RE: The last missing piece of the steem puzzle
Since VP is weighted by SP, all that is required to successfully mount a Sybil attack on Steemit is money, not multiple accounts. In fact, there are those that state that the current monopolization of the rewards pool by a handful of accounts is exactly that: a Sybil attack.
It's hard to remain unconvinced of that, and perhaps only my ignorance of the minutiae of witness voting enables me to continue to hope that Steemit yet might become decentralized. Less than 50 accounts hold the vast majority of SP, however, and the numbers indicate my hopes are but fantasy.
You are quite right about defining consensus. It takes upwards of 10,000 minnow votes to equal one whale vote. This imbalance is enabling botnet raids on the rewards pool, since there aren't enough whales to crush the bots, and minnows have too little VP to do it in groups of reasonable and attainable size.
However, weighting VP with reputation, and precluding means of gaming reputation, would make those bots quite fragile compared to groups, even of new accounts, while also precluding the SEC from acting to regulate Steem as a security.
I recommend doing that. You, I know from previous discussions, disagree, and you're the witness. The price of Steem is not rising commensurate with BCC, for example, despite the use case of Steemit, and I believe it is because of the SP/VP issue.
We'll see, as developments continue, how things shake out.
This is discussed at great length in the whitepaper. It is basically the design behind Steem. Sure, you can design an entirely new system, or re-design this one, but it is hard to pick apart this one when it is the main premise that the system was founded upon.
Sounds like an interesting idea. I'm not really opposed to exploring it. To actually design/build this though is probably quite complex. You may be underestimating the difficulty of the problem.
It has stayed relatively stable compared to the USD. We are kind of in 'wait' mode right now with regards to the major items in the Roadmap, and some of the other changes that have been discussed. I don't know if expecting to gain a whole lot of value in the short-term is really the right expectation. It would be nice, but for now, not crashing (as we wait for the things that are needed to take the platform mainstream) is good enough for me.
It is certainly one of them. Others, such as rewards for content creation, and curation, are perhaps more integral to Steemit than VP weighting, in terms of design.
Whether Steemit amends the code weighting VP, again, as it did with HF19, or not, there are other platforms being created that are making changes in how VP is weighted, and taking reputation into account to do it.
You may appreciate that it is not I writing the code =p.
While my investment in Steem is limited to rewards, and I do not intend to spend them for the foreseeable future, I do care about the price, as it drives interest in Steemit, about which I do care a great deal.
I, too, will be happy if the price of Steem doesn't crash, as it will mean that Steemit doesn't. However, I am sure that all of us would be also quite happy to see the price perform as BCC has recently. I am unaware of any advantages BCC has over Steem as a currency, particularly given the potential of a social media platform to drive use of the currency, which BCC doesn't have.
Steem has advantages in transaction speed, lack of fees, and the social media platform driving it's adoption, over other cryptos, and it seems likely to me that the markets are cognizant of those benefits, and also it's flaws.
If we learn anything from the BTC fork, it is that a good forking resulting in twin currencies can be very good for the parent currency. Perhaps Steem might take advantage of this lesson, and spawn.