A smart-contract for a one-off whale
This is a significant improvement of my previous idea aimed at bootstrapping reputation. This time we kill two (or even three) birds with one stone:
- we make it attractive for dolphins to engage and play the role of a whale,
- we don't require a newcomer to invest anything,
- and we get rid of the risk of being flooded with advertising.
In short, we will turn a dolphin into a one-off whale.
Use case
Let's assume I'm a dolphin and I stumble upon a good yet unnoticed post by an author who has little recognition on Steem. What can I do? Of course I can upvote the post but this will add just a few cents to the payout (in may case it's about $0.18) and the post will still be buried deep down the list. I could ask @dragonslayer109 to add it to daily gems and hope for the best. Sometimes it works but it's highly inefficient.
But what if I really believed in the value of a newly discovered post and wanted to put my own money on the line? Right now I have no way to do it. So we have a good post, an aspiring author who needs some encouragement and a dolphin willing to do much more than just an upvote - he wants to risk his own money. Surely there must be a way to utilize this energy.
The smart-contract
Imagine a smart-contract that works like this:
- A dolphin (some reputation is required) tops up an unnoticed post with her own Steem Power and as a result the post behaves as if it was upvoted by a whale - it becomes visible to a wider audience by being promoted in the hot category ranking.
- If the post is successful and gets further upvotes from other users (e.g. the post ends up with a payout at least twice as high as the dolphin invested) she gets her Steem Power back (maybe with some extra bonus, e.g. 10%).
- If the post fails to get further significant upvotes, she loses her Steem Power - it gets burned by the blockchain.
As a result, the dolphins can, to some extent, relieve the whales from the cognitive effort of curating more and more posts. The dolphins will start having more tangible impact. And new authors risk nothing while they can benefit tremendously - their reputation gets bootstrapped.
As a dolphin myself, I would be very eager to engage in this form of more active (and risky) curation.
What do you think?
dolphins should be granted with some extra steem power, because some high quality posts are being thrown into garbage
This is not a viable solution IMO. The whales cannot be expected to just give away their investment. But I think the dolphins should have the opportunity to earn Steem Power in this way - by taking the extra risk.
@innuendo, I think this is advantage for many authors that were not yet noticed by the community, people like me.
Interesting idea! Thank you innuendo!
It is an interesting idea, not sure how easy it would be to implement.
I'm wondering, when you talk about burning steempower, would that effectively remove steempower from the pool? Because than even choosing bad posts would be a benefit to the others, as it would increase the value of all the other steempower... (small effect as only a very small percentage of all available steempower will be burned in a year, but still...)
I haven't thought about technical details yet but I'm sure the devs can work it out. We could use either Steem Power or Steem Dollars for this purpose. The main thing is to make the dolphins risk something, otherwise this will be abused.
It would have to be steem dollars. Your steem power is out of reach until you power down
Can you evolve more your idea?
Please supply more specific questions. What part of the idea is unclear to you?
This is very interesting idea. Would this work like leverage? I'm a little confused, because when I upvote a post, I use my full Steem Power, and presumably the author has already upvoted their full Steem Power. How would transferring my Steem Power to them increase the reward? It sounds like it could be promising if possible, although I personally would probably find this quite risky.
It will be risky - it's some sort of a betting game.
Basically my idea boils down to this: you have the possibility to risk some of your Steem Power (SP) for the privilege of presenting somebody's post (or your own post) to the whales. If they like the post, you win and get your SP back (plus some bonus). If they don't like the post or ignore it, you lose your bet and your SP is burned.
It should have said steem dollars. It couldn't be done with steem power.
Also
I LOVE YOUR NAME LOL
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The issue here is that you can up vote your own post and so it's unlikely they can revoke the ability to "top up" your own. (Although maybe you can, I'm no techy)
Also I think there shouldn't be a chance to get your money back as your top up will contribute to your curation reward if the post does well, and authors could just start paying each other to top up their content with the promise to reimburse them if they don't get their money back. This would be an abuse of the system and put a lot of crap on trending.
You might be right. I haven't really thought much all possible ways to abuse this concept.
Simply Great Information and Presentation