It's time to end the mystery delegations.
By now you've probably seen the news that dLive is leaving Steem for a blockchain that appears to be of their own devising. They appear to have been using Steem to support their development and gather users, all the while secretly working to abandon it in favor of their own system.
I'm sure there will be plenty of posts about that, but I want to talk about the way Steemit Inc. has enabled this by the closed-doors method they use to determine their large delegations. While the blockchain offers large potential of transaction permanency and transparency, many of the transactions with the highest impact on Steem rewards are done completely out of sight of the community, between Steemit Inc. and the developers of dApps, exchanges, and other projects.
Currently these projects are supported through the Steemit Inc. account @misterdelegation, in addition to the 2 million SP that was removed from dLive today:
| Account | Delegated SP |
|---|---|
| @binance-hot | 1,011.946 |
| @bittrex | 10,077.207 |
| @busy.pay | 506,517.828 |
| @dsound | 995,451.082 |
| @dtube | 2,023,891.097 |
| @esteemapp | 505,973.156 |
| @fundition | 1,005,303.922 |
| @mack-bot | 255,162.772 |
| @musing | 338,822.501 |
| @poloniex | 10,077.207 |
| @sndbox | 150,884.195 |
| @spaminator | 2,699,869.612 |
| @steemcleaners | 1,515,917.268 |
| @steemhunt | 1,005,894.668 |
| @steemit-jp | 251,473.654 |
| @steempress-io | 1,005,894.693 |
| @tasteem | 1,005,303.885 |
| @trendings-grace | 344,951.310 |
| @utopian-io | 1,986,477.342 |
While many of these accounts are doubtlessly doing good things for Steem and have the base blockchain layer's best interests in mind, and maybe even all of them do, what dLive has shown us is that a constructive attitude from recipients of Steemit delegation cannot be trusted. Either Steemit did not impose sufficient conditions upon their delegation, or dLive violated them.
Which brings us to the real problem, which is that nobody knows the conditions of these delegations. They're made in secret, and kept secret, and over seventeen million Steemit Inc. SP are being used with no public declaration of the purpose and the conditions. That's over 10% of the active SP on the whole platform.
We're supposed to believe that Steemit Inc.'s process for determining their large delegations works to ensure that they're used for the benefit of the greater community. That belief has gone up in flames today.
It's time that this process became open and aboveboard. We need to know about the conditions and the process for receiving Steemit Inc. delegations, and we need applications for them to be available to any project that qualifies. No more back-channel negotiations. Take the blockchain value of transparency and apply it to Steem's largest business transactions.
If Steemit Inc. is unwilling to do this, hopefully some of the projects I've mentioned above will take it on themselves to offer information on the delegations they're receiving and what is required from them in return.
Logically if you want to encourage a project, you start with a small delegation, then increase accordingly depending how well it does AND after doing background checks on the people running it and discussing their future plans. Obviously, this was never done.
Well the dlive people would just have lied all the way through, I'm not sure these background checks would actually have done anything. We discovered their involvement with lino only a few days ago.
They could lie, true, but if there were minimal efforts to vet whoever is being delegated and being transparent about it, at least Steemit could argue "we checked them out but they lied to us". The public opinion would have been different. The outrage is not only against Dlive, but against the irresponsible delegations too.
These delegations are pretty small in business terms. Valuing them is kind of weird because they're not loans, they're transfers of cash flow from capital. But in general we're talking about a low-six-figure amount for dLive, which seems like a lot to individuals but isn't really a ton in a startup context. I don't think it needs to be done in rounds, or with extensive background checks.
If they've been doing it without contracts, though, that's just awful.
why delegate to exchanges that dont even use the power?! (and actually cant use it to be transparent)
I haven't been able to figure that part out at all, though to be fair I haven't looked all that hard.
@trendings-grace is also confusing, it appears to be an account that just doesn't do anything.
I would assume for bandwidth. If they are making a lot of transactions, during busy times, it might drain them a bit. Better safe than sorry I guess. Tho, exchanges should have enough to power up like 1k STEEM by themselves and save that for a better use.
Makes sense for Binance, but Bittrex has 4200 SP, and Poloniex 2100, so it doesn't seem like they would need it.
Well, I think that its time for STEEMIT INC to take a look at this and fix stuff up.
I have an extremely good guess about it - and it's not for badwidth. However I'm limiting myself to posting only twice a day so I'll send you a link for it only tomorrow .
The exchange delegations all seem fairly small. I assume they are entirely for bandwidth reasons. Steemit Inc. may simply be “gifting” them enough bandwidth to cover the volume of wallet transactions they make as an exchange to ensure liquidity goes smoothly and exchanges do not incur a cost that may prevent them from listing Steem. All speculation on my part, but seems a reasonable premise for those delegations.
I don't know if it's because I post from a tablet, but I struggled to ever get any dLive things to play back. So they won't be particularly missed by me.
The real problem is how dlive took a huge share of the reward pool and ran away. Maybe that's what cause dthe recent STEEM dump.
This is definitely the pragmatic reaction here. Thanks for putting it so well.
I wasn't aware that DLive is leaving steem! Wow, that's gonna be a huge blow to steemit, so many people upload there daily... Or maybe it will have a reverse effect and make DTube even bigger, since they seem to have added streaming capabilities with their last update... Guess only time will tell. Thanks for the info!
I hope that it will cause a better video platform than both DTube and DLive to be created on the STEEM blockchain.
Check out @vimm. Looks like a good replacement project already in process.
Very interesting point you make here. Steemit should indeed make the process transparent for more trust. It is their stake but the skewed distribution is their own fault and transparency would be certainly helpful. And allowing us to even have a word in that would be even better although difficult to achieve. I will try to be as clear as possible with my own 1UP project how the delegation power is being used.
Is there a way to apply for the communities spot dLive vacated? Something you might think about.
Well, I do have some ideas already and spoke to some people but I am all open to your ideas. We can discuss this in private on Discord or openly here. :)
I don't know that I have anything more, just a suggestion. Every time I do open applications for @themesopotamians I end up finding something/someone cool I didn't know about before.
I definitely hope that STEEMIT INC. will be more open with their delegations. They helped build this platform and no matter how much we hope, they still heavily influence it. Development is expected to be done by them, so is a lot of other things. Its time that we started taking things into our hands. I know that some witnesses(especially @timcliff and @gtg) have helped development(@gtg has helped exchanges add STEEM or reached out to them when things were down with their gateways). We need to transition from relying entirely on STEEMIT INC to becoming self reliant. Thats what the witnesses should be helping us with. And having good communities is an important part of this and events like this aren't good for STEEM at all. Maybe this is just another wakeup call that STEEMIT INC needs(not that they haven't had a few already, the chain stopping twice in less than 3 months is a pretty big wakeup call). Hopefully they change their ways and at least involve witnesses in their decisions as well. We are choosing them to lead us, and this is something that the elected leaders should be doing, not some closed door stuff.
On one hand the SP is theirs and they can do whatever they want with it. On the other much bigger tattoed hand, users and investors expect more communication from Steemit.inc.
It's a shitty thing to do but @wa7's whole spiel about "Toxic circlejerking environment" isn't something we should ignore. There is truth in what was said, which i guess was why people are extra pissed off about it, that plus the douchbag thing of hopping on the back of steemit delegation and high tail when it's time to do their own ICO. You should see the self-patting they do in their discord servers. Those people really believed they did nothing scummy.
There's no escaping it, Steemit.inc should treat themselves as a centralized company, we scream decentralization but look to steemit.inc when shit hits the fan. They might as well treat their users as stakeholders because the line is so blur between to 2 now.
I hope they make the deal public. Im sure that itself would open up a whole hornet's nest but not doing it would be worse because nothing wil then change.
None of it was news to anyone, though. Many of us are working on this to the degree that we feel it's important and that we have the ability to do so. Maybe it galvanizes somebody new to put some work into it, I don't know. Personally I think that while it's a good idea to include reducing that particular effect in any retention project spec if possible, it's not among the top five problems I'm looking to solve, except in the sense that it's part of the lack of a diverse class of powerful voters.
@misterdelegation's SP belongs to Steemit Inc. Company decisions should be shared with the community.
It would be nice to see what the process is for their decisions to delegate to app developers. What is the process that one must go through, what promises do they have to make, what are the consequence for failure to follow through on development. If they made the process more transparent they might get a few more developers to actually do some developing of quality apps.
Most times when a large company is looking for a new home, they let the bidders know how many people they will be employing and how long they anticipate at a minimum of being in that location, with that many employees. This is so they can get price cuts on taxes and electricity and other services from the local community in which they intend on moving into. Failure on there part leads to fines and increased fees and taxes on their company. Failure on the part of the community results in a decrease in hired people and eventual shut down of the facility.
It's a mutual support thing, and good for the community and for the business in most cases.
https://steemit.com/vimmtv/@cyberdemon531/delegated-1k-steem-power-to-vimm
Actions such as those of that user, are those that make the community feel in tune with the changes and what to do, if I had steem power to support other options like her, my contribution with the community goes little by little, not everything is steem power, but that helps a lot to be able to demonstrate more and more, what you want to do for the community and have opportunities to make changes, what they say about closed groups, it is true and it is what makes it difficult to emerge as users, and the different projects in the community.
I wonder, how many users are willing to make the community, take the right path, and make the change, that contributes to the community.