RE: Argument against (completely) proportionally linear effective voting Steem Power
This was part of the original design to discourage alternate accounts which would make the social aspects of the blockchain harder to be effective, encouraging a one human one account bias.
I don't really see this as a necessity or a benefit of superlinear. Alts can be made just the same. Yes, they can't split stake across them but that didn't give an advantage in linear anyway.
it's in the interest of the chain to have a large amount of Steem tokens powered up into Steem Power.
There's already an incentive for that. Power up to participate and also get part of the inflation automatically. Do we really need more and do we really expect more to do so with a bump like this?
If you want more of a say buy in. If you're powering down it should hurt your ability to vote.
You already get more say the more you stake. Powering down does reduce voting ability. I see you want the cost to be greater, but I don't really see it doing much.
I've heard that the whales should not be trusted, should be stopped, etc.
That's because many of them are acting greedily without the interest of the platform. But mind you, not all of them are doing so. Yes they are entitled to do what they want with their stake, but if it's hurting the long term prospects of the platform they really have to take a good look in the mirror at some point. I also heard the line "well they already made enough by buying in early, whatever they get in addition is just gravy". Not sure how much truth there is there but it could explain quite a bit.
On a separate note, doesn't this also encourage a group of people to delegate all to one giant account for more influence? (And find a way to split the result appropriately)
Yes, it's about adjusting the cost / benefit curve. It doesn't do a whole lot but it's better. It's good for things to be better, even if not by much. It perplexes me why people are not willing to make some steps in the right direction, instead insisting on doing the whole journey in one go.
The alts situation is important in my opinion. Of course you can always create alts, as many as you want if you're willing to pay. That was allowed unfettered in the blockchain design because of the stake splitting cost.
Concentrating SP into an account by delegation would be more effective without an additional rule change, that's true. I guess in effect it would make bid bots even more attractive. There could be a supplementary rule with this change, delegated SP does not get the n^1.2 bump in voting, it stays at n^1. It should be remembered in this context that stake delegation did not exist in the original incarnation of the algorithms and so additional balancing may be appropriate.
There are lots of additional and alternative possibilities. What's clear to me is that something fundamentally beneficial was lost in moving from n^2 to n^1
There's admittedly something attractive about penalizing stake splitting in terms of ease of tracking, but it also seems that we are pretty good at figuring out which alts are likely to be together due to how they act. In the end stake being split or not we can judge each alt independently as well. But I think we will likely agree to disagree about whether the alt splitting is truly a problem or not.
Yes if 1.2 goes, I agree we should penalized delegated stake. Might be a little awkward to implement though. Or more likely just to remove it altogether... I see, good that we never had delegations with n^2 in the past.
I would like to know more about this. Were more people staking? And back then how was it in comparison to the market? I suppose the market wasn't super exciting then.
I understand that trending and most payouts were more or less in control by large stakeholders. Curated posts that made it were supposedly higher quality. There were no bid bots but I can't imagine that they would go away if we brought the rules back. At least one whale serves to benefit from passively running one off their own stake. Is the reason there were no bid bots that nobody set one up or that it really made more sense to collude into curation agreements (I am hearing that was happening and was beneficial but I don't know much about the math there even though I was trying to work out how the stacking might work)?
Another question is that back in n^2 times, there were much fewer people also right? Would it still "work" with many more small stake people in the platform?