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RE: The Tale of the 5 Brothers -- A Voting Power Parable
Good analysis but your example seems to be revised with my data HERE. According to the data, a high power Frank seems unrealistic, and we have a high power Andy. You can check many on the list are big stakeholders and they have high IPR (measurement of utilization of power) with many voting casts.
A high power Andy still can have broad but flatter influences by casting below-100% votes.
Ned is a high power frank. Also Dan's account @dan. Also @jamesc and @val-a . NOt talking trash on them, because obviously they have other things to do besides curate content (like run the company), but according to the amount of votes they cast, they're definitely franks. If they continue to vote according to their current habits, they'll have significantly more influence after the change.
By high power frank, i mean someone with a lot of steem power, currently far below the 40 vote daily threshold.
Just as a side note, I discovered when i was looking for high powered freds on the richlist, that there are a very surprising number of high SP accounts that are "dead freds" ... they simply don't curate at all. There are 2 in the top 10 -- the biggest is @ben who has more SP than bernie sanders. and like 4 more in the top 20.
This is surprising to me... it seems like passing up on free money.
Yes there are many high power Frank too. However, ten (out of over 80,000) powerful Andys already have 60% of total value cast per day, and their multiplying factor between total value cast and actual SP share is 2.67 on average (while top 10~20 has 1.43 and top 40~50 has only 0.75). I guess the cause is a high number of voting cast with the combination of superlinearity. I am really curious the results of this change and will post about it after the next hardfork.
After reading your post and this comment, btw, I think I have one primary criticism. I suspect @smooth had effectively the same problem with the post, which contributed to much of his expressed rancor.
You assume, without backing it up with evidence, that a difference in results automatically speaks to a biased or unfair game. It is possible that you are correct, but without evidence, it could speak to one of two things:
Now, in a very technical sense, these are, in fact, the same thing. The fact that the game being played is biased toward a particular strategy is what makes the strategy objectively good. But when you talk about bias and unfair advantage, you imply a particular causation. Specifically, you imply that the rules of the game were designed to give specific players an advantage. However, the very opposite might be true.
For example, imagine you are watching a game of no-limit hold'em. One professional player is playing against 8 individuals who are recreational gamblers. Over even the medium term, absent some very unfortunate luck, the professional player will almost always be winning.
Now, you might say "This game is rigged! The professional player is winning all the money". And, in a sense, you would be correct. The game of NL Holdem is, in fact, biased to reward the professional's strategy (he tightens up out of position, cbets, punishes limp-callers, etc) and penalize the recreational gamblers.
But when you say "the game is rigged for the pro" you imply that the pro's strategy predates the game. This is untrue. The game came first, and the pro developed a winning strategy. It would be pretty unfair to change the rules in the middle of the game to attempt to cancel out the Pro's edge. The rules were there to begin with, and he put the cognitive effort in to discover and refine an effective strategy.
Also, at the end of the day, its pointless to attempt to revise the rules to deprive the pro of his advantage. Because the whole reason he has that advantage in the first place is that he's better at everyone else there (or willing to work harder) at developing an effective strategy.
@smooth and the other whales who have what you would consider a disproportionate influence have it because they invested a lot of time, effort and thought into the development of a curation and posting strategy that gives them that disproportionate level of influence. Isn't that the whole point of making curation a game?
I agree that they are active curators (with large amounts of VESTS) and their influences are due to their efforts. So one important index in my stats is IPR, which measures utilization of Steem Power. However, we need to look at the Max and Stdev of their votes simultaneously. While @blocktrades has very low Max and Stdev, which means his votes are dispersed to various writers, @smooth 's votes are concentrated to few people. That is, blocktrades has disproportionate power for many while smooth has disproportionate power for few, IMHO.
In addition, this analogy overlooked the basic things--super-linearity (votes on post is squared to calculate rewards).
Yes, it did, but im not completely up to speed on that. This model assumes all the brothers vote on brand new posts, and none of them vote on the same posts.
I actually have really strong opinions on the superlinearity issue, but the main scope of this post was to show that, contrary to what many many people on the platform believe, this is not merely a cosmetic change. Users are not giving up 8 quarters and getting two dollar bills. This is a genuine redistribution of influence.
You can't not have superlinearity in any system that successfully combats Sybil.