RE: Self-voting user list since HF19 - PART 3 (potential comment abuse)
No doubt this is a work of a genius, and I respect that genius, if not the necessarily the morality, depending on which way it goes.
To me, if this system isn't changed soon though, it demonstrates that it is a Ponzi Scheme. It's really disappointing to have just discovered something so promising, only to realise it's possibly not what is seems!
I hold onto the hope that something changes in the right direction to demonstrate our fear is wrong. I realise you're convinced already.
I think the first steps would be, along the lines you've proposed:
To increase the power-down period again.Perhaps gradually extending it by one week every month (set in software in the next hard-fork).
Prevent (or mandate) witness self-voting
Prevent (or mandate) direct self-voting on comments and posts
Perhaps some indirect self-voting could be discovered through tools, and somehow become a 'proof of work', useful mining operation.
Agreed 100% I am quite sure it is a ponzi scheme. The longer the big names in the top 19 witnesses hold out on refusing to address this issue, the more guilty they look. I laid out the scheme pretty clearly as to how there has never been any real power for anyone except the in-crowd over sufficient control to determine hard fork vetos, or not. Between @dan, @smooth, @abit, and a couple of others, there is sufficiennt voting power to pin at least 14 witnesses to the top 19, which basically means they control what little vestige of democracy there is.
Never mind the fact that steemit arbitrarily defines such changes as giving minnows a 25% vote capability (which is possible even with bandwidth limits), or even considering banning direct self voting, as 'feature requests' that repeating such offence (even if on different topics) will get you banned from the github, and that you must 'post it here in the forum' where, wouldn't you know it, anyone with any amount of voting power that could propel it to the trending page, where supposedly stinc might start to consider it, except they merely have to pointedly ignore such posts and nobody ever sees it and by magic, their power continues unabated.
It's the most gratuitously fake corporate democracy ever. The shares were issued to the inner circle at the beginning, and they have used their excessive share as a group to lock everyone else out. I am pretty sure that if this was a regulated asset (steem power), that the way these people acquired such a humongous share would be 'insider trading' because insiders, members or employees or other close associates, are not allowed to buy the shares until sufficient advertising has been made to offer shares to the public.
Make no mistake, steem power is a share. It even says so in the whitepaper, indirectly, right near the top, when it talks about reddit talking about giving users shares and this giving thtem power in the system.
Now that the SEC has ruled on the subject, I think that they should be informed that 250 million dollars worth of market cap included a closed early share issuance in digital form, that constitutes insider trading, and is being used to shut out competition within thte corporate democratic system and milk the small shareholders of their assets.
I have not either mentioned that the actual infrastructure has a built-in ticking timebomb in that eventually, the servers will not be able to complete a replay and the site will cease to work...
But people think I am exaggerating in all these things. How could I possibly be so sure about this? Go look up the limitations of graph database systems, for a start, and search for 'large binary blobs' in connection with this. Binary, or UTF-8, it really makes no difference. Large Blobs. Eventually it causes this type of database to become non-functional because of the explosion of indexes and index sizes. I wouldn't even be surprised if Graphene has a hard coded limit of 256Gb shared memory (if we are lucky, if it's 128Gb, it will exceed its own memory addressing capacity withtin 6 months).
I love reading your analysis, even though I'm unsure what to think.
I don't know enough about these systems to have an informed opinion on this, but do you think that this is Dan's warm-up act then, and before it technically exhausts itself, he will bring it down, and transition to EOS? Does EOS also have these technical problems, or have they been addressed in some way?
I do find it hard to imagine that the blockchain couldn't be somehow truncated (so a complete replay isn't necessary), and earlier stuff archived in some way, whilst the new continues. I know very little about blockchains though, and maybe I fundamentally don't understand the situation.
I do wonder why you worked at being a witness if you knew of the inevitable demise of the infrastructure, or did you learn that later?
Since Graphene is open source, would it not be fairly easy to determine to what shared memory limit is, if that's important?
snort yeah, I don't think Dan gives a flying fuck about what mess he left behind, nor do I think that his new system gives any mind to fixing it, I am pretty sure it's just another racket that he thinks he can get away with.
Yes, I learned and watched the process of decay during the 6 months I was working on and off with
steemd. For every improvement, there has been a greater overall decline. The only way the technical problems won't become even bigger than the game mechanics problems, is if they spend at least triple their current budget on development.Yes, I would think it would not be hard to discover. The thing you need to look for is the size of the shared_memory address byte size. That will tell you how big it gets before it runs out of actual addressing capability.
Not happy to read that. If it is a Ponzi Scheme I should withdraw all my assets immediately and stop posting here. Not sure if I want to do that though. :(
I'm powering down, and getting whan I earn back out as quickly as I can. I even had made the mistake about 6 weeks ago, of putting liquid steem (1235) back into SP after being delayed 19 days by Poloniex.
I'm continuing to post and comment and vote here, as long as here still exists, but I'm no longer in any delusion about the sustainability of this platform, and I feel a strong imperative to quickly build a basic replacement that will provide for the needs we have all acquired by becoming accustomed to using this platform.
Hopefully within 6 weeks there will be a working forum, rewards system, and an initially non-rewarded base of servers running the software, and a basic web interface for the discussion and voting system parts.
I will be getting on the task within the next 24 hours. I don't think I can make any valid excuse not to get going on it now, even this sleep problem, I have to fix it right away. The same with the allergy problem I am having, which is probably connected. This allergic dermatitis I have at the moment is especially irritating.
I don't know what to say. It just pops the biggest bubble of hope in my life and I feel like I am drowning. Steemit was my last resort.
The doom still needs some time to fully play out. At least 6 months. Looking at what Randowhale is doing, (and bernie's other philanthropy projects) possibly he is putting a brake on the doom a little, I would guess that you can still make some income for at least 3-6 months here. I am not stopping posting suddenly, I just am not powering up new money I receive other ways, and I'm sending my surpluses into Dash tokens, which I believe will outperform all other cryptos during this next 6 months (not investment advice, just what I am doing, based on Dash's superior governance and the fact they may have a banking licence in the next 6 months).
You can still make something of steem as an author. It's just a terrible investment, don't buy Steem Power, likely you will lose. Only the pigs who are self voting comments, and sucking up to whales, who are diverting more than half of the rewards pool towards their arbitrary taste in posts - ie, cheerleaders and sycophants, who are blissfully ignoring the warning signs that something is wrong here.
This is why I don't earn big rewards, but I don't care. I used to be a cheerleader, because I believed in the idea. But the more I had to do with the software behind it, and the more I saw the character of the people with the biggest stake, the less reason I could se to continue to have faith in it.
Don't worry - you are not the only one who has a need for what Steem theoretically provides - a means to monetise content without copyright or intermediaries. I am trying to build a replacement that optimises everything, but even besides this, if you are interested, there is Alexandria.io, Ark.io, LBRY, and of course Synereo and Yours.Network, that may serve you better.
A better idea would be to just start with increasing incentive to vote on others and get this UI improved A LOT.
Increasing the power-down period should provide that incentive.
Have you written about the UI changes that you think would help?
A little here and there, but it's mostly a waste of time. They don't seem to care about the UI at all (yet).
I don't think the power-down period has to change. It's the least problematic.
I can understand that to be honest. The blockchain logic is where the incentive structure needs to be IMO. Especially once Steem has community namespaces and differential moderation, which is due to happen this quarter.
They? The project is open source, you can go to the dev channel and if you have ideas or code changes you can definitely get the attention of developers and what is required to implement them. The blockchain can be forked as well, you can distribute the coin, you can write the UI, there is nothing stopping anyone from doing just that. After all competition is healthy.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@elfspice/i-have-been-banned-from-submitting-issues-at-the-steemit-condenser-github-repo-so-here-is-my-r-eport
'sif they will accept any PR I were to put up anyway. Pretty sure I'll get that neat little error for any attempt to contribute.
As for forking, from a technical perspective, steemd is a nightmare. If you've ever actually tried to work with it, you would know what I mean.
I am indeed working on something, I have progressed a fair way in describing the specification:
https://steemit.com/div/@elfspice/follow-the-development-of-the-div-whitepaper
...and development roadmap that leverages competition for rewards as its incentive model for developers:
https://steemit.com/div/@elfspice/the-div-kernel-a-weed-that-has-found-fertile-ground
I am just catching up on my sleep still, after having to abruptly spend 3 days travelling through Serbia, and getting my miners back up and running (and having the beasts in my little apartment is not very helpful for my sleep either, here I am at 1am, blathering away, I must return to bed asap)...
The problem is how you approach people, they don't have to contribute with you if they don't like you.
You can still fork it.
Your work looks very promising, I will be following you, I'm sorry you've had problems with the developers, but I've always been for competition, nothing makes people switch into high gear like someone beating them at their own game.
Yeah, I am not concerned about how I approach people, or who is repelled by my often abrupt manner. The work will not fail on account of my character, and enough people consider my character to be an asset in a world full of snakes and sharks. I'm not afraid of upsetting them and I've been for sure a significant part of how it came to be that calamus here is making these analyses of voting behaviour, and personz project smackdown . I named #project-smackdown, and the #steem-coop. You may have known that, I am not sure. I'm not saying I can take credit for it, because it's not my work, but I definitley was a loud voice inspiring thtose who did do the work.
As far as I'm concerned, the sole reason for resistance from Stinc is the fact that they all have something to hide. They are fools to not give what I say due regard because sooner or later they are going to be facing charges of racketeering and securities fraud. I will not be.
Well that's a problem that you don't seem interested in approaching, or are simply proud of, but not everyone is a Vulcan like me and you. You have no way to know if it was your character or not that ultimately led to the failure of steem, should that happen, not that I would hold you partially responsible even but you simply cannot know how people are affected and how crucial you could have been.
Being vociferous is commendable, but not placing importance on the manner you approach people is an issue I think.
That's not a fact, that's the thing, that's what you think they are resisting because. I think one solution would be to mediate through an arbiter, if what you say is true then I can see why you'd say that it's not because of your character that they will fail, but I don't think you have the facts that make it true.
What exactly has been disregarded by SteemInc that would make them face racketeering and securities fraud charges??
This is technically true, but forking the blockchain and getting a parallel witness network supporting so many accounts would be a difficult and very expensive undertaking I think. I'm not entirely familiar with the architecture though.
This is why at the centre of my strategy now lives the core concept of splicing together a bunch of off the shelf components (tendermint/basecoin and git, probably mongodb or similar NoSQL back end) to build the DIV Kernel, to get something up and running that kicks off the competitive development process where the primary activity being rewarded will be writing code and documentation.
With a toolkit assembled, that lets an ad-hoc group of developers coordinate their activities and peer review each other's work, and begin the process of building rewards and reputations, the bigger picture, as described in the whitepaper, will begin. This initial phase does entail a forum, however. Probably that part will be rapidly adopted by us malcontents too... but it's in the Kernel as a customer service component more so than general discussion. We need both, of course.
Why do you suppose you need to do everything, you simply need to get people interested in the idea that you're forming another blockchain, and essentially you would find those that are interested and work with them to that end. Difficult, very expensive, those sound like reasons that would fall away if you consider it's open source (free, free, already established architecture, did I mention already coded?), if you consider how many people we have in the community it's almost surprising that nobody has forked it already.
True. I guess some lower ranking witnesses could probably do that. I wonder what does stop them then.
Not the fact that it's open source, and I'm willing to bet there will be support for such a project, but alas seeing is believing so until someone makes this their dream I will continue to suggest it.
That is very true, but accepting code changes is still a democratic process which is slow and sometimes annoying. But maybe i should seriously explore this opportunity in the future in some way.
You could go to the chat, under the hamburger menu, go to the dev channel and ask around.