The Solution To What Ails Steem

We read a lot about what is wrong with Steem. I am obviously overlooking the gripe sessions and referring to the serious posts that are pointing to specific problems to stimulate discussions which, hopefully, move us towards resolution.

One such post was made by @ura-soul yesterday. This covered how the "Proof of Brain" model is broken. Specifically, the theme was that bidbots eliminate the ability to see POB evolve. Instead, the trending page is bought and paid for. The belief is that the most interesting content would move to the top under a POB scenario.

https://steempeak.com/steem/@ura-soul/community-spirit-engagement-on-social-networks-is-king-for-steem-this-means-proof-of-brain-which-is-currently-broken

This could well be the case. I cannot dispute it. The question is "what is interesting"? Even without bid bots, couldn't a large account upvote, like Steemit, upvote a post to the trending page? Sure it could. Plus, what is quality? Or best? These are subjective terms.

The truth is the POB concept is built upon a DPOS blockchain. The core essence of the network is Proof of Stake. POB cannot get around this.

So what is the solution to this?

It is rather simple. Volume.

Consider this. We have 40K accounts transacting a day; picture that being 1M or 25 times the amount. What do you think happens to that daily reward pool? It gets diluted a great deal. Obviously, with DPOS, it is not a linear trade off, so we will not see posts payout go down by a factor of 25. Nevertheless, is it unreasonable to figure they will be slashed by a factor or 5-10? I do not believe so.

Under this scenario, we have a $10 post being worth a buck or two. The trending page will show payout of $10-$20.

Let us go one step further. What if we find 2M daily active users on here? Think that is outrageous? MySpace, which is a platform that basically died in the eyes of most, still have tens of millions of users. The truth is having a few million people on the internet is nothing.

At that point, we see a 50 fold increase in users on a daily basis. Again, if this doubles what we were dealing with before, we see the trending page equal to $5-$10. At that point, a 50 cent payout is very good.

Will this eliminate the use of bid bots? Maybe not but the incentive is decreased. We are also going to see many of these users attracted by the Communities feature which could also help to lesson the impact of the bots.

Ultimately, it all gets down to a numbers game. When there are a couple million people active and earning STEEM, that means the number of upvotes can increase a great deal. Sure, most of them have votes not worth much but it all adds up. Imagine having a post that get 15,000 upvotes. Even all their votes were worth $.0005 apiece (if that is even possible) that is still $75 when $10 might be considered a huge payout.

Source

As an aside, bear in mind the $ here means S.T.U, not USD.

While we are at it, what about USD?

That is hard to tell since we know markets are their own animal. Logic would dictate that the price of STEEM would increase under this scenario. At what rate would it do that is impossible to figure. A 50x the number of daily users might result in a 100x in the price of STEEM; or it might net a 25X. Who knows?

Thus we cannot really focus upon the fiat currencies. Besides, by the time Steem has that many users, the ecosystem will be such that commerce on here will be priced in STEEM/SBD. There will come a time when our mindset will move away from pricing everything in fiat. Sure, we will have many things that still must be paid in such. However, that will diminish over time.

As was pointed out in the post, there are already interfaces that are blocking out the trending page and removing those that used the bots. There might come a time when paying for exposure is not getting the return desired. If the eyeballs are not there, it is tough to justify the cost.

Another thing that we are going to see happen is the influence of blogging on this blockchain will diminish. We will not have 1M or 2M bloggers on here. Instead, we will have people who are using the different applications, many that have nothing to do with blogging. Hence, we will see a lot of upvotes going to those in the communities on the different applications. That changes things greatly. Those people are not concerned about the Trending page or what is on it.

It is time to seriously consider what this place will be like with a million posts a day on it. Based upon the numbers put out by @penguinpablo, it looks like we average a post/comment per transacting account. How much different will these "problems" be with a million or more posts/comments being done a day?

Everything will be diluted to such a point that earning a lot of STEEM is not going to take place. We might see the average post get .01 or .02. There will be a lot with less than that. It is impossible to be any other way since the reward pool is fairly constant (actually it is shrinking with the inflation rate) and the number of users exploding.

Of course, this is where the SMTs enter the picture as a means to provide incentive to users. Nevertheless, if the price of STEEM follows logic, people with even a couple hundred SP will be very happy.

With activity comes changes. While they are probably not related at the moment, although I think more accounts are being claimed these days than before (I am at 73 myself). Let us look at the Resource Credit numbers as put together by @holger80.

https://beempy.com/resource_costs

Over the last few weeks, the cost of doing things on the blockchain has dropped some. This is something I believe we will see continue as more activity takes place on the blockchain.

One thing I learned being on here, give things some time. Change does not happen as quickly as we like but it is taking place and we are moving in the right direction.

I do not believe POB is dead, in hibernation perhaps, but not dead. It is pre-mature to call that.

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