RE: Why Flagging Is Bringing Down The Value of Steem, As A Currency
Rewards are not finalized until the payout is approved by stakeholders.
Rewards are finalized at the end of the day, there is no specific transaction on the blockchain that says: ApproveAllRewardsForTodayDate that gets signed by ALL stakeholders.
For the time window allocated - which is 24 hours now, subject to change to 7 days in HF 17 - the stakeholders are voting and when the time window expires, whatever has left in the post "account" is transferred to the author account. That's how things are working right now, according to the code I read on github. If there's something I missed, please let me know.
The fact that the rewards are not finalized is not colliding with the individual contract between two entities. The reward pool is neutral, or agnostic. Theoretically, if nobody votes, the reward pool vanishes at the end of the day, it doesn't redistribute equally to all the stakeholders (which would be also bad).
It becomes valuable, or active, when someone casts a vote. From that moment, the person casting a vote has a "contract" with the receiver, in which the part from the rewards pool he dislocated, is directed to the author.
Now, if another person comes and take out a certain percentage from the post account, he literally breaches the previous contracts between all the previous voters and the author of the posts.
The precedence of a vote is irrelevant in the current system. All it counts is the weight, in SP, of the voter. This leads to arbitrary results which are increasing entropy and are discouraging users for contributing to the platform.
I'm not making any moral or ethical statement, it's just a theoretical comment about how "consensus" or the lack of it, is reached right now in the Steemit ecosystem. Strictly the part about rewards, not the block signing consensus, etc.
You seem to be missing, despite clearly being aware of, the facility written into the system which allows any stakeholder to apply negative r-shares to a payout proposal.
The contract is between the payout recipient and the stakeholders. Some stakeholders apply positive r-shares to the payout. Others apply negative r-shares to the payout. The result depends upon the culmative amount, not just the positive. This is the contract which allows all stakeholders to have their say, if they so choose.
I don't believe this is true. As far as my understanding goes, the reward pool continues to exist indefinitely and will be allocated when a payout happens, as long as that takes.
I'm aware of that. What I'm saying is that the negative payout is breaching a previous contract between the recipient and all the stakeholders who voted until the downvote moment. The downvoter applies negative r-shares to a sum to which he personally didn't contribute. He has a say in something that wasn't part of. That's the part that, in my opinion, increases entropy.
The only contract is the smart contract written into the code which facilitates the payout system. That contract makes all stakeholders a party, as it is their stake which is diluted by the same mechanism. They get to decide how it is allocated, and the system allows for both support and opposition.
With all due respect, I think we're talking about different things here.