Is there a Witness “Circle-Jerk”?
First of all, I would like to thank @elfspice for bringing an important issue to our attention, I believe many steemians feel that the witness system is somehow rigged. I would also like to apologize for using the term “circle-jerk”, but I could not a find a different word or phrase to describe witnesses voting for each other for self-interest.
The Political System of DPOS
Being a witness, specially a top 19 witness, gives you Steem (money), but most importantly it gives you power to decide on Steem changes. To be a witness you need to be voted upon, so it’s in essence a Political System. Like any other political system, you need to negotiate and make alliances for others support, this results in what many people may call a "circle jerk", as many witness vote for others expecting a vote back.
DPOS is not a perfect system, but it is the best system I have seen on all Blockchains, on POW (Bitcoin) or POS (Peercoin), the only thing that counts is your resources to either buy miners or to buy the coin that allows you stake, this is of course not very democractic.
However, on DPOS (Bitshares and Steem) you need others support, this results on most witnesses collaborating in projects that contribute to the growth of Steem, they do this to get votes and people vote for them because of their work, we all win. In essence, is like politicians who get votes based on their social work, the only difference is that you can vote and unvote a witness at any time you see fit.
It is not all a conspiracy
Most witnesses know one another, because we talk about technical stuff needed to run a node, we often help each other when one runs into a problem, so normally you would vote for that witness that helped you out.
What I am trying to say is that YES, there is a "circle jerk", but the reasons for that result are not really a conspiracy:
- Making alliances and negotiating with other powerful human beings is normal to any political system
- It is also logical to vote for witnesses that you have had previous association with.
Is there anything we can do to make the system fairer?
The only real way to stop the so call "circle-jerk" is to get everyone to vote, there are plenty of big whales that do not vote on any witness and this is actually prejudicial to the system. If big whales do not vote, then they contribute to making the "circle-jerk" stronger as witnesses just vote for each other and decide who gets to be on the top 19.
I would love to hear your thoughts on this matter, so please comment freely.
Witnesses getting ready for a Hard-Fork LOL
I'd love to a see a downvote option.
I'd love to see 1x Stake rather than 30X stake. Meaning, instead of getting 30 votes each at full stake weight. I get 100% of my stake I can split however I would like.
I have 40M Vests. Under 30x 1.2B Vests. Some of the top Stake holders have 1B vests. Under 30X that's 30B vests. The impact of the 30X is huge.
Lastly, you failed to mention how some of the witnesses have a private witness chat going.
Those are my concerns. Thanks for talking about it openly and nice to meet you.
<3
Aggroed
If you want to understand why it was decided to use approval voting for witness voting (and explicitly to not have a downvote option), please read this: https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,5164.0.html (If it is not already clear, @bytemaster in that BitSharesTalk thread is @dan.)
Downvoting was part of the original design for DPoS. But then an attack scenario was considered that led to changing the design to approval voting.
Also, with approval voting you should ideally have no limit on the number of witnesses you can vote for. (That means going to the other extreme of infinity unique votes rather than 1 single vote that you split up.) Unfortunately, the introduction of the time-share witness in Steem meant that there needed to be a strict upper bound on the number of votes, otherwise an attacker could use sockpuppets to exploit it to completely dominate the time-share witness slot. (Note: some reasonable upper bound was needed anyway for memory reasons, but the stricter limit of 30 is a compromise, introduced in hardfork 2, between the competing needs of approval voting and reducing the abuse of the time-share witness slot through the sockpuppet attack.)
good science @arhag
dont forget follow me to
love the picture
Isn't all of the moot with steemit sitting on a 40% stake?
There are a fair number of witnesses that appear to be doing little for the network other than leeching steem. Downvotes seem appropriate to counter them. If the total value of voting percent is based on the absolute value of votes meaning both postiive and negative votes drain your total pool of witness voting power I'm not sure I see the attack scenario. But I fully admit I might be missing something about that conversation.
Arhag, I don't think we've met before. I'm aggroed. It's a pleasure to meet you. Thank you for your considerate response.
I agree with this. We can't be certain but there sure is appearance of this. Yet witness voting is everyone personal decision.
So if you can't fight them, join them. evil grin
I appreciate your comment. I had read a bit about this previously and it was nice to reconnect with this.
So the whales are there to counteract the 'EVILS' and vote for the 'LAZIES'? Do we put trust in the whales to not become 'EVIL'
Hi @arhag,
Congratulations! You have been chosen to appear on another amazing edition of "Who to Follow Daily". Thank you for adding so much value to the Steemit community. Steem on!
Thanks for this explanation, and link to Dan's discussion. It's very interesting! I wonder what the outcome would be if votes could total 1X stake as @Aggroed suggests. I presume it may reveal an attack vector, or ensure that the 20 biggest whales just dictate the 20 important witnesses?
what do you think of my idea: https://steemit.com/witness-category/@rival/rival-proposal-and-analysis-witness-voting-rolling-defend-system-please-read
Hello, with my qualities posts and content not getting enough visibility,
I would like to plead in any way whether you can help me out by delegating some amount of steem power to me for me to grow my account and curate more. I will be happy for your helping hand been rendered to me and i promise to make careful use of it and use it also to impact and grow others on steemit.
Thanks.
Hi, @arhag!
Please support our team (@alexmove.witness and @steemit-market). We ask you to vote for us as witnesses. We are developing automatic checks for the uniqueness of posts, user ratings and other scripts and activities. We are also preparing a big project - the online shop (sale for STEEM/SBD).
Every day we send double cashback to those who voted for us. Your vote is very important to us!
Witness downvote is a very cool idea, indeed. I will be replicating that one as well.
Witnesses : Yea, um... We won't be voting on that feature.
Perhaps not, but there's a difference between self-interest and enlightened self-interest. So let's hope those in control are enlightened :)
I've heard about the private chat, as well. I think Steemit should remember what it represents, especially since it's a new platform. Private chats are okay but when they have to do with Steemit's operations it's against the majority's best interest. I think Steemit needs a code of Ethics. If people don't follow them, their account should be terminated.
In this paragraph you clearly identify that there is a n-person Prisoner's Dilemma (let's start calling it nPD, for short?)
In bold I have highlighted the factor that precisely maps to this:
It is also known in another form as "The Tragedy of the Commons", as the issue is the same. If only we could make people conserve a resource that does not cost them anything to exploit. Except the other way around, how to get them to exploit the resource that costs them nothing to conserve. A perfect mirror, with the same dynamic, regardless.
I think this is why the witness account should simply not be able to vote at all. Neither should it be able to power down until it is inactive for long enough for a power down payment. This enables others to shuffle up until the witness has powered down enough to fund a project.
In the Prisoner's Dilemma, in general, defecting means ratting out the others. In the Witness prisoner's dilemma, it is participating in a voting pattern that is about buying the votes of others, like you say. Thus, if witnesses votes on witnesses, were not counted, while the witness is active, then they have no dilemma to deal with.
This is a starting point for how I would address the problem. There is too many people saying 'it's my stake blah blah' This does not extend to abusing privilege as a witness. Either you can decide with your stake who is a witness, or you can be a witness.
The only real influence a witness has, compared to, say, someone like me, who is not a witness (and note, this also effectively includes the backup witnesses, because their veto does not count in a hardfork quorum) is that they can block a hardfork. Anyone can propose a hardfork change, and anyone can wage a campaign of persuasion upon the general population of users to get a shrieking cry for something to rise up and bite Steemit and make them do it.
Of course, the most potent enablers of this, are large stakeholders (rightly) who can raise the profile of those who are supporting what they want to see happen. But there is nothing that also stops a small user starting a campaign, and recruiting whales to support it either.
In the top comment, also @aggroed has pointed out that there should be a witness downvote. I can wholeheartedly agree with that. I might also add, that a slider would be a good thing, but still limit it to 30 votes, for the sake of bandwidth conservation and computation conservation.
That's a great idea. You can only be a witness, if you agree not to power down while being a witness and not vote on things, in order to be rewarded twice; one for being a witness and second for having the STEEM to upvote big.
Witnesses : Um...No. We won't be voting on that one either.
The system needs a reboot. You can't wind back the granting of unfair advantages. That's why governments never shrink, despite all the rhetoric of the Republican party and their like.
Fortunately, we don't have to have a war of independence, we can just declare a new namespace.
I like this idea... however witnesses will never agree on a no vote policy 😢😀
I wouldn't be so sure about that. What if the votes listed in my post about this: https://steemit.com/steem/@elfspice/the-witness-circle-jerk-dilemma-and-the-richlist-witness-votes-some-solid-numbers-for-you-to-digest were the only ones remaining on the top 19's?
How would that look to the general population?
As long as there is no clown involved it should be fine. Unless your name is Falcone or Maroni, in that case I'd have to kick you in the nodes...
I haven't checked the white paper as I'm not very techy. But was thinking the other day to ask....How many witnesses control the show? the fewer the easier for a hostile take over. everyone has their price. And if some big money folks decide to takeover steemit, how hard would that be with Billions to offer? to simply buy the witnesses off?
Same goes for huge BTC mining operations, they got in for the money, not to support the platform, and are in fact making it more centralized ever day with thier greed.
Just my 2 cents worth
Thanks for reading
Well, I havent done the maths but I guess you would need at least half of the total steem market cap, so around 115M, but we could always fork it and run a different chain, so not sure if the efforts will pay off.
Bitcoin is already controlled by miners, chinese miners.
Pocket change for the people robbing us all our lives, that's why I like all the new up and coming coins like steem, if we lose control of some just move into another. Someone will figure a perfect scenario some day, might even already exist. where every wallet is equal and no double dipping. we all share equal and grow together. After all it was meant to be currency in the first place. BTC is no longer that, but a store of wealth like gold or silver and that's fine. grand daddy didn't ave it right, but we are building on the platform :-)
Cheers
Does a whale witness vote have any more power than someone with less steempower or are all witness votes equal?
Good question, your vote is directly proportional to your SP. So, YES a whale has more influence over the votes.
That's interesting. I didn't think that would be the case. Thanks for the info. I can see why SP would influence voting power for blog posts or comments but find the idea that a whale vote is worth more when voting for witnesses a bit disconcerting. I wonder why they chose to do it this way?
In the light of it being acceptable to change the content vote power in HF19, perhaps it might also be agreeable to change witness votes to being proportional to the square root of SP? This would reduce the power concentration somewhat.
A circlejerk is just a little fun between consenting adults, let's not be prudish.
Oh, you meant something else, sorry...
LOL
I think 'reciprocal voting' might be more appropriate, otherwise I can't discuss it with my parents ;)
I hear you @chitty
Appreciate your discussion and Bravery on this sensitive topic!
Keep STEEM N ON,
Frank
P.S. BTW That's Gangsta! ( your pic ) LOL
Important information, it would be good for everyone to read especially the whales, thank you.
That gun is tomphson on crisis action
I Like How You Compared It To Real Politics :)