life and the doors SMT's will open for our blockchain.

I'm going to try and not be as negatively oriented towards vote selling in the future, although I may not use them myself (even though I was going to do that today just to prove a point of what it would look like if I used all of them at once) I will accept that they are a part of us now and instead keep doing my thing of curating without getting paid for it by other means than curation rewards.

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