RE: Announcing My Own Steemit Experiment: The "FuckUp Files" Series
Having a certain amount of SP accounts for having influence, but unless you actually use or give away some of your accumulated value, we can't talk about a stake. Influence is passive and amounts to the number of "shares" (or, simpler, Steem Power) you bought / generated, while stake should be -at least in my opinion - active, meaning it should actively participate in the game, by being transferred from one owner to another. Stake is actually stake only when it moves and it should influence whatever we have in a reward pool only when it's active.
I think you need to come up with a different word than stake. The reason why we can talk about accumulated value (SP) as stake is because each of us who have Steem invested in the blockchain (SP) has money (though it's crypto) at stake by virtue of it being bound up in the entire venture. In this sense SP is like shares.
We get more shares and payment (SD and liquid Steem) given to us by the venture, allocated according to the activity of everyone, though weighted by others' stake. We each of us have skin in the game simply by having invested Steem (SP). If we take it out of the blockchain, we can the use it as we wish independently, selling it for other cryptos, in exchange for goods or services, whatever.
The game we do not have skin in is the game of allocating newly mined Steem. I know this is what you're talking about, but you're conflating that with the idea of stake in the blockchain in general.
In the voting / allocation game, there is no skin in directly, it's a free vote (voting power is restored over time, so doesn't count as skin). The only skin we have in the game here is our reputation, both the quantitive amount and simply the our perception in the eyes of other users. Perhaps this risk should be increased and more direct, I'd probably support such an idea if it was well thought out. But to say we do not have stake already is simply false.
On your post and idea, it's an interesting experiment, looking forward to see how it plays out! I'll participate with this one. Disagreeing is not a negative outcome 😉
Also this is an important statement, thank you:
there is this penchant towards "smiling, successful entrepreneurs who are just getting it", which I think it's very toxic.
So now I get it. I was getting hung up on the word "stake" because we do have a stake. If we vote well, our holdings get more valuable. If we vote badly, our holdings lose value. Beyond that, we also have a stake in the form of desired curation rewards.
What we don't have is an immediate/direct penalty for voting badly. Privatized profits and socialized losses. So (thinking out loud) how 'bout just applying a tiny fee (in an N2 curve based on a percentage of RSHARES voted - subject to revision according to the influence curve) and adding the fees into the curation rewards pool? Bots and whales would pay more to vote, fees for regular users would be negligible.
I don't have any liquid steem or SBD at the moment, but I'll free some up so I can participate in this experiment for future posts.
Our holdings get more valuable as a result of the price of Steem going up. I'm not very educated in this, but as far as I know there is nothing a single person can do to bring up the price of Steem except "pump" the system by buying lots of coin. The value of the holdings (vested Steem, i.e. SP) is not directly affected by voting.
There are curation rewards for voting "well", by which I mean voting on content in a rewarding way (this may not be "well" in a quality way, but it's subjective anyway), however this does not increase the value of your holdings, but the amount of them.
If you vote "badly" there is no direct loss, just no gain. Since flagging is a vote with negative weight, you could consider this to be voting "badly" but no one can take away your holdings.
Only have time for a quick reply. What I meant by this
Was that if we vote in a way that surfaces content that attracts users, our SP gets more valuable. If we vote in ways that drive users away, then our SP gets less valuable. Not a direct response.
Yes I agree with that, just wanted to clarify direct and indirect consequences. With the indirect it's very complex so there's not a one to one relationship between attracting users and a Steem price increase (take for example whether or not users are retained, etc.), though it is of course very likely to bring up the price.
The whole ethos of steem is not to create penalties for such but let voluntary reactions dictate that, not a system of punishing. Instead of punishing the whole ethos of steem is to reward. The reward has value like @personz pointed out because it's vested in the system and cannot be taken out at a moment's notice to create bubbles or bust and boom cycles.
Thats a tax, and taxes are immoral, you cannot force people to act to altruistic ends through coercion and justify it as a benefit in the long term, its immoral.
Prices are not taxes. Taxes are imposed through coercion by governments. Prices are paid voluntarily. There is already a fee to be able to vote, but its paid by steemit for people who get their accounts that way.
I think there's some truth to what @baah is saying, it does sound like a tax, though it would be good to disentangle it with the implications of government tax. Is there really such a difference between tax and fee in this sense?
Taxes are applied to people in general, but more often they are on some voluntary activity, such as earning income, buying something, etc. You don't have to buy a loaf of bread and thus don't have to pay the VAT on it. But then again you may starve and die if you don't, so the argument is more complicated when taxes are on the basics of survival, and the general, essential operations in one's life.
A fee is more like a cut that a middleman takes on a product or service, or the term that someone providing a first hand service to justify their charges. People getting paid privately to provide something to someone else, beyond the cost of the thing itself.
The reason your proposal would be like a tax is because voting is an essential part of Steem. It's like a fee because it's voluntary. I would oppose it however not on this basis, but because of the probable market effects of disincentivizing people to vote freely and according to whim. We need to stay whimsical 😉
I predict that some people will stop voting entirely if there is any cost to it, to preserve their holdings. Imagine if someone voted "badly" in this scenario and saw a net loss? I think this is what @dragosroua is proposing, and that's what "skin in the game" is - the possibility of loss as a result of an action. I also think that this would institutionalize "good" and "bad" voting, which is definitely what some people want (hey @krnel) but I would oppose strongly. But good and bad here would refer still to the dynamic of the day, which is currently popularity of those with the most SP.
A once off gift from our benevolent leaders is not a operationally a fee on the user and is not equivalent to what you are suggesting which is continued fee / tax paying.
Also you have not addressed how it is counter to the ethos of steem: to reward instead of punishing, PERIOD. No and, if's or buts about it. Punishment is not incentivized, it is left to the community/individuals and rightly so, people should decide "punishments" or repercussions on a strictly voluntary basis, and thus reward right/moral and justifiable behavior. Not addressing that won't make it go away.
The "ethos of steem" is what the community says it is, and it evolves. 8 months ago, downvotes for value were counter to the ethos of steem. Now they're not.
Further, the ability to vote requires an additional amount of steem power above and beyond the account creation fee. A user with an account but no steem power is able to post and comment but not vote. So it is consistent with the ethos of steem to exchange value for voting.
Further, the very existence of an account creation fee proves definitively that fees are not counter to "the ethos of steem." A price is not a punishment, it's an exchange of value for a service.
But you're right that one of steem's big advantages is free transactions, and voting is a blockchain transaction, so it needs more thought than an off the cuff remark in the comments somewhere, which is why I parenthetically noted that I was thinking out loud.
NO!
The ethos of steem is the values it seeks to embody and live up to, like the noble virtues they are immutable and haven't changed at all. The downvotes were built from day one to remove value from the post, be it that it was not expressed in the list of reasons to flag until a few months ago those values have not moved one inch, they have only been reinforced through explicit reasoning.
A new account comes standard with SP, from what I recall when I signed up I had already SP vested in my account at then the value of $4.50. I might not remember this correctly but looking at my account activity I don't see me powering up from liquid steem, and I doubt that they would miss such a simple thing that could be abused to no end.
https://steemdb.com/@baah/powerup
Fees are counter to steem, it says so explicitly in the whitepaper and from every conversation that points out that fees are non existent.
To call it a fee like I said suggest that someone is forking out money when it is in fact NO PERSON, not even STEEMINC that does that, it simply is vested power to begin with, therefore keeping the value of steem in check by limiting the supply and not creating an exploitative loophole by allowing people to transfer that steem out of the system by making such transfer painfully costly in time waited to begin with.
Regardless of the nature of the remark the facts are that applying a fee to a voluntary transaction is a tax, regardless of the counter nature of the idea : rewarding curation and taxing it as well.
Prices is what a thing is worth, yes. Taxes are imposed by individuals through systems, which can happen on steem as well. The fee to be able to vote/account creation is built into the system, yes, how is it paid by steemit and not the whole community, investors and content creators alike, and furthermore the price paid is not an accurate representation of what takes place, the steem paid is vested into the account and not liquid, so it goes back into the system to comply with the function that all commodities gain value through: supply and demand.
Just because the community "pays" for account creation is not a valid reason to impose a tax on people's behavior and redistribute that wealth, just like taxes in the real world. It certainly falls under coercion and calling it a price is disingenuous, it's actually a tax, imposed by the system, seeking to coerce people for voluntary behavior.
Nesting limit. Replying to your subsequent comment.
You are mistaken about how account creation works. If you don't get your account from steemit, you pay your own fee. Steemit only pays the fee and provides a small stake for the accounts that they create. As to your tax definition, the phrases that you conveniently ignored are, "contribution to state revenue" and "levied by the government."
No time to hang around, so that's it for me. Have a nice day.
I used that definition not to "ignore" that verbiage, only to point that it is a synonym for fee, fees and tax are interchangeable in this context, a tax is also a strain, it's also the other sense of the word tax.
I was mistaken, now I know that account creation does cost money, but having read the whitepaper on that topic it's clear why it does cost money and the only precedent sent is to protect against sibyl attacks, not a precedent to charge fees, and least to tax people for voting.