What would the effect of a Steem Voting Power cap be?
Can a balance between investors needs and a more equitable access to the rewards pool be reached without incentivising the creation of multiple accounts by large holders?
I would very much appreciate opinions.
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Happy Steeming
I would say possibly, However I am really not confident what the implementation would be like. And initially i would really be an experiment, I think it would be really interesting tho, it would also be really cool if we had a testnet for steem where we could test it.
Thank you for your response. An experiment within an experiment! :) I agree a testnet would be amazing and could certainly increase confidence in controversial HF proposals.
Exactly, I mean sure it would take a bit of extra work but...we could potentially avoid fiascos like the abit experiments on the main chain.
Indeed. The comms and the fallout for some users was a terrible cost, despite the extremely interesting information. I am greatly heartened by how many whales participated willingly.
Yes all and all the experiment itself was a success, but having had a safe place to carry it out i think would have been better.
definitely.
One of the things I have figured out during my brief time here is that anything is possible. This is still an experiment so it might be worth a try. I just can't figure out what would stop a person from opening up many smaller accounts instead of one big one.
Ha! You are right about that :) Well, we know that the majority of whales were willing to abstain from participating in voting for Abit's experiment. I don't think it's impossible that they would all agree to the cap. What is it that might keep present and future large holders of steem in one account? Reputation? Interest? Honour? ;) I don't know either...
Too many unknowns. As we are in beta, so the more experiments - the better. However it's necessary to set some formal rules for experiment i.e., conditions, duration, goals etc.. Then the next one may be about linearized reward curve and so on.
I completely agree.
The effect would be this:
People that were near or over that cap, would simply create multiple accounts and use multiple accounts to vote as if there was no cap.
Unless:
We come up with some very attractive reason for people to want an account with more steem power than that and not be able to vote. What is the benefit to powering up farther than the limit? Without determining that then limiting voting power is a short term event at most, as it will only make a difference until big accounts have a chance to power down and create multiple accounts.
Yes, this is it in a nut shell. But what I think many people are missing is that the whales are not against limiting their rewards if Steem will benefit. The 'unless' does not necessarily need to represent the financial loss in curation.
If we could come up with something and implement a cap, then experience huge growth in minnows, it might become too expensive to become a present day whale. So if the original whales are happy.....we have the basis for the entire platform to be dropped down a level in terms of the numbers able to have, reach and use influence. We are potentially running out of time to implement such a thing.
What do the whales need beside consensus?
Stake - they will get bigger returns from a successful steem than anything else.
Reputation - such a position in the steem community that could become a global community.
Prestige - no single act than rejecting further voting influence could help steem more.
Philanthropy - an act of sacrifice in a weary world.
Reward - minimum of inflation protection.
Is there anything else? Is any of that meaningful? It is to me but then, I am an idealist in many ways and I'm not a whale :)
This is a generalization. Some whales are against that. Might that make them kind of jerks, yes. Yet we cannot control or stop that.
Whales are people too so they will come in all kinds of people. :)
I accept that completely.....but what if almost all were up for it and they were able to show their support? What if terms could be reached that made everyone happy? I understand that people are different and perspectives are different.....but I would have thought that the one thing we can all agree upon is that extreme influence harms Steem as a whole and it is wide adoption that makes a success for everyone. I just feel that a solution is there if we make the effort to reach it.
Oh, and I too believe there is a solution.
Yet jumping at what appears to be the solution in the short term I think is likely to bite us in the ass.
If we can come up with a compelling reason someone would want to have power beyond the voting cap, where they still get liquid currency then I believe that could transform this into a more long term solution.
All I can think of for the future is for account verification processes to limit the number of accounts a person can control and/or have levels of what an account can do with/without verification. I well appreciate how difficult it is to implement a water-tight account verification process and also, we'd need to do something interesting to enable privacy to be possible.
That'd be pretty cool. Yet there is no guarantee of a bad actor buying in and then blowing up the idea.
I am fine with the concept, but if we can think of a compelling reason for someone to want to be a whale at that point or above that cap then that would be a good reason.
For the good of steem/it/busy, etc. is one thing?
Yet often they still want money. It could be argued their stake is gaining value, but if they are not voting then they likely are not earning anything liquid, and they cannot actually spend their money without powering down.
As to convincing them... I've monitored some of their activities for months and seen various investigations. Some of them are clearly in it for the money and don't give a big damn about the community as much as being able to use their power how they see fit.
Capping the power will likely not fix the problem in the long run. It leaves itself open to gaming, and in a sense if they do game the system which I fully expect some of them would (because, they do now, and they've been talked to about it and indicated they don't give a damn what anyone else thinks), then it actually could be worse. Right now we can identify them as one account.
Once they have their power disseminated across 50 accounts controlled by a simple program (not difficult to make) then it could be trickier to identify who they actually are. They could then even shell game it.
I see this as looking at the problem with short term vision, and ignoring the long term ramifications.
If we can think of it , we need a compelling reason for them to want an amount of power beyond the cap. If they cannot vote, then they cannot earn curation rewards, which is their liquid income, and there is no benefit.
This is reality. Not everyone gives a damn about the GOOD of the community, or other people. Some of them may speak of the good of the community when it is positive PR for them, but watch their actions and there are some that don't seem to actually care much about that.
I wrote a post perhaps just for brainstorming how we might be able to make such accounts beyond a certain steem power compelling, as there are more problems with the voting cap than the current situation. Yet I cover that in the post.
As I said... I do think we can find a solution, but I do believe that solution should involve making such an account attractive rather than effectively penalizing them for gaining power beyond a certain amount.
Over time more and more people would cross that line simply by using the platform.
Great, thanks dwinblood! I have too. I'll check yours out....it will probably be better than mine :)
It's not better than yours. It is just different... yours asked what the effect would be. Mine is more focused on trying to solve some potential problems that could come with it. I don't know a solution, so more a post to solicit ideas and get people thinking about some of the problems.
Just kidding :) I absolutely love it. Having some more engagement is all I wanted. I'm not foolish enough to think that these ideas have not already been discussed elsewhere but perhaps there wasn't the perception of support or enough people involved. Either way, at least we can say we all tried.
STEEM at 0 cents
Why do you say that...if not a joke? :)
cant cap the steempower's power. can cap an idividual posts payout based on the marketcap at a rolling ceiling
Why can't we cap the power? Let's assume all the Whales and Orcas voluntarily decided it was in the best interest of Steem to cap the voting power. This would immediately place many thousands of Steemit accounts on an equal footing with regards to disbursement of the rewards pool with the possibility of many more being within reach of that level. Perhaps the whales and orcas perceive that to be in their best interests. STEEM at $1000
Bingo. This. But most of all...yiu are SPOT ON when u say people will simply make extra accounts (like most krakens already have..because people like smooth and abit who not only have big whale accounts, but ALSO witnesses...are the real issue here).
Sure you can ASK people to voluntarily do it (like im basically doing...which is to severely cut back my voting max % on nearly everything), but all this means ...kind of like in the gun debate...that those who DONT voluntarily drop their voting power will simply earn more voting power in the system than those good hearted people (who are prob best to give extra sp to in the long run).
Thank God for my idea and a friend building it. It will fix alot of this crappy aspect of this amazing platform.
Making changes that make sense for the success of Steem is not communism . 3) There may be ways to encourage large accounts to remain that way. There needs to be an investor class that cannot use extreme influence in the day-to-day disbursement of the reward pool. In fact, multiple account might be better than that....even though the influence amounts to the same.
Actually the big guys would simply split their account into multiple accounts below that limit, and keep voting business as usual. So there would be a short time effect during the time it took for them to power down and create multiple accounts.
Stupid to artificially limit voting power as more than an experiment without giving some very attractive reason someone in power would want to be above the voting limit. They would need some other benefit that is unique to being that powerful to offset it.
@benjojo..Steem On from a friend who has no opinion, but an interesting question. Steem On!
"Well you've gotta have an opinion!" Vincent
:) Steem On bud!
I shot marvin in the face
The math wuld be change
Indeed, worth it if the outcome is better.
Interesting post, congratulations
Thank you. I believe we can find a solution.
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Making deals with whales is COMMUNISM, SOCIALISM, the Obama sharing the load thing and the alleged leveling the playing field, and it is not capitalism and I believe that competition means whales will be very big with lots of power and I do not want to ask them for a cap because I would not want a cap myself.
That doesn't make any sense to me. Do you not think it is reasonable for someone who has more than they need to choose to share.......this is not socialism, it is philanthropy. Also, i the application of power is detrimental to the whole, do you not think it is reasonable.....if only out of self-interest for someone to self limit? If the whale is interested in benefits that aren't purely financial then a different strategy may yield better results faster.