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RE: A Radically Updated Steem Whitepaper
can you confirm for me that this change to a linear reward system thus means everyone can reward themselves with the full weight of their STEEM POWER?
Yes. Actually more because not all SP votes, so there is a net subsidy being fought over. It's a large incentive to various reward harvesting schemes which bloat the blockchain.
I would say this is not all bad. All the schemes at least keep (some) people engaged in a sort of multiplayer social game. They also pump up the transaction counts where Steem can claim to be the blockchain with the most throughput, a form of promotion. Overall, I think its kind of bad though, but as you say it is still doing reasonably well despite.
That’s another case to add to the generalized point that asymmetrical advantage exists because not all users are equally informed, motivated, or have sufficient economies-of-scale. Disadvantaged from a token ROI perspective are the users who don’t: create sockpuppets, join cartels, and vote (for themselves/cartel) as often as optimal.
The lack of economy-of-scale means that most minnows and even dolphins have no motivation to upvote themselves when they only muster a dollar or two per day for that effort. Thus the whales maintain the asymmetrical advantage in rewards even after the change to linear weighting.
And yet it’s still worthwhile to some of those “disadvantaged” users.
I agree there’s another level of usership which is gamesmanship. But I would argue that is not a popular use case that could involve millions or billions of users.
We also have Yours.org and Kik probably entering the foray. Ned points out they are not rewarding tokens in a decentralized manner. Perhaps ditto for Minds also.