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RE: Update on the whale buyout proposal
[Edit] This proposal is completely separate from the 'whale buyout' idea that had been discussed. It was another suggestion that was brought up in the process of discussing.
@smooth and @clayop can probably explain this better than I can, but I will try to explain what I have gathered from the discussion:
If you have a whale with 1000 MV and small dolphin with 10 MV, if they each vote on a post - the whale is not voting with 100 times as much influence, they are voting with 100^2 as much. By using a less exponential reward formula (such as "n log(n)"), then the difference between a whale vote and a dolphin vote would not be as exaggerated.
Would be nice if the solution did not incentivize vote Spam.
(EDIT: not correct, correction below)
Thanks timcliff for clarifying off-line.. Basically we are not looking at vote Spam. I think we agreed: It is technically not correct to say dolphins and minnows get more influences. The reason: now a dolphin and minnow can vote on a high paying post and see the price move more under n^2 just like the whale does. All accounts are equal based on their Steem Power. And yes n log(n) would treat balances fairly too.
IIUC, this is precisely why the n^2 curve was adopted... the idea was to create a two tier protection against abusive self-voting.
For whales (who have enough influence to use their vote to assign non-trivial rewards on their own) the idea was that they would police each other with downvotes.
However, the assumption was made that non-whales would not be able to be organized enough to police themselves, and that the whales would be unwilling to devote a level of time and energy sufficient to police all of the non whales. So an n^2 curve was adopted to make sure non-whales did not have the power to assign a significant amount of rewards without consensus.
These assumptions, however, have not been borne out by time. There are institutions on steemit (like steemcleaners) that monitor such things. For example, the recent ubg spam thread and the "whitespam" thread by steemvoter. The latter was getting downvoted even in the absence of upvotes as a prophylactic measure.
Even with mere linearity, the typical user would still have to spam comment, then upvote the spam to get a non-trivial portion of the reward pool. this plan would die in the womb when such spam was detected and downvoted by observant community members.
Which part does that / how?
Under this algo, someone with large stake is going to create a bunch of accounts, spread out SP between them, then setup a bot to auto-vote when it sees their main vote. Whales can be dolphins or minnows.
Are we still talking about the algorithm with two classes of SP?
(investor class above 250 MV and regular users below that)