RE: The last missing piece of the steem puzzle
I have to disagree with your assessment that self votes, collusion, and various botfarming scams do not harm other accounts, so no action is necessary on upvotes.
The white paper envisioned 90% of rewards inuring to ~30% of accounts, yet 99% of rewards inure to ~1% of accounts (per the most recent data I have been able to acquire). This is orders of magnitude more skewed than predicted in the white paper, and strongly influences what people post.
While you're on the right track regarding downvotes, you have not really developed careful definitions of what you mean by consensus, and this leaves readers able to define consensus as what THEY mean by it, preventing actual development of solutions.
Rewards need to be distributed more widely, and demonetization should only be undertaken when the PLATFORM is under attack. If Screwtube only demonetized content for that reason, no one would complain.
Demonetization happens for ANY reason the flagger cares about, or none at all. This should be precluded, if Steemit is to become a platform than does more than just enable the rich to get richer, and the poor to adulate them.
Various means of precluding collusion and concentration of rewards into a handful of accounts also need to happen, or Steem needs to no longer weight VP (my preference). Also, Steem needs to not be a security, or we're going to deal with the SEC, sooner or later, and weighting VP with SP makes Steem a security.
Thanks for raising this issue, and making some good points.
How does it harm other accounts?
I suggest you read this post to get a different perspective of the one you are used to https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@jerrybanfield/top-10-cryptocurrency-questions-and-answers#@someonewhoisme/re-themarinememoirs-re-serggioc-re-lexiconical-re-jerrybanfield-top-10-cryptocurrency-questions-and-answers-20170702t180115037z
You need to think of the reward pool in USD term not in STEEM, because that's how we are going to scale in the future.
These devices extract value from the pool that would otherwise inure to content creating and curating accounts. What is difficult to understand about that?
Despite your contention that the rewards pool is unlimited over time, it is not unlimited at any given time, but fixed at any given payout moment. Payouts are calculated as a percentage of the pool relative to the VP of the curators.
This is how extractive mechanisms simply profiteering devalue content.
When you sell your VP, you are selling the rewards the white paper states will inure to content creators and curators of that content. You receive payment for delivering a common resource to the payer, which financial impact that extraction would have on your investment is more than covered by the payment you receive. Since the remainder of the beneficiaries of the rewards pool are not so paid, they - the entire rest of the community - lose the value in the rewards pool you sell.
This is financial harm.
You are personally contributing to the perception that Steemit is unfair, and Steem is a 'scamcoin'. You are personally acting so as to inhibit capital gains investors traditionally invest to achieve, by financially manipulating the platform, as warned against in the white paper, and for which the white paper specifically states that it designed downvotes to combat.
Read the white paper, if you care.
This sounds like communism. How do you define a vote that doesn't excessively use those precious common ressources?
Votes are purposed to be used to reward content creators for content people find valuable. While you find the payment for your vote valuable, that has nothing whatsoever to do with the post you are upvoting for pay.
The curation reward is designed to provide you an incentive to curate content. Vote buying simply pays better, and is clearly less work, as you never have to read the post you upvote for pay at all.
Since curation is the purpose of votes, such votes for posts you subjectively value according to your personal judgments use those resources as intended.
Since this is a community, with communal resources (the rewards pool is a common resource), there are considerations that are communal in nature. That isn't communism, but is community centered.
My measly $.04 upvote may not be precious to you, as it is clearly a tiny amount of money, but it is what I can share from the rewards pool, and I find that those receiving my votes appreciate them for much more than their financial impact.
Do read the white paper, because it clearly states that financial manipulation of rewards is an existential threat to the platform, in the eyes of the developers.
In England, back in the day, the commons were grazing grounds, and as the herds grazed on those communal grounds increased beyond the carrying capacity of the land, enclosure resulted in ending the commons. A guy with access to fenced off grazing land that was the property of the community that needed it to graze their sheep, who then sold the right to graze sheep on that fenced off parcel to those whose grazing rights were otherwise as limited as their neighbors, would have been hung.
People died in the enclosure movement. Fortunately for us all, Steemit isn't necessary to provide the meat and wool we need to survive, and mere downvotes have been the result of this adventure for you. I reckon you're way ahead of the game, neh?
However, the rewards pool isn't your personal property to sell, any more than the grazing rights to the English commons were back then. That isn't communism. It is honest capitalism, and respecting the rights of others according to the communal nature of the rewards resource.
Just because you can do a thing, does not mean you should do a thing. Steemit is more than money.