RE: The Witness (Circle Jerk) n-Person Prisoner's Dilemma, and the richlist Witness Votes - Some solid numbers for you to digest
That's the current rules. You are making best use of them, as you see it. The question is, are those rules optimal for a beneficial equilibrium?
I say, it is not, because it encourages incumbency. I think the platform needs frequent churn. So this is the rules I would propose:
- When you post an
update_witness, in this you imply that your stake in the account should be applied to yourself only. This is kinda implicit, but this makes it quantitative. - When a witness is active, the other witness votes in the account are not counted. This prevents you influencing the witness schedule with a potentially large stake.
- When the account is activated, the ability to power down is disabled. This prevents you using the income to, as the controller of the account, influence the witness schedule.
The results of this would be as follows: At some point, a witness would decide they want to spend their witness pay on a project they have been talking up. This then shifts them out of the moral hazard of having a vested interest in maintaining their position as witness, and they then focus their resources on implementing the scheme. Usually the scheme will also make them money.
By falling out of the witness schedule, during power down, for however long they wish to do this, they allow backup witnesses to move up, and become beneficiaries of their successful winning of votes from their election campaign.
If they run their witness well, of course they can stay in there as long as they can keep their votes. But naturally there will come a point where they want to 'retire' for a while, and have the ability to spend what they earned.
Then others can get the same opportunity as well.
The witness schedule should churn more, and the rewards pooling in it, should act as a brake on the 10% of the rewards pool, or so, that it comprises. The longer witnesses stay in, the more they hold liquid assets off the market. This helps reduce selling pressure, and benefits the community indirectly.
It's a little bit like, when you get elected into parliament, you have to divest yourself of assets relevant to your field. This is cognate to the liquidation of Steem Power. If the minister of health has shares in a drug company, if they are caught with this, they can be permanently banned from office. And rightly so, because they can make rules that unduly benefit themselves.
This last point, in a nutshell, is why I believe that this is the long term sustainable, and beneficial way, to eliminate the influence of people like Dan and Smooth, who are or have at various times been earning both as a witness, and a big wheel. It's corruption, pure and simple, and you know it is.
It looks bad to the people outside the platform, and the people inside. It is the incentivisation of abuse of privilege, of earning an income that, in terms of risk and capitalisation (rental of servers, maintenance of server) is relatively low, and the benefits of colluding with Steemit, Inc. which is supposed to be the one job you guys are doing, flipped on its' head.
What you are proposing would just end up with a bunch of users creating sock puppet accounts, and voting for themselves just with a different account.
Preventing a power down only stops new earnings from being used for voting, but the new earnings are only a very small percentage of the stake at play for witnesses voting.
A lot of witnesses need to power down too, to cover the costs of being a witness. If you prevent them from powering down you limit witnessing to only the people that can afford the costs out of pocket.
Churn is great when it means newer more active and valuable witness are replacing older less useful (or more lazy) witnesses, but churn just for the sake of churn is a horrible idea. There are a lot of witnesses who have been around for a long time, and continue to add a ton of value by remaining a witness. To throw them out just for the sake of putting in someone new would be a big mistake for the health of the platform.
The real goal should be for the platform/community/stakeholders to identify the best possible people for witness and to vote them to the top. The current system is not perfect, but it does a decent job at that. I don't believe that the proposal you are suggesting does a better job at that, and in my view it makes it worse. If you have technical proposals that you believe would actually make this better, I will evaluate them under this context. I am not locked into the idea that things are perfect and cannot be improved.
I really agree with what you say about powering down being an important source of income for some witnesses, and to prevent that, is like taking away a politician's community derived expenses. It would effectively mean the witness is then more susceptible to (hidden) bribes and corruption from more wealthy people.
Yes, great point!
Hey, to be perfectly honest, I don't believe that any of you, especially those in the top 19, are ever going to agree to anything that threatents the incumbency.
It's got so calcified it's sick-making. I absolutely disagree with your last paragraph. What is a witness doing so closely to Steemit that they are answering Condenser issues on their behalf?
Not even SLIGHTLY a conflict of interest.
The campaign against your cosy camerilla will continue, until I get bored of throwing cats at you, and believe me, it will probably not take very long to get boring.
In case anyone is reading this, this ^ is why I am doing this shit-stirring. This smug bastard who thinks thtere is no conflict between working as a volunteer answerer of issues, speaking on behalf of the company
WHILE BEING A WITNESS.
If I can't manage to make you see sense, I'm going to at least show everyone what a bunch of hypocrites you are. Speaking community concern out one side while sucking up the juice from the other side.
What's interesting is that I actually don't see what I am doing as an issue. Maybe I am giving you more ammo in your crusade here, but I legitimately don't see a conflict of interest with what I am doing.
As a witness, I am heavily involved in the happenings of Steemit.com, since it is currently the main platform that uses the Steem blockchain. I am also to a lesser extent involved with Busy.org and a few of the other platforms as well.. In my view these things actually make me a better witness, so it is interesting that we have such differing views.
As far as GitHub, it is a public repository so anyone is allowed to comment on issues. I don't know which specific interaction that we had which you are taking issue with, but I do frequently help out with issues and filter out ones that people in the community open which are against the posted rules of the repository in the GitHub repo.
I also submit pull requests to make changes to the website, and help out with supporting users who are having technical issues with the website as well.. I'm curious if you see those things that I am doing as good or bad from the perspective of being a good witness.
How you got into a place where you are serving two masters, I don't know. But I am beyond caring. You are the last straw for me. Your duplicity and obliviousness are absolutely breathtaking. The rules put everyone in a position where either they go suck some whale's @#$% to get the issue elevated, or they just sit there and bear with it and build up that load of anger like I've got sick of dealing with. I'm not normally this mouthy, but duplicity, two faced, oblivious, complacent, self satisfied people make me want to smash my screen with a crowbar.
I don't see it as serving two masters. To a large extent, the goals of the STEEM/SP stakeholders, and Steemit, Inc. are in line with each other. If Steemit can take off and become a platform that has billions of users, and the price of STEEM moons - that is good for everyone. If Busy.org or some other platform gets us there, that's fine too. In most of the scenarios that I am aiming for, all of the stakeholders benefit.
There have been times when I have been "at odds" with Steemit. One example is HF 17. I did not pick up the hardfork, because I did not agree with Steemit's position on it. I worked with them (and several of the other witnesses) to negotiate a solution, and we got HF 18 - a compromise.
A lot of your views are based on assumptions of malicious intent and mutually exclusive win/lose scenarios. There are definitely selfish people here and users/groups that will exploit the system to their own ends, but I do think that more often than not most people that are here want the platform to succeed.
I'm not sure where/how you got your view of me, but I really don't think I'm that bad of a guy. I feel like you have created your own view of what you think I am like, that isn't really in line with who I am. I'm happy to talk to you more and explain my views on things. Hopefully if you get to know me, you will realize that I'm not as bad as you made me out to be.
I do get where you are coming from with your frustrations though. I've only been here a year, and I have gone through periods where I ranted about tons of issues that I saw with the way things were. Things are by no means perfect, and there is lots of room to improve.
Despite our obvious disagreements, I do get the impression that you are saying all this stuff out of a genuine interest to make this place better. While I don't really agree with your approach or views, I think that is enough for us to get along.