Hi @trostparadox, I did not find a good time to speak in depth with you at HiveFest so I'll take the opportunity here.
First, I thought you made a great point early in your presentation about what I would call "namespacing" and what you call a "prefix." I believe BitShares has this feature and I was surprised years ago when I found that there was no such protection on our chain. I'd love to see that implemented because right now, anyone could claim an account that looks very much like it is owned/operated by another. I think that if BitShares does it, there's no reason we couldn't. Obviously we would need to do this without affecting accounts which already exist, but I think that's as simple as doing a check once at the point of account creation. Something like: does the portion of the username before the dot match an existing user? If so, an additional signature from that account's owner (or active) key is required to create the account.
I would disagree strongly, however, with any protocol changes exempting stakeholders from curation duties. Our chain already enables this use case in a few ways. The easiest, and least damaging I think, is delegation to curation projects like @curangel. This allows stakeholders to entrust a group of humans to find and upvote quality content with their stake, and still receive a high percentage of the curation rewards. The curators are, of course, paid a fair rate for this transfer of responsibility, which I think is important.
Thanks for the feedback.
If we are already allowing stakeholders to circumvent the curation process, why not make it so that it increases the influence of ALL manual curators rather than just delegation aggregators?
Delegating to @curangel (or similar delegation aggregators) simply creates a new (or more powerful) whale upvoter, whereas my solution would empower all manual curators with a greater upvote voice. I do not have a dog in this fight, btw. This is just my $0.02 suggestion on how to allow large stakeholders to willingly and openly contribute to decentralizing the manual curation process rather than further centralizing it.
Regardless of whether we agree or disagree, creating dialogue about ways to improve the ecosystem is my goal. Thanks for helping with that!
And thanks very much for your reply! I agree that dialogue on these things is important. I recognise that not everyone has the same ideas and that's fine.
I do admire the goal of decentralisation and certainly, we do not want centralised curation. However, there are many projects to choose from, each with different criteria and rates of return. The space is open and there are no barriers to entry; a new curation project can be started by anyone. I believe this more than mitigates any concerns about centralisation; of course not everyone has to agree there.
This is a great question. I actually do think it would be a mistake to distribute the increased voting power among the entire body of voters. Curation is more than just finding posts that seem good to us. It involves combating plagiarism, fraud, misinformation, and value extraction schemes, and that's hard work. Everyone can vote, but not everyone is a great curator, and I think the best thing most large stakeholders can do for the platform (and, therefore, themselves) is to delegate those responsibilities, not just to anyone, but to a team of professionals who have a good eye and know, frankly, "every trick in the book" by now.
I absolutely would not want to discourage anyone who actually wishes to curate by themselves with their own stake. But if a large stakeholder is not going to curate, they should at least be held responsible to delegate the responsibility to a party or parties they select. If they don't wish to do this, they can always forego curation rewards, but as they say, "there is no such thing as a free lunch."