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RE: Steemit Betting Scandal - Crowdfund to pay @Walden our internet detective.
It makes sense to check that these betting initiatives are working correctly....that benefits everyone. But let's be careful about creating impressions around guilt or innocence in advance of the facts. Everyone makes mistakes and everyone has a tendency to get argumentative before the facts are available due to their bias. nikflossus, I support the need to ascertain the facts but I also think virtualgrowth deserves the benefit of doubt....especially as he seems to want to put right any mistakes. We want to encourage new uses of the Steemchain....mistakes will be made. Hopefully the majority will be genuine.
I'm simply trying to get to the truth. I agree that @virtualgrowth deserves the benefit of the doubt from you. But we also need to find out exactly what happened.
The data may well reveal a multitude of errors. Perhaps many people were not paid out correctly and that will be very good to know. You will have done the community and ultimately virtualgrowth a great service in insisting that any problems are revealed and addressed. But you would have to find very specific and unequivocal evidence of foul play to conclude that foul play was the motivation. That's the main point I'm trying to make. So let's fix the problems that exist, use these examples to help refine these initiatives and set a higher standard for execution and move on.
Thanks for your reasonable and measured input. The official excuse was that without telling anyone VG set the threshold for payouts at 50%. In my previous post there were multiple reports that payment was mostly made to those who had larger accounts. Some people said they were paid whether they won or lost. It seems smaller steemians were ignored. A simple audit would prove whether the excuse that those who bet at 50% had not been paid was valid. But apparently this would constitute a witchhunt....
Unfortunately this issue leads on to a much more troubling one. Whilst multiple accounts are allowed, these betting accounts were run as sock puppets. The same poster pretended to make the accounts talk back and forth to give the impression of legitimacy. Alone this is not a big deal. But this is being done by the same person with a large number of accounts, all of them appearing to be independent, all of them growing rapidly and all of them soliciting small amounts of funds from newbies in different ways.
A further concern is that after talking back and forth for a while, it became apparent to me that this poster was not interacting with me on a normal level. He would happily say whatever he needed to, to get out of trouble.
If you don't think this spells trouble in the future for Steemit then I'm surprised.
I am attempting to speak from a set of guiding principals I believe in because I've been wrong about things in my life. Let me say this...you may be correct about your concerns...for me, that only informs the decision to investigate thoroughly. With respect, your conclusions are meaningless to me because you are a victim here and far from objective. Voicing your suspicions so vocally in advance of a forensic examination of the blockchain is premature and counterproductive in my opinion. Don't take that in the wrong way, I do not mean it as an attack, just an observation from the point of view of how we might do things better in the future. If virtualgrowth is running sock puppets and games with the intention of conning votes from people and withholding reward funds, then we must put a stop to it.
In the future, perhaps initiatives and the scripts that run them should be put through an open peer review process to minimise ambiguity or bugs or whatever...before they are launched. Reputation would obviously be greater for those that went through that kind of process.
Let's see what the data says, then an informed consensus can be reached. If the Steemit community can accept that in an innovative environment, we are going to continually run into issues....no I don't think that spells trouble....I think that is the means of making this platform far stronger. What makes a problem from which we can learn acceptable is the way we choose to deal with it. For instance, those who are harmed, we do everything reasonable to help them out or compensate them. Hopefully the problems will be caught fast and dealt with faster and make future problems more difficult.
Well I admire your optimism on this. And I told you what I know only because I don't expect anyone else to bother with an investigation now. Regarding sock puppets, most people won't be able connect the dots.
You see a Nietzchian dynamic to Steemit facing new problems? Maybe, but I feel there's a fundamental misunderstanding of Anarchism and how it could work running through the thinking on this platform. I do hope I'm wrong.