You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
RE: @transparencybot - three points
Sad thing is, Steemit itself is designed to encourage this behavior. It's optimal play that achieves the ill-disguised goal of funneling as many tokens as possible upward to bot-controlling whale accounts.
I very much doubt the witnesses have the guts to fix this, because to do so would require things like account bans and asset confiscation, which cryptocurrency's "decentralized" libertarian ethos abhors. (Centralized power is of course Good when it's delivering ROI to already wealthy asset-holders.)
The thing is, game theory doesn't really cover the present situation here as far as the conclusion that this abuse is inevitable given the current system. There is so much power concentrated in the hands of the few that it would really only take a couple or even possibly only one of the largest accounts (hello @freedom) to remove their delegation(s) from vote sellers and use thatSP to flag vote buyers. I doubt it would even take one week before the whole thing crumbled. Major vote selling could be stopped in an extremely short amount of time. The question is just how bad will things have to get before the biggest guns wake up and smell the coffee. Obviously a fundamental flaw of Steem is the assumption that the largest stakeholders will act with the best interests of the network at heart to protect their investment. But they have been so ridiculously succesful in concentrating power in the hands of the few that they do indeed possess equivalent power to a centralized governance like Facebook has that could easily prevent this kind of abuse. They just have to choose to do it. I think at some point the present course will present an iceberg that the biggest whales cannot avoid. It is just not sustainable.
And that's exactly it--they have no incentive to take that kind of action. Long-term sustainability is only something that matters to people who haven't made it yet on the platform. If the winners wake up and smell the coffee, as you put it, the play that gives them the most bang isn't to sacrifice their stake to make things better for the plebes, it's to cash out and move on to the next thing.
you may be right. But most of those players actually have other ways to realize large return on their investment here, many of the biggest funders of vote sellers are top 20 witnesses, and also earn a large chunk of the reward pool just as a payout based on their stake - the short term profit from delegation is MORE than these sources of income, but those sources of income are not trivial. If they have another "thing" to move on to that is more attractive, of course you are right. The thing is though the system was already set up heavily on the side of rewarding stake in the first place. I am not sure it will be so easy for the major players to find "something else" more profitable than Steem even if they are not profiting from delegating SP to vote sellers.
To be clear, I'm not working from a pure philosophical game-theory perspective here--more a psychology-aware one, where we recognize that humans SUCK at gauging long-term vs. short-term benefit. If your system is set up to subtly favor long-term success but has obvious short-term potential, the short-term strategy is going to win out even if it's "irrational".
You hit the nail on the head with "the system was already set up heavily on the side of rewarding stake". Minnows exist only to feed whales; the imagery there is pretty overt! And if getting people to buy votes is an effective way to consolidate stake, even if it's not the best, just a satisfactory and easy one, that's what we'll see happen.
This outcome should be no surprise, really. Cryptocurrency in general, and Steemit especially, are capitalism in code. And the thing that capitalism does best is pillage labor to make a few people rich, sustainability be damned, even to the scale of the whole planet.
We should probably rename "minnows" to "krill" to be more accurate ;)
Yeah. I wish I could disagree :(