RE: A simple, radical change to Steem that could fix most of our problems.
Ack, this isn't processing for me.
If the system relies on taking rewards from inactive users and distributing them to active users, then the system is dependent on a continuous supply of inactive users. And thus doesn't really work at all in the long run.
When you talk about staking advancing the platform, you're making two contradictory arguments: that the Core Game is inherently valuable, but people won't play it unless (money available in the game) > (money put into the game) * (1 + inflation rate). Those can't both be true.
We have a lot of voluntary players already, and the idea that it would just revert to PoS is not consistent with the choices many Steem users are already making. If the Core Game is inherently valuable, or can be made so, then it will attract users when it's at par with staking. If it isn't, then we're all living a lie already, an unsustainable one fed by Steemit's unused stake.
That's essentially the bet we're all making here, and while the white paper is a wonderful marketing tool it's not a proposition we have a lot of empirical evidence for. The main evidence is that we're here.
But... at the very least, bid bots distribute wealth a smidge better.
This is the one really strong argument I see against this plan: that bid-bots are good. Or more broadly, that having a market for our core resource provides opportunities for entrepreneurship and for intelligent buying, which lead to upward mobility. But the bid-bots are the market-makers, at least until something comes along to replace them.
I would be interested to see your rebuttal for that particular passage about the prisoner's dilemma setup.
Basically restating some of the above: if the Core Game has inherent value rather than just being a complicated method of rewards payout, then people will choose to play it. There isn't a PD here because "defecting" is strictly worse than not doing so if the social/content mechanism has positive value. If the social/content mechanism does not have value, then Steem is a fraud and none of this matters.
You could look at my system as an experiment designed to test whether that's true, I suppose.
The main disconnect I have with this, and is relevant to PD, is about the behavior of current high staked whales, some self voting, some delegating, active, etc. You've heard even from the whale's mouth quotes like "why am I manually curating and delegating to groups like a sucker while other whales just vote themselves without a care for others?" It's certainly not because they are making the core game better for themselves. They are making it better for others, at their own expense (opportunity cost wise).
I suppose you are saying that the whales that engage put a monetary value on their engagement with others which is higher than just self voting, but I don't think that's really true. I believe that some of them acknowledge that the platform can only survive if there's enough of them contributing to making the core game better for others (and attracting users). This is a hard statement to show support for, admittedly. It's rather based on statements from certain whales and thought experiments like these.
Having trouble with this. I'm interpreting this as meaning that the following two statements can't both be true:
Not too sure about the formula, may need clarification. But I think I'm starting to see that the difference in our lines of thinking lie in the belief about why we are here today.
Is it that high stake actors are valuing social interaction over the value of their self vote? Or is it that they believe that the platform can only succeed if they forgo immediate gains for spreading out stake to others?
Hmm I would say the perceived value of the game... depends on the actions of its participants. And depends on the value available in the game as well.
A particular whale who thinks he can use that argument to sway people into enriching him at everyone else's expense.
Anyway, I'm not sure if I can explain this better without going back to to the premise of everyone voting. And I really do mean everyone, not just Steemit. You wake up in the morning to discover that every Steemit account has decided to use its outgoing vote. No self-voting in any form, but also no sitting inactive. Essentially the utopian ideal here.
Does the system work? Your argument suggests that you think it doesn't. What I'm building here is a model Steem, a smaller one where everyone who participates values their outgoing vote over their self-vote, because otherwise they wouldn't be participating, they'd be in the larger basic PoS system on the same coin.
If the scaled-down system doesn't work without pushing money into it from the outside, then neither will the idealized full-scale one.
And if it doesn't then we need to be quietly panicking about that instead of other things.
Gotcha. See, I'm arguing that the idealized system does work, but that it involves the voluntary choice to prefer giving out to keeping to one's self. You say this is unsustainable, but I am saying it is not. The setup forces no alternative.
It could be that this is the reality, to which your response would be: how can a system designer set up something so wrongheaded to rely on an entire group to make individual "sacrifices" to achieve a societal optimum?
This is a fair point. However, I believe this to be the reality, and maybe an either optimistic part of me or an amused part of me thinks that this is why I like this experiment.
The other reason I think this is that your proposed solution isn't that far off from right now. People can opt for staking by having someone provide an auto voting service that does exactly what I described at the beginning of our discussion. Ok, I know, it's not the same because of the stigma. But don't you think people will look at the choice of taking the stake option in the same way?
Now I'm confused, because I'm pretty sure that's also what I'm saying. Or at least hoping.
As I understand it you've been saying that the participatory system needs more money in it than the participants' stake to work, which seems like it's exactly the opposite of that.
Where am I wrong here?
Odd. I've been scratching my head about what happened since we are saying the same thing when it comes to the staked reward pool. I suspect it's my attitude towards the inactive users: I would rather see them go, than into the staking scheme. And that's going to cause the crash you refer to if we were to forcefully remove them. And I'm okay with that.
Let me then go back to the actual proposal. We think the result would be bid bot delegators would switch to stake mode simply because they are chasing rewards and they get more if they use stake mode for the same delegation. So we suspect bid bots would collapse overnight, assuming rational behavior. But it doesn't actually get rid of the "self voting" problem, it just hides it. So this was a previous question of mine, won't people be just as upset?
I believe that staking behavior will affect the steem price. The more that do self staking, the less the value. The synergy you refer to must be about those that view the staking as great and want to jump in to stake themselves. But I argue that this is not a synergy. I argue this is like a dividend that is leeching from the value provided by the core game.
Oh... Dividends attract investors too and there is a precedent in the stock world... But in the form of self voting? What % does that amount to? And is it reasonable? Interesting... But if it's a dividend, shouldn't that be applied across the board regardless of whether you participate or not? Oh... the inflation paid to SP holders that are not part of the rewards pool already functions this way.... Thinking out loud here.
Personally I'd be fine with that too, but you're never going to get the key witness voters to support it.
To be honest, I've never understood why you guys are so upset. Things like the early-voting bonus, sure, but basic self-voting is fundamentally a null behavior.
And now you're where I was right before I wrote the post, I think.
Kind of. But my conclusion of my musing (without having pulled any data yet) was that being paid inflation allocated to SP holders is the dividend and is enough. Inactive users do not deserve more than that even though the game allows it.
The objection to self voting really is about the desire for less inactive participants, or about less activity that is "like inactive behavior". You say self voting is null behavior, which I understand from the amount corresponding to their stake. But I still feel that this isn't true if viewed from valuation in USD, after the market reacts to the current voting behavior.
Let me ask another question which I think might be interesting. How will we be able to evaluate the intrinsic value of our ideal interaction / the core game with active participants in the proposed system? The steem price lumps both together, and I posit that the inactive participants affect the valuation.
The interest that comes from the changing vests:SP conversion? I don't see why anyone would stake here if that was all they were getting. It's much less than the base inflation rate.
Basically the same clumsy way we do now: by counting activity and search engine ranks and so on. If I can come up with a truly good way to value social media networks I'll sell it to Google for a billion dollars and it won't matter if Steem is sustainable cause I can keep it as a retirement toy.
The Steem price doesn't do this and I doubt it ever will.