If this experiment with no whale votes were to be permanent... some things to consider... there is a flaw
There are typically many ways to game and exploit a system. If this experiment were to become permanent and let's say the cut off for where voting was permitted was 384,000 steem power (which is where the current experiment is) then there is an easy way to exploit this.
Let's say I have an account worth 5 million steem power which is about where @smooth is I believe.
If he permanently cannot vote then it'd make sense for him to power down and create 50 accounts with 100,000 steem power each, or even create more with even less steem power. They would be a bot network.
The end result is he would still be able to vote with 5 million steem power just like he can now, it'd just be coming from many accounts.
What is needed
There needs to be incentive (a reason) someone would want to have accounts above the voting cap. It needs to be attractive for some reason. If they cannot vote, then it becomes a wise move for them to power down and create an army of smaller accounts.
If they do that then we'd be right back where we are now except with a lot of BOT votes.
So IF a controlled experiment shows that no voting after a certain power is beneficial and we decide it should be made permanent, we need a way for those with high steem power accounts to benefit, otherwise in short order we'll be right back where we are now.
You can set the voting window to whatever you want, and they can create however many bot accounts are needed to distribute their power across to still do exactly what they can do now without this experiment.
So ultimately it won't fix anything unless there is a compelling/attractive reason for them to keep singular powerful accounts.
Why would anyone want to ascend to above the voting cap? If we are going to propose steem power voting restrictions then this is another issue we also need to have resolved or there really is no long term point to doing it.
You would see a short term benefit until they had a chance to create their bot nets. Then it'd be the same as it is now.
Steem On!
I personally see several drawbacks with this experiment:
I really think that having this on the long run may become a real problem for the platform, especially the two last points.
In contrast
Except this, what you say is true as long as all the whales play the game, which does not seem to be the case :)
Yeah I posted about my views on how I think they should handle experiments in the future I think two days ago.
Yet now I thought about what it actually would mean if they decided they like the model the experiment is based upon. Then I started thinking about how to exploit it. Finally, I ended up here where I realized in short order we could be exactly back where we are now(Without the experiment).
I still try to understand where they want to go with this experiment... :D
When the whales vote the way the system is now it kind of keeps the same people that are fortunate enough to be whales now essentially always and perpetually the dominant delegates for who gets rewarded.
It could be due to the curve or other factors. They get to designate where almost all of the reward pool goes.
The idea was to see what happens if they were not designating where the reward pool went and letting people with lesser power do the voting with the idea it would spread out more evenly and not be in the hands of the same few forever.
In other words, a way to test out redistributionary ideas without actually redistributing power. At least that's how I perceive it.
That is true. In terms of quality, I however don't think things are better. But there are actually too many things going on all together so that is is hard to disentangle the sources...
Well this was far from a controlled experiment... If they have to police the results with flags then it is flawed. They should have worked hard to get a code implementation that disabled up votes and down votes for people over their threshold steem power. That would have been controlled and consistent and not require human monitoring and intervention to make it work. It also wouldn't have any psychological rammifications of flagging mixed into the study.
nesting limit... continuing here: I fully agree with you on this :)
Another intriguing change is that curation rewards have increased quite a bit since they started the experiment. Maybe 2x or 3x.
Me too. Since the last two days, it exploded!
whoa, I thought the purpose of the experiment was just to see how minnows and dolphin voting power worked out sans whales.
Did anyone suggest capping whale voting power permanently?
Who would want to invest in the platform if they couldn't get curation rewards?
Other than a second reward pool for comments, a flattening of the reward curve, and the removal of the flag as a curation tool (i.e., removing the monetary downvote), I haven't seen any "good" suggestions for improving the platform.
I think that we have to live with whale domination of the reward pool in any case, and hopefully provide some social, not system, confrontation of whale abuse, if we want the platform to survive long term.
No one is going to buy in if they cant get a return on investment. No one outside the community is going to take the currency seriously if the market cap is small.
I've seen some people calling for it... no whales though.
And when asking people like @abit when it is going to end, some of them actually don't have a time frame.
At least not yet. So who knows.
whew...that's good. You spooked me LOL
as far as the experiment (and the future ones to come) I'll just ride that out and make a Steem here and a Steem there.
Still in beta, and I don't have any timeframe I expect to see real money coming in
`100% up vote! yawns and rubs my chin People are going to love Engage once we get it running solid. Keep up the good work friend!
My understanding is steempower will be transferable, which negates the purpose of having steem and steempower. If steempower doesn't have to be powered down, then there is no incentive to hold it, and you could just move steem power between accounts and vote with it on each account. Moral of the story is flat n voting weight. Equal say for each vote, but the problem there is multiple accounts. Either way the system can be gamed and I don't know what the solution is going to be. I'm not really putting much faith in the platform surviving much longer without drastic changes though.
Steem power transferable makes it easy... each of the smaller accounts simply needs to be able to delegate their power.
What I'm saying is, if the vests transfer with the steempower, then it nullifies the need for vests or steem or anything other than steempower as the only currency. The steem dollar tether may still live, but there will be no point not to keep all steem as steempower and just transfer it to an exchange that way. It's removing the reason to stake and hold for value.
Well transfered steem power is not the same as steem. That is a persistent power. It is not decreased by spending it or delegating it. It is not liquid. So it is different.
Delegating power is essentially already a thing through curation trails. It sounded like they were talking about transfering actual steampower currency between accounts.
This is the related wording which is part of the next hardfork expected to happen on Tue, 21 March 2017 (don't know what this section means in practice though):
https://github.com/steemit/steem/releases/tag/v0.17.0
That actually clears it up a bit. Thanks. Still waiting on the voting curve to go flat n.
No that'd make steem power liquid, and the purpose of steem power is to make it long term investment to prevent pump and dumps.
I've been thinking about this for a while. I'd be interested in building a tool that detects collusive voting. You should be able to look at the posts that a account votes for and figure out which other accounts have commonly voted on those posts. If you have a 100% match, that's a good indication that those two account are owned by (or controlled by) the same person. My @ozymandias and @philipnbrown accounts are a good example: they vote on almost exactly the same set of posts.
Of course a clever account-splitter could try to outsmart this, but to do so they'd have to give up power: they would have to spread their votes out and not put all their voting power on every single post.
This fancy tool wouldn't be of any use if we didn't have a way to actually punish cheating (a la smooth or abit downvotes), and it also would probably get a few false positives.
There is some potential in that even if only as an investigative tool that could be used to assist a human.
Should be a incentive or reward for accounts that don't ever power down or say after a certain time frame, 12months, 24months, etc...
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