was trying to explain this to someone this evening, and I discussed how under Equity and Ancient Jewish law (such as was in operation for 9000 years in the settlement of Jericho), where a rigid, simple to understand rule could succeed in suppressing even a small amount of bad behaviour.

A Judge would defer to such a law and not need to tease apart fiddly conditionals, if such a rule could be applied to the benefit of the society as a whole, even as little a reduction in the incidence of bad behaviour as 2% - cost less than the expense of employing an expensive to train judge.

Blockchains also have rules in them that precisely function as laws. One of the things that has been noted by some, such as @ats-david - is that Hard Fork 19 (and several preceding hard forks) removed a lot of the simple, rule-based defences against bad behaviour.

Self Voting, as I have mentioned previously, was only profitable for Whales before. Now everyone can do it. I submit that HF19 has simply taken this out of the hallowed halls of top SP holders, and put this tool into everyone's hands. We can't anymore argue that simple stake is a valid criteria for judging the good behaviour of a user, now that we see this power accessible to all.

But it is Whales whose one click reward gets everyone's attention.

Not only that, I would submit that the fact that you can vote upon your own witness, and, yes, since I now technically have two accounts, one I post with and one for witness, that I can even unduly influence the witness schedule, to my also, easy, one click direct profit, and not only that, to the ability to veto, or not, bad changes in the rules. Consider what happens if I patiently build my SP to over 1 million. My vote on my own witness would be equal to 2000 minnow accounts.

If a simple rule can eliminate bad behaviour, and conserve the function of judgement for complex situations, such a rule is better in force, than not.

As @pfunk, and several 'responsible' steemians have said to me, they believe that allowing direct voting is important, to facilitate their activities in moderating behaviour of users.

The problem is, you cannot easily draw any line between blanket permission and conditional permission, with a simple algorithm. Then, you can also turn another argument around, that is also a common justification for allowing self voting:

"But people will just make a new account and self vote via proxy."

Firstly, it should be obvious that such an act is instantly recognisable as taking privileges.

Secondly, by requiring an extra hoop to jump through, we create necessary behaviours that also make automated detection of this mischief cheaper. Consider the fact that somewhere along the line, to use that reward, as vote power, one will by necessity create a chain of links between one account and another, which can be if not 100% confidence, then still very high confidence, automatically detected, with an algorithm.

Plus it makes this method of abusing the system of allocating rewards more expensive in terms of knowledge and attention, even if you can automate this with a two or three click installer of a script, you still have to keep the computer running, or activate the application to do this for you.

Can you also then argue with a straight face, that the greedy for rewards self voting 'miner of steem', as these people amount to (and yes, we are collating the publicly available data proving your bad behaviour), is becoming of wise and judicious individuals with the quality of patience in their character?

By and large, the answer is No

The most egregious self vote self-rewarders, are just like the rats pressing the lever for the little pile of cocaine to sniff at.

I have also, therefore, suggested that all posts, not just root posts, be configured for a default 100% Steem Power reward. In fact, this is another possible, and very small rule change for the blockchain consensus logic, that would defeat the typically impatient mentality of the self-voting users, who take advantage of the shortcut to getting upvotes that these bad rules allow.

I would suggest that comments, which are a special subset of original posts (root posts, aka Posts) should not have a liquid rewards payout. Either declined, or 100% power up. All of the self-voting superstars we have discovered so far in #project-smackdown, are exploiting the fact that all comments are by default in all interfaces, set to 50/50 rewards.

(The #steem-coop will be generating open source analytics scripts to determine if there is a correlation between the self-upvoting and the flow of SBD, a week later, to known exchange accounts, such as @poloniex @bittrex @blocktradse and @shapeshift)...

Reward Pool Rape can be quantified...

You can change this, with specially formed variants of the post transaction for comments. But again, another example of how a sensible default raises the bar and can have an outsized beneficial effect in the system.

I am not talking out of my hat with this, you can go read some of Bruce Schneier's work on security systems, and other security oriented operating systems like OpenBSD, and this is also becoming widely practiced even in companies like Microsoft and Google - that if you can make a simple rule that blocks easy exploits, that the benefit exceeds the times when 'responsible people' might better produce security, by being able to bypass this rule.

Note that I also argue that 'resteeming' via alt accounts is not a violation of the social contract. I worked long and hard to build a following with the @l0k1 account. This is something that I earned by playing the game honestly, and this is one thing you cannot easily buy, in the steem blockchain ruleset.

Update:

Once again the illustrious @dang007 has flagged my post. The evidence condemning their character is becoming pretty substantial now, and it's only going to highlight this post to the followers of @l0k1, which I have also resteemed my own post (since l0k1 is my account, and the legacy of my many many months of work building a fanbase).

Quick money cannot beat reputation in this game system, @dang007 You are signing the warrant that will see every one of your posts suppressed by a negative reputation.

Moar updatez

And new the spectacle continues, another whale upvoted this post, and now @dang007 has burned even more of their VP by removing and re-adding a new, more souped up flag. Note that the dang account has very little more reputation than this 7 day old @elfspice account. They can take all the rewards away, and I frankly don't give a damn about that. But the flag is not gonna bury my profile in a million years.