Sharedropping as a stigmergic operation
What is a sharedropping?
Sharedropping is a practice perfected by the Bitshares community. Stan Larimer discusses the purpose of sharedropping in the article titled Bitshares Sharedrop Theory. This quote below highlights what a sharedrop does:
> It’s not about imitating Bitcoin. It’s about attracting an affinity
> group. And once you’ve motivated that group to hold onto your coin,you have eyeballs to sell. In this case, the value of your coin is tied to the value of your group as a target for other developers’ promotional shares. This is exactly what PTS and AGS holders are: A demographic MUCH more likely to be good supporters. These blockchains are like mailing codes that let you target your shares to the people you want to reach much, much, much more precisely than using Silicon Valley mailing codes!
One of the first successful sharedrops occurred within the Bitshares community. Originally Bitshares was centralized around a company Invictus Innovations which invented the concept of Protoshares. Protoshares at the time represented nothing more than an idea. All who believed in that idea were encouraged to acquire Protoshares through either mining it with their CPUs, working for it, or buying it.
What is a stigmergic operation?
Protoshares represented the hopes and dreams of the Bitshares community symbolized as a token and the developers encouraged all participants to rally around that shared idea by formulating a social consensus. This represents a stigmergic operation and provides one of the best examples of stigmergy to date in the crypto community.
How can you conduct a stigmergic operation?
To do a stigmergic operation just follow these basic steps.
- Come up with a compelling idea and share it with people who are likely to appreciate it. Be good at explaining the idea and make sure people believe it can work.
- Find an attractor pattern to represent the idea. This could be as simple as tokenization where anyone can mine if they believe in the idea or acquire the token somehow by buying or working for it. It can also be the joining of a mailing list, the membership on a forum, citizenship, reputation or anything you want.
- Create stakeholders in the idea. This is where you conduct the sharedrop onto all who hold the token, or who are on the mailing list, or who maintained active membership on the forum or virtual citizenship group.
- Create a social consensus and or constitution.
Once all is in place you will have created a swarm. The price of the attractor tokens will influence behavior of the swarm. In bees the duration of a dance is the signal, but for humans price is usually the signal. The social consensus is also extremely important to follow consistently because it is the glue which holds everything together. It is trust in the distributed rule-set which holds the holonic structure together.
What does this mean for Steemit?
If Steemit can develop through sidechains a mechanism for sharedropping on bloggers who fit into a certain criteria, this technology could take Steemit to the next level. Currently there are reward tokens such as Steem Dollars, but what if in addition to rewarding with Steem Dollars, an independent group could decide to reward 1:1 with a private token mirroring the amount of Steem Dollars they earned? This would give top bloggers on Steemit a stake in different projects and allow for new forms of stigmergic marketing campaigns.
References
Larimer, S. (2015, February 4). The Origin of BitShares. Retrieved July 23, 2016, from https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=14019.msg182306#msg182306
This is an excellent idea. Actually, given that Steem has already far exceeded BitShares in market cap and is based on the exact same technology, there would be a case for turning BitShares into a Steem sidechain. This would allow cross-chain atomic transactions and give to Steem instant access to a rich ecosystem of gateways and fiat onramps as well as a diversified basket of stable assets tracking key currencies from CNY to Gold. The benefit for BitShares would be an overnight explosion of its user base, a flood of liquidity flowing in from Steem, and overnight fame. The relationship would be so massively mutually beneficial that the simple prospect of it makes my mind boggle. Being both a Steem and BitShares holder, I'd be thrilled to see something like that happen.
This has nothing to do with using sharedrops to create stigmergy so I am only partially on topic, but since you have proposed the idea of having Steem sidechains, I thought I'd share this view here anyway. If you agree, it would be nice to have a well researched article on the topic, you are a much more convincing writer than I will ever be.
Always happy to have some awesomeness served up. Reposting this over on some bitshares channels to see if anyone can add/assist.
Many thanks recursive
I will work on that. I have to give it some thought first though. Can Bitshares really be a sidechain? Technically it can be, but first you would have to culturally integrate the Bitshares community with the Steemit community which might not be so easy. Also Steemit source code isn't really open while Bitshares is.
Maybe you can talk Dan Larimer into doing the initial explanation on the technical details of how sidechains will work. Having him explain the code snippets would be enough for me to better formulate my articles with greater technical understanding and detail. I do know the capability exists to do it but I also know Atomic Cross Chain Transaction capabilities exist in Bitshares. So you can do it in many ways but it's about finding the optimal way which is mutually beneficial and which doesn't take away the blockchain independence from the Bitshares community if they want it because Bitshares is a sharedrop target which means it's part of a stigmergic operation in itself (evolved from Protoshares). Steemit is not.
@dana-edwards This is a great post, except for the part about what is a stigmergic operation. That's not a great explanation and perhaps maybe an ELI5 answer would allow folks to follow it easier.
For all of the laymen out there, a stigmergic action is one which has a high upfront cost in terms of some resource, typically energy or inertia, but which makes it easier for others to follow once the first mover has made it through.
This works because there is generally a trace left in the environment which stimulates and eases the state transition for other independent agents.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigmergy
Ants following a trail are doing so because they are following a trail of pheromones left behind by ants that have come before. Try swiping your finger through a line of marching ants and watching the confusion set in as the ants begin to search for where the scent ended up. They will follow to where your finger swipe ended and that becomes the new trail.
Laughtracks on TV shows exist for this exact reason. :)
Some concepts take more than one try to explain to the laymen but I'll try again until more people understand. That is basically what I'm doing on Steemit. I'm taking concepts and trying to package them in easier to understand articles so people don't have to study the academic literature.
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Thanks for this idea !
It has been tested in the Bitshares community for anyone who would like to do case studies. It's been effectively used with Protoshares, and now there are many tokens such as the Beyond Bitcoin Tickets or Let's Talk Bitcoin's magic words which actively use a token to reward attention.
This is great news, but still 50/50 no body know if steemit can develop it
The developer for Steem is the developer for Bitshares. It's greater than 50/50 and probably inevitable.
wow amazing
Will be interesting to see what happens.
Thank you !