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RE: Guardian of the steem universe: A different perspective on the role of whales within steem ecosystem.

in #steem7 years ago

Basically I agree that current design is flawed on some points. However I don't think the proposed solution will solve the problem, or perhaps it will lead to new issues. For example, by capping the influence that whales have now, you're asking them to dump.
I still upvoted because the post leads to good discussions. I upvoted some of the replies as well.

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@abit The proposal will not cap whales's influence, they would have the exact same influence but they will have to use it differently.
I see a lot of similarities with hard fork 16 in that the change in the design of the system looks very different but is in reality not different at all. Whales will still have the power to decide where funds are being allocated. I believe such design will be inevitable for a simple reason that the system as it is won't scale.
Using facebook for comparison, they have on average 40 000 posts every second, how are a bunch of whales going to handle this? It just isn't practical.

you're asking them to dump.

I believe they won't. Because 99.8% of users will finally have an incentive to buy steem power.
This quote perfectly describes the most likely scenario imo

I imagine that would get addictive before long, and people would want more and more STEEM power to increase how much of a reward they can give.

Such proposal would benefit the whole ecosystem greatly.

Interested to hear if you personally would dump? and if so why?

An easy way to game the moderation reward is registering tons of asshole accounts to upvote shitty posts then use the whale account to downvote them; if the upvotes need to be stake-based, the whale can split some stake to the asshole accounts if the overall gain is attractive.

Do you mean whales splitting their account and upvoting themselves with sockpuppet accounts ? If so that would be no different than now, whales can upvote themselves if they wish.

I mean they down-vote their own sock puppets to get moderation rewards.

I see. It's not clear yet how moderation rewards would work. Curation rewards are easy to calculate, the higher the payout the more the curation rewards. I will have to think about a how to calculate moderation reward and prevent anyone from gaming the system.

It's basically the stake holders of a company deciding how to use its daily budget. It's not an issue that bigger holders have more weight in the decision making process. The "giving" part is great. However, when big holders put more % of the budget into her own pockets, simply because they have more weight, it's not ideal. It's worse when squared. From this point, I think

  • the stake-based curation reward distribution algo is flawed
  • downvoting with a good reason should be encouraged

I believe they won't.

I admit that some people buy SP for more influence, however, some others hold SP for interests (before HF16) and curation rewards. I'm not sure how many percentages they are. With different designs there would be different equilibrium points. When high interest is gone, some people sold and some bought, although the price didn't change much, but it seems the down trending stopped somehow, so overall it's not bad. If we kill curation rewards or cap it, sure some will sell and some will buy, I'm just not sure where the new equilibrium point will be.

Interested to hear if you personally would dump? and if so why?

If I see there is an opportunity that I can buy back same stake at a lower price, or I think the price will go down and have little chance to come back in the future, I'll sell some for sure.

The "giving" part is great. However, when big holders put more % of the budget into her own pockets, simply because they have more weight, it's not ideal.

The main thing this proposal is trying to solve is not so much how whales use their vote, like I said whales are doing the job properly. The issue is that 99.8% of users are excluded from the "giving part is great" and this also create a problem to scale, if you have only 0.2% that can give to others.

If we kill curation rewards or cap it, sure some will sell and some will buy, I'm just not sure where the new equilibrium point will be.

The proposal won't really kill curation rewards. It would still be an option, basically you could split your account and earn curation with multiple small accounts. But the idea is to incentivize whales to moderate by giving them a moderation reward. If this reward is higher than curation rewards they would have no reason to not moderate.

If I see there is an opportunity that I can buy back same stake at a lower price, or I think the price will go down and have little chance to come back in the future, I'll sell some for sure.

I understand what you mean but in the context of the proposal you said whales would probably dump if this was to pass, I was curious to know why you think so.. This proposal will create a lot of demand for steem. Like this user said currently there is near zero demand

One other thing I would mention, is that it isn't 99.8% of users who lack incentive to buy STEEM power. The remaining 0.2% have so much of it that they don't need any more, and are much more inclined to be selling their STEEM rather than buying more of it. This means, it's technically 0% of informed users who have incentive to buy STEEM and power up.

If you give 99.8% of people finally a good incentive to buy, the demand will increase a lot as suddently there is a real use case for buying steem and the speculative demand will follow which could send the price very high, which whales wouldn't want this? Curation rewards will look like chump change when their account increases 10-20x in value.

A bigger demand for "moderation rewards" than "curation rewards" could be an elegant way to improve curation on steemit !

The proposal would improve curation a lot because posts would go through a lot more scrutiny. First they would be voted on by a lot more people ( wisdom of the crowd ), then some users would report and finally whales would determine if payout matches content quality.

@abit TRUE !!!

If we kill curation rewards or cap it,

His proposal doesn't even do that. It restructures them so there is an incentive for larger accounts to moderate: "This reward could be replaced by a moderation reward." Obviously, that would require a lot of work to figure out a workable mechanism for that. I've always felt thought, that downvoting/moderating is under-rewarded and therefore the system will suffer from a deficit of this important function being performed. So I think there would be a gain from this anyway.

Anyway, as long as the amount of curation/moderation/whatever rewards being paid out to SP holders don't change, it wouldn't radically change the overall incentive to buy SP. It would just change what tasks you have to perform as an SP holder to earn those rewards.

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