Update on the whale buyout proposal
The plan seems to have settled on the following for now:
- The community will continue to discuss the idea of removing or changing curation rewards, independent of any whale buyout. There are valid arguments on both sides of this discussion.
- The community is going to discuss the idea of flattering the rewards calculation from n^2 to n log(n), or something similar (independent of any whale buyout). This would be a different way of reducing whale influence while giving more power to dolphins and minnows.
- The whale buyout will be put on hold for now to see how the above two changes (if adopted) as well as SP delegation and curation guilds play out. It may not be necessary if some combination of other changes would have the desired effect.
- If the idea is revisited at a later date, we will need to find out how to achieve the right balance between having enough incentive for whales to keep stake invested as "investor class" without inadvertently giving them too much as to be disproportionately rewarding them at the expense of the network.
[Edit] Here is a link to the previous 'whale buyout proposal' discussion post:
Whales - Can the community buy out a portion of your influence?
Thanks to everyone that has been contributing to the conversation so far! It has been a very productive discussion, and I am hopeful that we can arrive at a set of changes that will move the platform and community forward to a better place!
There are so many valid concerns in relation to this topic, thank you for sharing the ideas so far.
I can't help but think of the makers of this great invention called Steemit.com as parents of this almost one year old baby... I strongly believe that there's a great need for them to have a lot of power in the sayings around the evolution of their baby. this said, I also believe that for any children, it is important for the parents to learn to listen to their children. Therefore, I can only with the idea of waiting for a while before moving on with proposal 3 and 4. In itself, this is qualitatively speaking very important for our platform. the influx of new people on here may have hugely profound and negative impact on the sustainability of the platform if the parents loose of their control over the direction of the main values and necessary road we are finding ourselves on.
I can't help but think of what happens when a government want to take over a region by sending a super high ration of people voting in their own direction knowing perfectly that this region contains mostly people that are actually going against their grain... I talk about voting here as I don't want to be too heavy in the discussion, there are far worse example of that in history.
I simply wouldn't want our platform to loose sight of its original objectives because of public pressures. Thanks for sharing this important post with us all and sure hope we'll all be able to have a positively constructive dialogue about this touchy by necessary matter.
All for one and one for all! Namaste :)
Well said!
Thank you Greatly Tim for updating us little fishes.
Steem on,
Frank
Wow, interesting and exciting times ahead. @timcliff, this is the first I heard of a whale buyout, what exactly is it? Or perhaps you can point me to the link where I can read about it. Thanks for all you do!
Greg
Here is the post where it was being discussed: https://steemit.com/steem/@timcliff/whales-can-the-community-buy-out-a-portion-of-your-influence
Thank you sir.., I did read this and I think it is a great idea. I thought "buyout" mentioned here was more along the lines of some type of severance pay, lol.
I don't think we could afford that ;)
haha indeed, that is why I had to ask.
How will this work? The only way to do this that I'm aware of is to use something other than Steem Power .. Remember, accounts can divide up SP into more than one account.
[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)
the most beautiful thing I love about steemit is its community and it is unique among so many blockchain projects. everyone is free to say and do anything within his/her power (although sometimes limited by s power) to change how the system evolves despite so many inherent difficulties or challenges. so, thank you Tim and everyone else for contributing to public steem good! :)
What is also beautiful is that as a community we can vote or not vote, comment our opinion or not, and come together at the end with a mostly democratic result.
Frank
Way to go you and snowflake shaking things up hehe ;) Any change to try out sounds good. Thanks for the work in getting this done.
Indeed :)
this is the topic of my next post
my favorite part! :)
I am curious to see where this will bring us. In any case, thank you for the summary.
To the moon (eventually) ;)
Totally! Only the date is unknown ^^
Thank you very much sir @timcliff for the information.
I hope that the decision will be beneficial for all, and that we can work in harmony and in team, that is the best for our beloved platform
Agreed :)