Is vote buying and collusion an issue?
Is vote buying an issue with dpos ?
Recently it became public that some EOS whales may be colluding among each other to become block producers.
This has caused a little debate amongst the crypto media.
Vitalik has also stated that he sees this as a security issue and weakness of dpos systems. https://vitalik.ca/general/2018/03/28/plutocracy.html
is this not part of the design?
Truly collusion seems inevitable. In fact we have seen many of auch cases manifest here on the steem blockchain.
In fact we have just released a service on the steem-bounty.com website called „Votinng Exchange Club“ that automates such a thing.
It is obvious that if aomeone can gove someone value via an upvote, a witness vote, re-steem and even a mention that one hopes to get such actions returned in kind.
what right do tokens give us
In a DPOS system our tokens are not just money they also provide utility of value. Holders can spend and use these as they please. If that is an issue than there would be a fundamental design flaw at hand.
I am not convinced that is the case.
it comes down to decentralization
Buying votes is expensive it is much better to get votes for free.
On steem we can buy votes and as a result get large rewards. However there is not really a financial benefit from that as u simoly get what u pay for in financial terms.
What is valuable is holding the token. You won‘t become rich by buying votes here. But if you hold SP you get rewarded. I think that is fair because getting coins requires work or money and is risky.
So I am simply not convinced that exchanging votes is such a big deal. It would be much better to just get the votes withou aving to spend your own. And you could just spend the votes on yourself anyhow. And that too seems fair to me.
What is however important is that the coins are distributed. Just like with anything if few can dominate the ecosystem, this creates bad experiences for all others and as a result reduces value for all.
both EOS and STEEM are too centralized
There are too many whales on both STEEM and EOS, which creates bad dynamics. This is the problem that leads to bad constallations that abuse the systems, not so much that some users decide to vote in each other favors.
wealth distribution is the ultimate economic challenge...
That has not been solved by any economic system including blockchains, such as this one, eos, bitcoin etherum or our current state systems.
I dont know what the solution is, but I don‘t think dpos is that bad.
What do you believe?
What do you think! Is our ecosystem broken? And if so how would you fix it?
Thq question is if true decentralization of wealth will ever work imo.
If/when BTC becomes the store of value for the masses the people with just 1 BTC will be super rich and even people with I believe 0.28 BTC will be in the 1%.
In steemit many people have a sense of exclution as they think they deserve big upvotes from the whales. While the truth is in not many other chains you get rewarded for taking part without putting money upfront.
If I want to mine BTC/XMR/ETH I need equipment which I dont get for free.
Yes it is up to the whales and orcas to include smaller accounts but of course they want to earn as well afterall arent they who put money/BTC into the system who put a $/satoshi price on the steemtoken?
Here we are many and while collusion is not optimal it is not as hurtful as in a smaller circle.
If 2 players collude in a 180 sng it is not as bad for the other indivdiuals as if 2 players do it in a 6 max sng.
If more do it in a small circle the worse it gets for the indivdual who is not taking part
When I hear someone the word "collusion" crying out loud, I instantly have to think about "Russia collusion". But there s not only Robert Muller, there is also the FISA Memo. Vitalik seems to be searching of arguments against EOS. In German language we could say he's crying "Haltet den Dieb!".
Centralisation of many coins in the hands of a few whales may be a problem, but this not quite annother thing than in the economy in general. In Bitcoin there a whales as well in copanies listed on stock exchanges.
If many many people would buy small amounts of shares and coins the distribution of power could be improved.
So let's buy some steem and power up :-)
I don't know much about EOS, but vote buying/selling when it comes to block producers and upvotes are two separate subjects.
In my opinion, Steem is semi-decentralized. While votes for block producers can be seen as a political instrument that can decide the course of the blockchain, upvotes, delegations, and actions that affect the reward pool distribution carry economic aspects of the blockchain.
Theoretically, a single largest stakeholder or few top stakeholders can determine who the top block producers will be, and blockchain can be completely centralized. Is that good or bad thing? I don't know. But I believe, such possibility may keep larger outside investors away. At the same time, other investors may be interested in more centralized blockchains.
When I first learned about Steem, my simple assumption of economic incentives would be that larger stakeholders would be more interested in longer term increase of value of their holdings, rather than short term gains from reward pool. With that they would/could empower smaller to medium stakeholders to accelerate the growth of the platform in social media space, empower developers to create new apps, etc. Win-win scenario for everybody, everybody would grow as a community. However, I came to realize that was a naive thinking. Reality of the the dpos economics seems to be much more complex than that.
But I wouldn't call it broken. I works, just needs some improvements, which is just part of the process.
Basically a came to a conclusion that every user has to choose a battle that he can win and proceed with flags. It’s pointless to have someone like bernie flagging puny spamming accounts (that can be flagged by us), instead the whales have to counter the abuse of whales...if that won’t happen Steem is bound to lose value as long as haejin and sweet (and their likes) will continue to rape the reward pool. All the whales that are IGNORING the matter are SUPPORTING the matter, because there are only handful of them that can counter abuse of such a scale.
My humble opinion is that the whales are underestimating the matter. They feel like Steem is prospering so there really isn’t anything too wrong with it. I on the other hand think that we currently are in Altcoin bubble (slowly popping at the moment) and that Steem will soon be at around 1 dollar again...maybe even lower. This conclusion is based on the premise that users do search around the platform before investing heavily and as soon as they spot those worthless trending "celebrities" they will realize that it’s really not that much about quality of the content for now.
It is part of the nature of this system. When there is a disproportionate amount of steem spread out through the community, some people will have more power than others. It is not inherently wrong, its a mechanism of the system. Vote buying also is not inherently wrong, its a business at the end of the day and people are concerned with turning a profit. This comes down to a philosophical principle I think and I'm not sure there is an easy solution. Good to ponder though
Voting Collusion While cooperation to distribute funds to the best work is the desired goal, collusion that undermines this objective should be minimized. There are two kinds of collusion , the most straightforward is when one user simply buys a larger stake than others, and the other involves coordinating a large number of smaller stakeholders to work together.
Larger stakeholders can have the voting influence of 100 or even 1000 smaller stakeholders which means they have even greater incentive to defect by voting for themselves than they had under a linear distribution. Regardless of how much money any one individual has, there are always many other individuals with similar wealth. Even the wealthiest individual rarely has much more than the next couple wealthiest combined. Furthermore, those who have a large investment in a community also have the most to lose by attempting to game the voting system for themselves.
I don't think vote buying is a serious issue. And inflation is slowly eroding whale power here because it puts STEEM in the hands of new people.
The wealth distribution here on steem blockchain is just as in "normal, regular" life. Very few rich, some middle class and many poor poeple. I agree that at the moment you hardly can get what you pay for the vote. There are not enough bots to profitably reward all users, who are paying for votes.
Is our ecosystem broken? I don't believe it has anything to do with blockchains or centralization... and everything to do with the thing called "Human Nature."
I remember thinking that same thing when I started out here on Steemit... the people at the top being too naive about an assumption that people would exhibit "good and just" behavior.
Sadly, most humans could care less, even in a "good" system. They just exhibit self-serving behavior. The idea of people simply using a planned system for general good? Maybe we're just not ready to accept our share as "enough;" we still greedily scramble for MORE, even when we have enough.
Tough question to answer.
Dont think that there is really a problem. On the contrary I prefer systems such as stellar XLM, where every vote is openly bought, to EOS where there is a constitution stating votes 'should' not be bought. And then there are some non-public deals made in the dark. Because people will do them, the question is just if you can see them.
But I also agree with Vitalik. If you use POW this whole issue does not exists in the first place. POS or dPOS does have some potential especially in scaling, but it also has some serious disadvantages compared to POW.