RE: Benefits of Pure Linear Reward Distribution
Just to understand the exact terms of "pure linear reward distribution": Does this mean a vote is equal in power for anyone voting? ie not a weighted vote against steem power / MVEST? Does it also imply the 30 minute rule is abandoned?
When still the vote is weighted with users steem power / MVEST, the vote of a user with a high MVEST, is more powerful and will have more return over a vote from a user with a low MVEST. This will still result in challenges for newbies. Since the platform needs to grow by onboarding new users and keep those users active on the platform, as well as turning around many of the existing inactive / passive users into active users, I would propose a voting system in which each individual has a equal vote regardless of the MVEST a user has. If such even distribution is not acceptable, some influence curve could be introduced lowering the influence of a user with high MVEST and increasing the influence of a user with low MVEST per unit of share / MVEST; this to give the enormous amount of low MVEST holders a chance to influence, and with that give them the idea they CAN make a difference and therefore keep them engaged more.
I compare my proposal to how in the EU the participating countries do have their vote in EU legislations; Each country regardless of its economic size, or its number of residents, have equal power in EU legislations. This means that a country such as Denmark, Belgium or The Netherlands has equal power as a country such as Germany or Italy. There are reasons why this is not liked, but it makes sure the smaller countries are willing to be part of the EU. Otherwise the EU would not have happened as it is. In Steemit terms, each user can be the equivalent to an EU country, where Steemit is the EU itself.
Another analogy can be made to the voting system for national and local government (in democratic countries) in which each person eligible to vote, has an equal weighted vote, regardless what that person is contributing to the economy, or what stake it has in the country in terms of financials, or even time a person contributes to the common good of society. Someone not working and maybe even taking money from the state from the general pot of money the government has, has an equal vote to someone who contributes millions of Euro's to the government by paying his income and/or corporate taxes. That is in the end what real democracy is IMHO.
There could also be a system introduced in which the community can (temporary) blacklist user from voting. This maybe prone to miss use, but if the bar is set high, eg 70% of the (active) community is voting YES to temporary bar someone from voting, then it'll be hard for individuals to miss use such system since it needs to convince a lot of people. Of course I bank on the fact that the majority of the people vote based on his/her common sense.
Yes my proposal is still stake weighted. It's just like a company, where same stake has same weight in decision making.
Sure it's fairer if everyone have same weight, but the blockchain only knows accounts but not real identity, so it's possible to be Sybil attacked. For example @sigmajin has 8000 accounts, some miners have hundreds or thousands as well. A whale can easily create thousands of acccounts. The community-blacklisting feature you mentioned is also related to Sybil attacks.
Could and should the system not be build with identity confirmation? The system requires a mobile number for registration, which essentually means that the user is providing already some sort of verifiable identity. Of course, a user can get a prepaid mobile number to stay anonymous.
It is maybe super nice to be able to stay anonymous, but the reality is that we are not anonymous. Even here on Steemit. People get verification done through eg SteemVerify, ID needs to be given when wanting the ability to buy Steem with FIAT currencies. Also we may post on Facebook and other social media.
In addition, systems can be put in place to do behavioural analyses and identify people with multiple accounts, even when the users are anonymous. This is more and more implemented in mobile networks to identify SMS wholesalers using backdoors with low or zero costs to the SMS. Of course, not all fraud is detected and blocked, but the systems are getting better and better.
Mobile numbers can be fake. One can have many numbers. Also as you said it has benefits to allow people to stay anonymous, although many people don't care about being verified. Try to solve this issue in this way is not the highest priority of a blockchain, nor we have any advantage in this area.
I know mobile numbers can be fake. That is why I mentioned the SMS case using backdoors to send free messages for which European mobile operators ask multiple cents per SMS through the normal routes. Those SMS senders using backdoors are also using big farms of SIM cards, ie many mobile numbers. Intelligent systems in the network identifying the numbers operated by a single SMS sender through behavioural analyses. Most of these backdoor SMs senders are identified and blocked. Of course, once detected they may implement a different behaviour. But, the net result is that many of those SMS senders using the illegal backdoors are stopping there activities after some time; since it just becomes to complex and time consuming for them. Therefore the net result is less abuse of the networks. I really think this will also be the case within Steemit / Steem and similar frameworks and platforms when behavioural analyses is introduced to fight against multiple accounts controlled by the same user / group of users. In the end, I really believe true democracy will be necesary for platforms like Steemit to have an impact in our world as we know it. It could be that today it maybe to early to inplement what I'm bringing forward, but I truly hope such approach is considered as a possibility and the search is on how to actually implement, now or sometime in the future. Otherwise we always will be in worlds with the majority of the power at a few people which causes all the troubles we are facing in the world.
The fraud on mobile networks I'm talking about in previous messages above is called SIM Box Fraud. Some links to interesting articles about this:
Leading companies providing solutions to detect and block this type of fraud are:
In essence the solutions are based on protocol parameter analyses, pattern recognition and (self)learning algorithms.
Thanks for the info.