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RE: How-to solve SPAM and Democratize Steem: Introducing UserAuthority
I hope this is somehow applied in the next steem fork to prevent the usage of multiple account for self-voting and witness election manipulation by using fake accounts to vote for the witness account of the botnet owner (ahem nextgencrypto ahem).
The number of accounts voting for witnesses is irrelevant. What matters is the stake (aka "Steem Power") behind the votes.
So basically one user with a ton of steem power can nominate himself as witness and hurt the platform and no one can do anything about it?
One bad witness can't hurt the platform. The job of a witness is to sign blocks and to approve software upgrades (forks). If a witness does not do what he is supposed to do then he/she is kicked out from the top spots or is left running a version of the software that is incompatible with the one used by the rest of the witnesses and by doing so is no longer part of the blockchain.
It takes 2/3 of the top witnesses to enforce consensus rules. Even is someone with a big stake does bad things socially, he still needs to behave as a witness and do useful work for the platform.
One "bad whale" is not an issue if the "good whales" counteract his or her social "mis-behavior".
This is good to know. However, this still requires the witnesses to be active and somehow cooperate in some form of moderation and enforcement of consensus rules. So the question is - do they? And how can we tell, aside from state of the witness posts?
This past week, with all that's been happening, just made steemit more fascinating to me as an Internet culture researcher.
I still have a lot of questions unanswered, like what can be done about illegal content on the blockchain. What happens if someone posts child porn, for example? How does the blockchain deal with THAT?
This can be dealt with in several ways:
At the UI level, each front end provider can choose not to display certain content.
At the community level the users can downvote unacceptable content.
At the blockchain level the witnesses can come to a consensus not to include unacceptable content from certain accounts.
The caveat is...who determines what is acceptable? What is illegal in one jurisdiction is legal in another. The only thing that we can all universally see as unacceptable is child porn...I think.
Yeah, child porn is a sensitive issue. It's the one thing that I think everyone can agree is unacceptable. Which is why I brought it up as a topic for censorship. The only one there's no argument about.
You wrote: "the witnesses can come to a consensus not to include unacceptable content from certain accounts"
But there's no way to limit the creation of new accounts. So theoretically, if a bunch of child pornographers decide to use the steem blockchain to store content or links to content that is unacceptable by all, what would be the process? How would this be stopped?
Edit: and thank you for the answers! I ask a lot of questions and it sometimes gets me in trouble (see: bernie flag wars), but I keep asking anyway. :)
Images and videos are usually stored on the blockchain merely as links to the actual content hosted elsewhere. That means that in the case of child pornography or other illegal content it's the persons or organizations hosting the actual content that would be liable and can be forced to remove it.
It is possible to post the actual image/video content to the Steem blockchain (see steemliberator.com) but that can be done with almost any blockchain, many of which are much easier to use for that purpose than Steem.
I agree with you about many of the issues here - specifically the great power a small number of whales wield over the entire system - but I don't think illegal / inappropriate content will pose much of a problem.
That actually helps me sleep better at night. Thank you.
The witnesses cooperate and come to consensus by running the same or a compatible version of the software. That is very visible on steemd.com.
As far as moderation that is the job of the community (especially of those with a big stake due to the disparity in token distribution) but it is not a function of a witness per say.
Again, UA is fat better at predicting witness quality as well.