Fixing Steemit With Baby Steps (Part 1: The Vault)
Pipe Dreams Die Hard
I make a lot of bold claims about how Steemit should operate, but what are the chances that these grandiose ideas take root? My magic 8 ball says, "Outlook not so good." The best ideas are small and easy to implement. Once enough of them are put in place it has the same effect as the previously unattainable plan. Not to imply that my plans are impossible to achieve, I'd just rather not have to wait for results.
Blind Trust
The biggest fault of Steemit is the honor system it's based around. We blindly trust investors to distribute 75% of the inflation pool fairly. We vote for investors to be witnesses for 10% and we give another 15% to investors just for being investors. Everything about this site is centralized around investors. Blah blah blah I've said this all before.
Solution: The Vault
We need to change the rules of savings accounts or make a new kind of savings account. I'd call it "The Vault". The Vault would have the same cash out rules as vested Steem Power. It takes 13 weeks to cash out and you'd get 1/13th per week. Whenever it was determined that an investor was abusing their Steem Powers there would be a forced transfer of Steem Power to The Vault. This way trolls would lose their ability to exploit the system for a while.
At the same time I think The Vault should have an advantage. Instead of awarding 15% of the inflation pool to vested Steem Power holders, all of that reward should be allocated to The Vault. This helps decentralization by forcing investors to choose one or the other without getting both at the same time. It would also make it so trolls and innocently convicted investors would have little to complain about. They'd still be getting rewards.
Honestly, the more I contemplate this idea the better it becomes. Why should we be double rewarding Steem Power? Also, reallocating the 15% reward to The Vault will make the interest payments higher. The amount of Steem in The Vaults is guaranteed to be significantly less than all total Steem Power. This would create an interesting balancing act of choosing between platform power and traditional interest returns.
The original design was based on rewarding and empowering those whose interests are aligned with the long term success of the network. Only being able to vote with vesting stake should motivate people to vote with the long term in mind, and the partial protection from inflation encourages people to vest their stake and think long term also. The vesting period was originally much longer than it is now, which may be part of why we're seeing so much abuse of voting power for short term gains now.
The change to a linear reward curve also decreased the incentive for consensus on upvoting quality content, though the original curve may have been a bit extreme. I think one of the biggest problems is the lack of curation rewards for downvoting. There's a major spam problem and yet we're relying on people to charitably burn their voting power in order to solve it while all the other curators get paid.
Agreed, thanks for setting @edicted straight.
Let me get this straight.... they actually changed rewards TO LINEAR at some point? This just gets better and better.
There has to be a system that further rewards the Steemian to improve curation, content quality, and inversely remove junk, spam, and other non-value reducing activities like plagiarism, etc.
Education and long term investors are 1 way of doing it, the other way would be a system of rules that incentives like a half way between linear and some gradiant geometrical growth. Best would be a hybrid of both.
I would also propose the reward curve be dynamically calculated and proportion to the number prior day:
Just my $0.02 SBD