Hey Beth I appreciate you standing up to me and making a transparent discussion/debate. Kudos to you! And I think we both have good intentions in that we both want maximum decentralization, freedom, and a capitalist system that rewards meritorious production. You can view some of my other comments recently if you want to get a sampling of my philosophy. I admire that you’re lady who is apparently into obscure technical knowledge such as configuring servers. I’m sure you’re aware that high testosterone males tend to be less trusting and more confrontational because we understand that other such males are motivated by opportunity cost, not always prioritizing ethics. Our evolutionary biology makes this so.

The power-law distribution in nature guarantees that not everyone will run their own hosting server in their own data center. This is simply a fact of the way nature allocates resources. And if you mean that everyone will pay for a host in a data center or connection to an ISP they don’t own, then the decentralization is reduced to those who control the data centers and ISPs. So this is why I posit that the decentralization must occur at a meta layer where the resource involved is only human coordination, which is what the new (not yet released) consensus algorithm I designed posits to accomplish. IOW, the resource intensive nodes will not be decentralized to extent of one for each user, but the controlling power will be. I posit that conflating those two orthogonal facets is a fundamental flaw in the extant consensus algorithms.

As for what developers get paid, we agree they’re being paid 25%. My point is we can copy their open source and disintermediate their 25%. So they do get paid, but we don’t get stuck with that egregiously high fee long-term. If they’re not (eventually) making their system open source, then users should understand they’re investing in a system they may not be able to force improvements to in the future.

I would prefer those who fund the developers hodl STEEM and fund the development work because they want the value of their STEEM to appreciate. This funding could be a smidgen of their total hodlings. For example, @smooth is a STEEM whale and I think he funded the creation of busy.org which doesn’t charge anything. Presumably he did it to create an alternative UI to steemit.com to prove that the Steem ledger can be accessed via GUIs other than the one controlled by STINC (Steemit, Inc.). And I would prefer there is some mechanism in Steem to pay transaction fees for the peripheral nodes, so that there can be a wide diversity of people who operate those nodes. The Dtube paradigm means only those developers are paid and only they run nodes. Which is very very bad outcome in terms of centralization and overlording. For example, someone alleges that videos which do not receive enough rewards are discarded and not archived.

Also the developers could do a Kickstarter style fundraiser by creating blogs on Steem that users can upvote if they want to fund Dtube’s development. Maybe they could argue that Steem is not yet significant enough to fund a large Kickstarter fundraising. But did they even try? I bet they could have raised $100,000 if they tried and then they could have purchased STEEM with it being long-term bullish on the platform given the potential impact of Dtube on adoption. That they didn’t go this route tells me that they probably see the flaws I see in Steem and are in a defection mode of extracting the most they can from the platform. With the change to linear rewards 7 months ago, everyone has an incentive to only vote for themselves and Steem is now a defection paradigm.

Or at least they could have hardcoded in the protocol of the software a sliding scale reduction in the share of rewards taken as the volume increases, so that they had committed in code for the fees to reduce to say 0.5% at high volume.

Since presumably Dtube was not funded that way, presumably they have some more nefarious/greedy intentions and/or they don’t trust the long-term appreciation of the value of STEEM. However in the defense of their ethics, if they’ve open sourced it then we could make a reasonable guess that they’ve just looked at the reality of the flaws in Steem and decided to take their ROI in the way that makes the most sense in light of the dubious future of Steem.

The generative essence or general underlying problem in the crypto sector is the opportunity cost for not defecting is higher than the opportunity cost for non-deleterious production.

I hope my stance is more clear now.

EDIT: a follow-up tying this post in with Torrents.