RE: Voting is a popularity contest
The current system of voting and rewards—designed, it seems, to both encourage and reward participation, and reach a consensus on popular content—is largely effective in accomplishing this essential function. It identifies a subset of content as popular and rewards people who produce this content (even when serendipitously).
With the hindsight of 2 years, seems you’ve come to the point of publicly acknowledging that the reward aspect of the voting is mostly[potentially] benefiting “abuse” (rather than being paid out to the best and most important bloggers) as I had predicted in 2016 was the only possible outcome.
Did the voting model seed the site with anything sustainable that could really disrupt the centralization of the Internet? Or was it just a gimmick to obscure the sneaky premine obfuscation of a self-issued ICO? Have you seen SEC Chairman Clayton’s latest warnings? He is warning in writing those who even promote “pump-and-dumps”.
P.S. If you didn’t see my latest blog about the timing of the next crypto winter, you may want to take a read. I have received positive feedback about the content.
Mostly implies a majority. I'm not sure that is accurate (nor that it is not). I still see popular (with stakeholders) content being rewarded, which probably (though I can't be sure) isn't primarily on the basis of kickbacks. For example the #2 Trending post right now is something about helping children and the #3 post (with $900 reward; pretty high for these days) is an online art exhibit. These are probably based on some sort of popularity. I don't think these are necessarily all that unusual.
So I do think there is serious leakage to abuse and serious systemic problems, but not necessarily 'mostly'.
Thank you for the heads up about your post about crypto winter. I will look for it.
I agree that I (we) don’t know how to measure what ratio of “abuse” there is. And then we have to define ‘abuse’ as I guess collusion? Because there’s not really any abuse in the sense that users are just gaming the system protocol as they are (should be) able to in a free market.
I think the consistent point we might be able to agree on is that voting for rewards sourced from a pool shared by everyone, can’t in any possible reformulation of the protocol (other than truly randomized rewards?), prevent the rewards from being inexorably disproportionately more concentrated over time?
Actually perhaps you might quibble about that not being proven, for example arguing that competing cartels would form to create a stalemate? Yet I would argue that such cartel wars are precarious and unstable, because when Godzilla and King Kong fight, they tend to be clumsy (preoccupied focus) and trampled the working order of things around them. IOW, top-down driven things fail overall. Which is essentially my argument against consortium blockchains. In my conceptualization, Steem and EOS are milking machines for the whales to extract from while the pie is expanding, but when the crypto winter comes they’ll be potentially fighting over a shrinking pie. When everyone is making money, there’s less incentive for an out-all brawl, in order to prevent the disruption of flow of gains. But under a collapse scenario, it’s worth risking a fight to winner-take-all as there’s really nothing to lose by trying. America’s melting pot and assimilation of immigrants was held up by the same expanding economic pie mutual incentive, but even that is being eroded now.
Although that concentration happens anyway due to the power-law of distribution of wealth (the wealthy have low expenditures as percentage of net worth so they can accumulate), my goal has been for a long-time to find a way that the whales could not have any adverse impact on the decentralized ledger. They wouldn’t be able to effectively buy influence. Proof-of-work arguably doesn’t entirely accomplish this; and besides it was shown that the transaction fee revenue model can in theory ameliorate the incentive for the longest chain to be unique.
My theme of what I am working on is I posit that the coming crypto winter is going to be the ideal time to build something like Steem that is more focused on real usage (which Steem has somewhat achieved but I think we can do better) and without the whale extraction. Because during the Dot.com crash/winter many hitech people who were unemployed were experimenting in their home offices that became the Web 2.0 innovation and startups. So in the coming global economic downturn which is accelerating probably next year (seriously accelerating in California and Europe), and the posited concomitant crypto winter, we have a huge opportunity to employ people in creative contribution on decentralized ledgers.
My open question is has Steem attained some qualities or could it change to do so, such that it could fulfill that posited role?
P.S. Thanks for the upvote on my crypto winter blog. I’m not lacking funds any more, but I do appreciate that blog post attaining more exposure as maybe it can help others. Also it helps for me to get more followers for any project announcement I might make on Steem. I've decided not to post to BCT anymore after the latest ban several weeks ago. Seems all the (highly capable programmers) old timers such as yourself rarely post there any more. Besides head down work to do.
You are welcome. I might be the only one left doing it :) but I vote/d based on appreciation of the contribution.
I do agree that weighted voting systems tend toward increased concentration. That is readily apparent in stake-voted rewarded block production (DPoS) as well as Steem's stake-voted 'content' rewarding system.
However, it remains unclear to me whether that failure mode is total or if the magnitude of the effect is small enough to be tolerable given sufficient concurrent value creation.
Social trust may remain sufficient given sufficient concurrent value creation. Even in a cryptocurrency system that isn’t debased, the whales can extract value by manipulating the market price and even crashing the price causing panic selling, then repurchasing at the lows.
I presume you also intend that ‘value creation’ can in theory comprise non-monetary forms.
What I’d really like to see is a system succeed based primarily on people using it because they like the capabilities enabled by decentralization, not primarily based on any monetary motivation. IMO, that would be the Holy Grail achievement. We may or may not be able to get that achievement purely without any monetary incentive at all. I would probably not want to risk it, and would try to find some way to enforce that the monetary reward was a long-term “we’re building this together as a global community” theme (because realize most users aren’t getting more than a couple $ per day of earnings any way, so if they were going to get a larger multiplier by HODLing that might be an incentive if there’s sufficient social trust), which was sort of the idea originally behind the 2 year weighted average lockup of STEEM POWER before it was reduced to afair 13 weeks.
But one problem with Steem’s former long-term lockup model was it was unduly penalizing short-term speculation, arguably killing liquidity, and complicated planning/diversifying a crypto portfolio.
I always thought asymmetric debasement was counterproductive. If you’re going to award tokens to grow the value of the blockchain, then debase the money supply for everyone. So then you’d only need to lockup for longer-term those who you’re rewarding with free tokens, not those who are buying free trading tokens.
There’s other issues also such as the fact that if you have any common enterprise issuing tokens even for “free” (i.e. at no monetary charge) then they’re probably securities. So that is another reason Steem had to reward based on decentralized voting, but again I think we may agree that might be a relative weakness in terms of reducing social trust as compared to a system the whales couldn’t so easily extract value from. So finding the solution that solves both of those issues I think one of my major insights, which btw if and when I launch many/most will likely think “wtf?” and probably think I have made a silly insight because I won’t have a premeditated document (unless this is it) like one Larimer wrote laying out the entire scheme in advance (but that will be if because they didn’t entertain the possibilities of the long-term plan that will surprise later). Which is as designed, because for one reason there shouldn’t be any profit expectation if we want to be sure we’re not issuing securities. I have some other insights also, such as a design for ledger that decentralizes the objectivity of consensus. One thing to keep in mind is that there’s distinction between law and reality. Clever is the one who can leverage that distinction. So much work to do. I hope I can get there…
Don’t currently have the means to send you a private message, so I’m sharing this with you. No reply need. FYI only.
Note I added a new section to my latest blog which seems to project that the altcoins are going to near zero again in the next crypto winter! Must see!