Visualising the Votes For the Top 50 Witnesses.. With & Without The @freedom / @pumpkin Votes.
I was looking at the graphical display of the distribution of witness votes here on SteemReports and noticed the huge impact that votes from the @freedom / @pumpkin account have on witness positions.. So I thought I'd experiment with removing them to see what happens.
As you can see, the top 50 witnesses are displayed below with each of their voters given a different coloured block. The large, dark blue blocks are from @freedom / @pumpkin, a mysterious account that has a large amount of Steem Power. Votes from this account for a witness mean a good chance of making it into the top 20. I have no idea who operates this account though some have claimed it to be a person that was or is part of Steemit inc.
You can see that the huge scale of the Steem Power wielded by this account in many cases actually beats the power of all of the thousands of accounts that are combined in the graphs into one solid light blue bar at the right side of each line. One vote from one account literally has more power than 1000s of others. The multi coloured boxes in the middle of the horizontal lines represent other individual accounts that have a lot of Steem Power and it seems though, that despite the power of Pumpkin, there is something of a consensus regarding who should be in the top 20.
I took this graph and manually edited it so that the pumpkin votes were removed, just to see what would happen to the top 50 witness slots.
The top 20 move around a bit and some make it into the top 20 who weren't in there before. The witnesses marked in red at the bottom of the list would drop out of the top 50 altogether.
What are your thoughts? Let us know below!
Wishing you well,
Ura Soul
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Thanks for a well researched report. I find stuff like this fascinating and the last 2 weeks has opened my eyes as to what steemit "is" as opposed to what i had assumed it was. This has given me a whole new outlook on my investment here and where i need to make changes including witness votes After seeing which side the more vocal witness's stand.
You are welcome! Many witnesses tend to say nothing since they can't please all of the people all of the time.. I, on the other hand, am less interested in people pleasing in the short term and more interested in getting to the heart of the matter to create the clarity that leads to the best outcomes for all. :)
Every witness wants to get a vote from pumpkin. From his last activity in Feb 2018
pumpkin approve witness prcand @prc seems offline for some time e.g. 29 days see here and also the fact he/she still votes for Jerry, so I believe he/she is not part of Steem Inc... just my guess. The rumors say that the pumpkin belongs to @dan which is not entirely impossible.Yes, that is the only explanation I have heard, but I don't know for sure. I think that the 'rules' are meant to be that no-one at Steemit inc can run a witness, but if you have enough tokens to control which witnesses sit in the top 20 then you don't really need to! That said, I would not expect Dan to vote for Jerry.
I did a big post a long time ago on freedom, you might find it interesting. https://steemit.com/steemit/@paulag/unmasking-freedom-what-the-data-can-tell-us-steemit-business-intelligence
Great, thanks! I saw some of those names and reached some similar conclusions when looking at early blocks a while ago. Someone knows! ;)
it is more likely a steemit inc account considering the past witness voting by steemit inc whale accounts
https://steemit.com/steem/@transparency/don-t-vote-for-witnesses-your-vote-does-not-matter
I think with some digging we can find out. I don't believe stinc would vote in the way pumpkin votes. I'd have an easier time believing pretty much anything else.
I doubt it too, but don't have any evidence in any direction really.
if the votes were removed, its doesnt really make a heap of a difference. But, if the votes were just changed to other witnesses, well then you could see a big shake up
yes good point! without this account there would be much more organic competition, which would be a healthy thing!!
Right but that's not removing their effect. up until recently when Steemit only showed the top 50 on the witness page (now top 100) getting your name in the top 50 was a huge advantage as people would vote for you a lot more than witnesses outside the top 50.
Firstly, voting for a top 50 was much easier press a button and done.
Secondly by being in the top 50 the assumption was automatically that you had been vetted and considered a witness who was doing good for steem so people are more likely to vote for them.
To make it a fair comparison you'd need to look at what the witnesses ranks were prior to getting that vote and then model growth in their votes as a sub-50 candidate then a above-50 candidate and see how far they get.
Also I'm sure pumpkin is not the only ninja mined account. would be interesting to see what effect it would be to remove all ninja mined accounts.
I don't know exactly which accounts are due to ninja mining, but it is possible to identify some of them from the early blocklogs I have found.
If you look at the current situation where the witness voting page ends at 100, there is no significant jump above/below that point, but it could just be that we need more time for that to develop.
The longer the witness list on steemit the smaller the effect it will have. If you imagine a top 30 list (when everyone has 30 votes) the easy vote will be to just vote for the top 30 and there would be a big disparity between rank 30 and rank 31.
As you increase the length of the witness list the benefit of being on the page diminishes, but having had it for long means those who are in the top 50 have had a much longer time to enjoy the benefits.
I have always found it interesting that apart from @gtg, @freedom and @blocktrades votes are 'mutually exclusive'.
I wonder if that tells us anything....
What would the order look like when @blocktrades is excluded from the voting too?
And then to even it out a bit more, how would it look if say all 10 top megavoters were excluded? This would of course simulate some sort of voting weight cap that might be an interesting option to explore (although probably easily exploitable).
Founder of the A Dollar A Day charitable giving project.
Yes, I'm sure there's a logic to that and it is deliberate, though I can't say more than that for sure.
I didn't remove blocktrades since they actually run an active witness and it seemed a bit too warping to add that complication in there. I think Andy might do well to make his reports adjustable in future, so we can see what happens when certain votes go elsewhere!
The election of witnesses very much mimicked big party politics in many western democracies until recently. The range of @freedom's choices was all that was being displayed from STINC's interface. It was very much like media coverage traditiomally alloted to smaller political parties.
My feeling is that we are only beginning to see the difference of expanding that list. Maybe it could include all witnesses in some dynamic way? There should be no arbitrary definition of witness acknowledgement other than activity, in my opinion.
Idealy, Witnesses that are inactive for X days would have their votes released. Then @freedom would have to check in more often at least. 😎
Yes, these are both points I have made repeatedly before - I agree totally!
With the stakes they have, they have the right to vote this way. However, it could be detrimental to their own stake if the witness is not performing in the best interest of the blockchain. I cannot really opine on those that would fall out as I am still learning who is who here. I can tell you that I do expect some shifts as more people start to look towards which witnesses are truly governing and being responsible or not. I have also seen, new witnesses like @fulltimegeek gets lots of attention given his vision for Steem going forward. Overall, I think that people finally taking this seriously is great for the future of this ecosystem.
I did some detective work. @smooth is approving/unapproving witnesses.
smooth approve witness timcliff 21 hours ago
smooth approve witness ausbitbank 21 hours ago
smooth approve witness lukestokes.mhth 21 hours ago
smooth unapprove witness timcliff 21 hours ago
smooth unapprove witness lukestokes.mhth 21 hours ago
smooth unapprove witness ausbitbank 21 hours ago
https://steemd.com/@smooth
Some of them have been doing that recently, not sure why.
I've just read over the comments on one of berniesanders posts about the witness voting system being centralized. You commented there as well. There seems to be quite a few improprieties on the Steemit platform.
Interesting. So basically, even though they have so much SP, they really aren't picking the winners. Same top 20 with or without them.
Well that's a comforting thought.
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