Does it make sense to force some decentralization?
STEEM is too centralized. We've all heard that before, but I think something to consider is that this isn't just a problem with STEEM. Lots of cryptocurrencies are highly centralized as in just a few people have the vast majority of the coins.
Thinking about this further though, I can't help but feel like because of the core functionality of STEEM, centralization is a larger problem here than with other cryptocurrencies, since with most other cryptocurrencies(not all) holding the coin doesn't give you the ability to earn more coins, but in the cases where it does, I don't know of any where you can earn as much as you can with STEEM(via self upvotes). Of course for a lot of us, that might be what you like the most about STEEM, but I think at the macro scale, I wonder if this could be a system breaking issue.
So I've been thinking if there could be a "fair" way to make decentralization a part of the actual law(code) here. Like what if self upvote weight was also on a cooldown timer where when you upvote yourself you deplete a "selfish" meter, so the next self upvote, if it occurs before the timer has recharged, will return a certain amount of that upvote back to the reward pool.
I immediately thought up the exploit as soon as I thought that up, which would be to just make 10 accounts and upvote each once with your "upvoting account", or you could spread it out and mix it up. Hmm. Maybe along with that, there's another metric that measures whether you're voting for the same people or not, and while it maybe never make these upvotes not valuable at all, just makes them less valuable at the extreme than a 25% curation reward. I could maybe see something like that working as long as it takes pretty extreme conditions to get to that, like you have to be voting on just a few people over and over and over to get to that point. Nothing to try and be too oppressive, just a deterrent. Make it more trouble than it's worth sort of thing.
The reason I'm even thinking about this actually has to do with the thought experiment I had a few days ago with this post where I was imagining a future with $300 STEEM. I couldn't help but think self upvoting would be a MUCH bigger issue if that were the situation. But possibly not because the market cap would be so much larger that it would take titanic moves to move the gauge. Depending on how decentralized things were at that point and who was selling and how much I suppose a balance would be struck. Maybe I'm worried about nothing.
It just feels like lately regarding STEEM, we're just playing the waiting game. We want to hear news, developments, advancements, but the bears are still out and we're still in survival mode, so it might be a while. I guess I'll keep imagining apocalyptic scenarios over here by myself. How are you all feeling about where things are? Do you think we should program decentralization in?
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