[Gedanken] Upvotes, Markets, and Other Possibilities

Upvote

What is an upvote? It is simply a right to provide market liquidity to a optionalized financial instrument (Post/Comment) in the Steem ecosystem. The holder of an Upvote is a market maker. By using an upvote for any content we do not not have any downside risk, except for the risk of no payoff. As been shown by various games of chance, @safecrack, they create an option that last for 24 hours. The payoff is the author reward minus a small fee. So an upvote provides author value, but there is also a curation reward which is the payment for providing liquidity for the author. A very small hedge for not winning.

Markets

How to create a market for the price of Steem. It always seem to me, the lowly Steem Power holder that I am, that I would like to take a short position on the price of Steem. Or another way to look at it, is to go long on inflation of Steem faster than the value of the dollar.

The market would be a binary option (Post) of the price of Steem from the price of the day before. So if you go long the price you are saying the price will be higher than the day before. If you go short you are saying the price will be lower. The payoff will be the author award. How you select is through the comments. You would have one long comment and one short comment.

One of the problems is the data feed. You could have a registered list of posters push the data onto the blockchain, The author of the option would randomly select the data feed(s) from a seeded (published in the original post) PRNG (also in original post), so that it can be audited.

You could also add a theta component to the option such that the closer to the close of the market you get the less payout you have. This algorithm could also be published.

Which may even require auditors to verify outcomes of the authors.

Possibilities

Something blew me away, @mindhunter set a trap for an original content bot @cheetah. It was extremely funny, hours later I'm still grinning :). But seriously, If the IPFS was up it would make those bots go away, because we would want to link and copy all that information to maintain the integrity of the data. Another thing is, if everybody would play wack-a-bot it might be a way to farm bots for a little extra SP. It may even spark an arms race.

Steem Lover

I love Steem for it's possibilities, not just in the social media aspects, but for the substrate it which we can be build a more exciting future.