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RE: Is Steem paying for Groupthink? The Game Theory of Steem, Part 3
I suppose that one possible response is that whales have an incentive to preserve the value of their investments, and the best way to do that is to promote a system of fair voting and promote the integrity of the system. We have already seen changes to the curation rewards system which negatively impacted a lot of whales in terms of steem power, but you could argue it positively impacted the whales in terms of future value of their steem power, since their accounts only have value in so far as this is seen as a legitimate enterprise.
Yeah, I'll be looking at that in upcoming installments. I have a feeling that it's going to prove difficult to analyze; it's akin to the arguments for the original Proof-of-Stake coins like PPC and Nxt: put system security in the hands of the people who have the most to lose.
It's one of those arguments that has a logical ring to it, but it's not obvious to me that awareness of long-term consequences always leads to good short-term decisions. I'll definitely take a crack at it, though!
Keep on burninating!
It lacks, I think, the direct circularity of proof-of-stake where who owns the coins is determined by consensus and consensus is determined by who owns the coins. There is a different sort of circularity though, perhaps more akin to proof-of-work where security goes to zero if value goes to zero and vice-versa. In any case, I look forward to your analysis.
The one-size-fits-all ranking system (c.f. my other reply to smooth below) makes it impossible for whales to act rationally, because they can't compute a set of votes which would reflect their individual preferences for quality which might be shared with other like-minded users.
Thus as far as I can see, the system disincentivizes the whales from participating in voting, for they will come to see that either they become one dysfunctional groupthink monolith or they more or less effectively nullify each others votes in terms of anything other than a uniform ranking which is functionally equivalent to no ranking.
Yes, that's right.