What would you say if I told you that a simple change to how Steem works could get rid of bid-bots, circle-jerks, self-voting, delegating for return, and also the incessant complaining about those things, forever? What would you say if I told you that it would work nearly maintenance-free - no flag wars, hardforks to fix exploits, or hardforks to fix the exploits introduced by the previous hardforks? What would you say if I told you that it would make literally everyone's experience here freer, happier, and more enjoyable, and almost everyone more profitable? (Sorry, bid-bot operators.) Oh, and what if as a little side effect it also solved the ninja-mining problem?
If it sounds like I'm offering you the Philosopher's Stone, don't worry - it won't stop spam. We'll still have to deal with spam.
I'll tell you about this solution later in the post, but to explain it I have to start at the beginning, so you understand the root causes of the conflict that has all of those things as its symptoms.
Proof of Stake
Steem on it's basic level is a Proof of Stake economic system. We talk about delegated Proof of Stake, but that's just for the part about who operates the blockchain. The rewards system is very vanilla Proof of Stake at the beginning. Proof of Stake systems are a neat bit of economic stage magic that use the power of controlling inflation to maintain the value of the currency. Rewards, which come from inflation, are assigned to people who commit to holding the coin for a certain period of time. Since people want the coin in order to hold it and get more of it, the more people who hold the coin, the more the price goes up, the more people stake the coin, and the more the price goes up again. It's kind of circular but it works, as long as you can get past critical mass of people staking at the beginning.
rshares
Most Proof of Stake systems simply assign their rewards in the coin that they're based on. Where Steem gets complicated is that rewards are given in a highly-restricted hidden currency called rshares. As a regular user you never see an rshare; when you haven't spent them they're represented as voting power, and after you've spent them they're represented as the dollar value you see at the bottom of posts, STUs. Rshares can only live up to seven days after they're spent; after that they're forcibly converted to Steem and SBD. Rshares are invisible, short-lived, and there are very few ways to use them, but they're still a currency, and they're still issued as stake rewards; you get them based on how much Steem you have staked by converting it to SP.
The Core Game
The reason Steem decided to restrict its stake rewards by issuing them as rshares is what I like to call the Core Game: producing, discovering, and rewarding content. This was created in order to distinguish the Steem blockchain from others by giving it a real-world use as a place to create, consume, and interact. Steem is not just one currency among many, it is a currency that supports a system of human social growth.
In order to get people to participate, the designers of Steem chose to issue stake rewards in tokens that are only good for playing the game: rshares, the Disney Dollars of Steem.
The Core Conflict
This system has attracted a fair number of people who are interested in participating in the Core Game, building social communities where we get rewarded in cryptocurrency, interacting with and helping each other, and basically creating a society built on Steem. But as the price has gone up, it has also attracted a fair number of people who are primarily interested in getting their stake rewards. Those two groups have come into significant conflict, and this is where bid-bots, circle-jerks, self-voting and all the other hyphenated things that people dislike come into the picture. All of these things are workarounds to the heavy restrictions placed on rshares in order to drive the Core Game. They exist to help the people who want their stake rewards get their stake rewards despite the ways that rshares are built to make that difficult.
This conflict continues to escalate, and will escalate endlessly as long as the two groups consider themselves to be fundamentally opposed. We need to find a way to cut the Gordian knot of the Core Conflict and end the war. Fortunately I think I've found it.
The Solution
I believe that both of these groups can coexist by a simple, radical improvement in how the blockchain functions: allow individual users the choice to take some or all of their stake rewards in Steem rather than rshares.1
For investors: If you own 0.1% of the staked SP, you will get 0.1% of the rewards as they're issued, period. No giving up money to vote-selling services and vote-buyers in order to get your rewards as liquid currency. No conflicts over flag wars, who's in trending, whether you should self-vote, who you're voting on. No difficulty at all. Stake your money and get your return.
For participants: There's no longer any reason for a bid-bot, or a self-vote, or a circle-jerk. The people who want their rewards will be able to get them without those methods, and without bothering us. And most importantly, rather than forcing in a lot of people who just want financial reward, the Core Game ecosystem will function based entirely on people who are part of it voluntarily. We will direct our stake into the rshares system by our own active consent, and those stake rewards will make up the reward pool for voting.
We can stop spending effort on trying to find technical solutions to the conflict, and start spending it entirely on making the Core Game more appealing and attracting more voluntary participants. The great thing about investors in this system is that they provide the benefit of their stake while requiring almost no effort to maintain; the system works simply and easily for them. All of our developmental, social, and personal investment into the platform can go to making participating in the content portion of Steem extremely compelling and attracting new users into it. Which is not only way more fun but more useful to humanity. If you've looked at social media in general it's kind of a trash fire.
This also fits the dominant human value system around here quite a lot better than the current state of things, because it operates entirely under a system of active consent. Zero forcing people into participating the way we want them to through social pressure, flags, or more restrictive system design. The people who currently gain value through self-voting, delegating for return, and vote-selling will switch to earning their stake rewards directly, because it's better for them. Those of us who are interested in participating on the content side of things will be in an ecosystem where it's just us, playing a game we want to be playing, all of us making it better for the others.2
Each group will provide an independent means of value for Steem, and the two will synergize, the two groups currently with conflicting goals supporting each other as they should be. The social value of the Core Game will make Steem the best Proof-of-Stake system for investors, and the investors will keep demand for Steem high, allowing us to make the Core Game the best social media environment online. Everyone wins.3
What about Steemit?
There's a problem, and I got hung up on it for a little while. @steemit's ninja-mined stake, added to the Core Game rewards pool as it is now, would inflate vote values so much that it would be vastly profitable for people to reject their direct stake rewards and come into the social side of things and sell their votes again. But if you've been following along, you'll have noticed that I've been assigning rewards in a way that leaves out an extremely important group of people.
We can use Steemit's stake to pay the witnesses. @steemit will take its stake rewards in Steem, and use that Steem to cover the witness rewards.4 This will perform essentially the same function that the account sitting without voting does now: expand the value of everyone else's stake. Except that now it will be codified into the system as a mechanism for paying the blockchain's overhead costs.
Conclusion
Much of the conflict within Steem comes from trying to force two divergent goals to exist within the same ecosystem, when we are entirely capable of building a dual environment that can support both of them at the same time. Steem will be vastly improved on both a practical and a moral level by removing the non-consensual aspects from its system design. Everyone will have an easier route to their goals. We will be able to devote our energies to improving our product rather than fighting amongst ourselves.
And it's easy to implement. It's so cheap in computation power that it will actually reduce per-user system load, as the total number of votes will decrease. Once Voting Mana is here it opens the possibility to choose Steem or rshares on a minute-to-minute basis, so if you need to go on vacation you can just flip a switch and not have to worry about voting for a while. Investors will be able to change over too if they get interested in participating.
Both groups will get what they want. Everyone will be able to seek their own value here without this overarching conflict, and removing it will make everyone more successful.
I'm one of the larger beneficiaries of vote-selling here; I've been able to profit quite significantly from the fact that people who want their stake rewards currently have to sell them to me at a discount. I believe that I will be better off in the long term under this system, because the part of Steem that I enjoy most will be freed from the cost of the conflict and allowed to grow to its full potential.
Please join me.
- There may need to be some discussion about what's issued in Steem vs. SP vs. SBD. I don't think it particularly matters.
- Except spammers. We still need to worry about spammers.
- Again, except bid-bot owners. I really do regret that, as I respect your entrepreneurship.
- Steemit's share of rewards is currently in the neighborhood of three times what we're paying the witnesses. Something to work out.
I’m not sure I totally understand. Are you saying have the option of 1) traditional proof of stake earning proportional rewards and 2) participating in the content rewards?
You said it in many fewer words than I did.
I can certainly see the appeal for investors in that case.
But isn’t part of the DNA of STEEM the incentive to develop content?
There's still incentive to develop content. All of us who value that will still be able to reward each other, at essentially the same rate that we can now.
We're just not holding people's money hostage to them developing content any more. It will be done by the people who actually want to, the content will get better because of it, and we'll be able to draw in more people who find it compelling.
Social media by itself is so compelling people use Twitter. I don't think we're going to lack for people who want to use the product if we make one that doesn't suck.
... and not pretend to, as it is currently on Steemit.
Oohhh, I love this idea... @timcliff I hope you don't mind me tagging you. Would you share your opinion on this matter please?
@lukestokes - sorry as well, but I'm summoning some brain power here. I'm not fishing for upvotes for Poly or myself, this is just well thought out and I'm struggling to see the flaw.
I thought you would enjoy it.
Yeah I like the idea as well, I mentioned the need for something like this on @aggroed's MSP witness show a few weeks back - there has to be some alternative for a large investor to get a good ROI besides just delegating to bid bots, and currently there is absolutely no question that the bid bots are the best choice from the purely profit motivated perspective of an investor.
Its kind of ninja... but, funny enough we got little traction so far... However, I won't give up. and I'm sure Poly won't either.
Maybe on the next witness getty?
Yeah I think the big barrier it will have to cross is just resistance from people who don't think investors should be able to get a chunk of the reward pool without "doing anything" / posting/voting/etc. - Which of course ignores the fact that delegating SP to a bidbot is already earning a chunk of the reward pool by doing nothing, but it is worse than doing nothing IMO because it saturates the reward pool to the point that normal and even large account upvotes barely even move the needle.
exactly! - but it's about informing the people what's happening already and how its distorting everything.
Interesting idea.
Under your proposal, this is not definitely going to be the case. I think that like any economic system, people will do whatever yields them the highest returns, with the social / cultural bounds. People who have a lot of time, good software and who don't care about the social norms (i.e. on the scam / spam / abuse side) will continue to self vote, circle jerk and abuse the Steemit.com faucet delegation on account creation if it's more rewarding than simply taking stake rewards.
So my question is, how is it to be balanced? It seems to me that for the Core Game to be truly voluntary it would have to have less returns that simply electing to extract a stake dividend, at least on average. This however would devalue the Core Game somewhat. Perhaps that's a necessary compromise with what you propose.
I might have missed something obvious so corrections invited.
Since every exploit has a significant cost in the effort it takes to actually do it, as long as the returns from self-voting are kept essentially the same as the returns from pure staking, pure staking should win. Maybe a few people will try to find ways around that but they will be few enough that they can still be controlled by the folks around here who really love the idea of flagging people who don't play by their rules.
People who are choosing rshares should be active voters, since it makes no sense to choose rshares and then not vote them. That keeps the average stake return for the two systems consistent.
That, for instance, will still be a problem. (I categorize it with spam since it's mainly spammers who do it.)
Another thought on consequences. Leaving your VP at 100%, not voting, does not prohibit you from posting, as you pay for that (and any operation) with bandwidth. So you could never vote but still comment and post stuff.
I can imagine a new culture emerging of people who post and comment regularly to try to garner others' upvotes but who very sparingly vote, attempting to maximize the amount of time they spend at 100%. And a counter culture of those calling them out. Maybe I'm too cynical 😅
That's a very useful point.
Right, and those who "really love the idea of flagging people who don't play by their rules" (ahem, of which I am one, though I reject your characterization) attempt to increase this cost, or rather reduce the exploit payouts. It's a large, underfunded, frustrating and mostly thankless job, but removing scam is good for the platform longterm, thus everyones' stake.
I guess your proposal isn't really for the bottom feeder scammers but the mid and top feeder scammers, those making pretty seriously low quality attempts at content to disguise their actual purpose of simple token extraction, and for whom there will always be a gray area and level of plausible deniability.
And it's also not for the top platinum lambo moon scammers, like those who shilled BitConnect and whatnot. They thrive on the personality cult to, but I can imagine them going back and forth between passively collecting and making noise about the latest pump and dump.
Technical details aside (as discussed in other thread) I'm chewing this in my brain to see if it's better, still not sure but intrigued.
It's not targeted at scammers at all. It's targeted at groups of people who all have different legitimate goals. Part of the problem is the casting of people who just want their stake rewards as scammers. That not only leads to inveterate conflict on the platform but cuts back the resources to fight the people who are here to actually defraud others. Those will always have to be prevented the old-fashioned way because they take advantage of people, and people's decision-making. There's nothing we can do technically to prevent someone from voting their stake on someone who wants to sell them gold so they can eat it. That has to be done by humans.
Wanting stake rewards without playing the game does not categorize a scammer. Not at all. But I would argue that acting on that want by cynically playing the game for rewards only (for example, posting random images to up vote with your many alts) is fraudulent by definition. The only reason this fraud is okay is that it is not fraud on a systematic level, all operations are legal, as code is law. The contribution to the game though is clearly just for show as the only way to get rewards for stake. This we know.
Enough has already been written about this I think, but to mention it, this is why we have bit bots. Large stakeholders invented a game on the game to (attempt to) legitimize their desire for passive return on investment. This has been a success for them, but arguably not good in the long run.
Here's the thing that you are attempting to sidestep: your proposal would give people who are expending unnecessary effort by playing dishonestly an avenue to make the actions supporting their aims (rewards only) legitimate. This cannot be overstated and it's why I talk of scammers.
I'm sorry, but I see no logical basis for this argument that doesn't boil down to "my values are the right ones so yours are a fraud." These other people did not agree to your value system, and the fact that the system tries to force them to conform to it is evidence that the system is a fraud, not the users who are circumventing it.
This is why the most important element of this proposal is not who gets what rewards when but converting to a fully-consensual model of participation.
Arguments are not based in logic, but if they are good they proceed in logic. The premise of my argument is that the whitepaper is the founding document of the platform, which outlines the game. If you read the whitepaper you will see that the game is the only supported means of reward. Subverting the game is (currently) subverting the platform, which is fraud. I should note that the larger game outlined in the whitepaper is larger than the blogging platform somewhat, but not by much.
You are really abusing the concept of consent here. "A fully-consensual model of participation" sounds great, but in fact we already have that. No one can stop you doing what you want to do with your own stake, and you can't stop anyone doing what they want with there. In terms of a social network, that is never seen before.
Under the current system people are not entitled to rewards based on their stake, it is up to the free vote of potentially every single account on the platform. You propose to implement a change so that people will be entitled to rewards based on their stake. This has nothing to do with consent and everything to do with giving more options to stakeholders. It is potentially a good thing, but you are muddying the conceptual waters by attempting to frame it in terms of consent. I can see it being a politically useful misdirection, but that's all it is.
Thinking this through a little more, the system could be set to deliver all rewards when at 100% voting power as Steem. That should enforce the par between rewards types and might be an even easier way to accomplish the whole thing.
Perhaps, I was going to ask how you propose the choice be technically implemented. That makes me think of this:
Votes will probably decrease, but other costs will rise up to replace them, and back of the napkin guesswork tells me it'd be a net increase in cost.
Votes are active actions which nodes respond to on demand. From my understanding (as a former backup witness and active 3rd party developer) the computation strategy is to respond to events as much as possible and have as few "implied events", what are called "virtual operations" (check out the end of information on this block on steemd.com).
The blockchain nodes don't actually keep track of VP regeneration, it is only calculated again when another vote is cast. Blockchain users (by which I mean any front end or app) must manually recalculate this if it's something they're interested in before voting. There is no regeneration operation, not even virtual, and the blockchain doesn't care until another vote is cast, saving on computation.
Adding total system-wide payouts periodically (should be ever X minutes or hours I guess) for all accounts at 100% VP would (a) require VP regeneration to be actively calculated by nodes, and (b) calculate how much to pay them, and then pay them, periodically. Depending on the amount of account which reach or maintain 100% VP the compute cost could be a very significant increase.
As an optimisation, VP calculations could at least stop when VP reaches 100% if there is no further voting operations. However (b) would still cost.
My original thought was there would simply be an account flag that users could set to a number between 0 and 10000 (since we like that number) for how much of their rewards to get in each system. Then there should be less computation because all of the pool payouts come with very complex computations already anyway, and the new ones would be much simpler.
I can see that the 100% cap might be harder to do though.
I'm not sure it saves computation so much as outsourcing it, since we're all looking at our live voting power all the time anyway. But I guess if the witnesses don't have to do it that's something. Still, it should be possible to set a 100% signal somehow even if we aren't doing it granularly.
Not sure how Voting Mana is going to change all that anyway.
That removes cost (a), but increases cost (b). I'll have to dig into the code but I think you're very much understating the burden this would have on nodes, their complex computations not withstanding. You're proposing additional account operations for every account that selects this (not proportional to the sliding scale, of course) or every account at 100%, every X time period. I would like to see an actual reckoning with this fact, or at least a good rebuttal if you think I'm wrong.
Saves computation for witnesses obviously. Not doing it on nodes is likely to increase total universe size work to do because lots of other computers are needlessly calculating it, but that's just being pedantic. When we talk of computational cost, we're of course talking about witnesses, that is a given.
I think I'm going to have to see Voting Mana in action before I can do that for the 100% idea. For the flag, I'll see what I can come up with. Nobody's going to implement this this week anyway.
For real. I'll stay tuned and contribute if I can, at least to thrash it out.
If I'm not mistaken, bidbot owners will be fine under your system, as they will make a better return than they currently make. Better because they will not have to lose out to entrepreneurs like yourself, who successfully underbid the value of their stakes, and also better because your proposal frees them from paying for witnesses also.
On the other hand, I see no reason why the controllers of the @steemit account would go along with this, since I presume they consider they own this stake, and it is not communal property. I concede I am only guessing as to the legal ownership of the @steemit account, so please feel free to school me lol.
All in all, your proposal seems to be the most fair and libertarian of proposals. Libertarian, since it does not conceive supporting the rewards pool as an essential duty of any Steem investor.
If is not the duty of a Steem investor to support the rewards pool (as for example, it was the duty of Facebook shareholders to support the acquisition and retention of active users, for many years before they ever saw a dividend), then one has to acknowledge that while your libertarian system is the most fair imaginable, it is not the most business savvy, as the degree to which rshare owners opt out of supporting the acquisition and retention of active users will be proportional to a slowdown in potential growth.
This in turn will make way for a competitor to compel participation in active user growth, by prospective stakeholders, mirroring the Facebook example above, in such a way that the competitor will inevitably ultimately outcompete your newly redesigned Steem ecosystem.
That said, I do think there is a brilliant elegance to your solution, and it would be infinitely preferable to the current slightly rancorous state of affairs.
Congrats on thinking so laterally and elegantly! :)
Most bidbot owners have large stakes because it's delegated to them. The delegators will do well when they remove the delegation, but it will remove all the value from running a vote-selling service. The bidbot owners will still get value from the SP they've managed to accumulate themselves, but most of their income comes from selling the votes of other people.
That's really complicated. Essentially there's a community expectation that Steemit Inc. will not use that stake; as such they leave it sitting at 100% voting power all the time, and have shown no inclination to change that. My solution essentially just leaves them doing the same thing in a different fashion.
To look at the other half of your comment, I think it's more or less indisputable that the social interaction of non-consensual participants here adds negative value to the acquisition and retention of active users. They're not doing any of that work, and they're taking time and mental energy away from many of the people who want to.
It seems like this would also be true of any competitor that tried to implement an involuntary system. They would have bid-bots, and fight about bid-bots, and we could keep making ourselves better while they did.
That's brilliant! And it could actually work. For those who already have large stakes, they can sell off the profits and earn fiat or other crypto. Then those who want to buy in can purchase that and grow their own share.
It would also solve a lot of bandwidth issues as people who are only spamming to spam won't have the incentive to do so. If you get the same reward regardless of involvement, there's no point in doing the work. The person can just buy a small stake and watch it grow.
Put my mind at ease here, because I have just one question:
"How is this stake option different than someone creating a blank post 10 times a day and self-voting it at 100%?"
From what I'm thinking, your 100% voted rshares yield precisely the percentage of the fully staked SP, and that's what you'd be taking out of the rewards for that block. I think there's a hole in my understanding of how exactly the rshares percentage works though, and this might be what I am missing. (like maybe it's not the percentage of rshares corresponding to fully staked SP, but the active rshares that were assigned within the same block???). I suppose I should go dig around...
No, it's exactly like that.
Sorry for the delay, of course there is going to be a follow up the way I phrased my question :)
This I suppose was still one of our differences concerning the core game. If all major stakeholders opted to do this, we would be in trouble, and certainly from the observation about self voting, it is possible for them to do this today (albeit not conveniently). Bid bot delegation does the same thing automatically at a discount compared to this, as you mentioned. Why would things improve in this new system? It seems to me that the platform would be worse off as major delegators switch from bid bots to self vote mode.
I know we talked about making the core game compelling to make vote behavior favor voting others over voting self, but I think we did not fully discuss this last time. In my opinion, it's about long term vs short term thinking that would drive this valuation, and one would hope people don't opt for this stake mode. But why make it easier to make that choice?
Think of it in opposite direction: that's how much we've* decided someone's stake is worth, regardless of who they distribute it to. If you add up all the votes cast and divide them by stake again, that's what you get; it's just a simple valuation of what the stake rewards are worth.
If you need to take some of the stake rewards from one person and give it to another to make the system work, that's basically the definition of a pyramid scheme. Everyone's stake rewards should be enough to cover their footprint in the Core Game, on average, or else we have a problem so large that bid-bots are moot.
To get reductive about it, would the system fail if everyone started voting? Then the value within the Core Game would be the stake rewards of the people participating, minus what we pay the witnesses to run the chain. My proposal is slightly better because the witnesses get paid by the other side.
This, I think, is where we differ: I don't believe this is true. We'd have a smaller Steem, with about as much participation as we have now, but only the participants being active. Which is also what we'd get if any of the more hostile anti-vote-selling proposals were implemented, with one difference: my proposal does this without crashing the price.
Right now delegators' stake rewards go exclusively to three places: delegators, bidbot operators, and people who buy votes from bidbots. How would we be harmed if delegators were getting all of it instead? (They even take a bunch of extra curation rewards with them.)
If there were hundreds of people like me who were taking vote-buying profit and spreading it into the participation system, there would be some sort of trickle-down effect there, but you now have a spreadsheet to show how much I've made from that and while it's nice for me personally it's essentially meaningless on a systemwide level.
The rhetoric around vote-buying has prevented this from being a common strategy on a large scale; I'm only aware of one other user doing it on a similar level to mine. So I'm reasonably sure the curation rewards which wouldn't be taken by the bots more than make up for the loss of the trickle-down benefit, on a systemwide scale. It will suck for me and that guy, and on some level for the specific users we support. But I think we'll get more value from social harmony, even if it's non-currency value.
Actually, I hope more people would opt for this stake mode - just people who don't own Steem yet. If we end the war we can focus on attracting people to both sides of the system.
Ack, this isn't processing for me.
If the stake is used to drive value yes. Now I understand this comment as what would happen if steemit specifically started voting. If it just self-voted, then yes, this is not a good thing for the platform. I see that in your proposal the witness funds would come from these rewards making it slightly better. But I suppose this is really a distraction from the main points to argue about, which brings us to... the point about "Everyone self voting" / "Everyone staking under proposed rules":
I don't really see much of a difference except being able to automate self-voting without possibility for flagging.
So the reason I believe that everyone staking would be bad, is because in my opinion, stake should be used to advance the platform (see below on one of the values), and passive stake that's just going proportionally is less efficient towards this goal.
I'll concede to the point that if everyone goes to staking mode, STEEM looks pretty much like an ordinary proof-of-stake currency, which in theory could hold value as a currency itself. I believe this is one of your main points of this article. But that would only succeed if the currency had enough adoption with users and usage in value exchange. Part of the appeal of STEEM to me is that it has a great mechanism to help with adoption, which would motivate services to look here to begin with.
To be clear, I hate both situations. But... at the very least, bid bots distribute wealth a smidge better. We might disagree on whether or not this is good or not. But part of my metrics on "good for platform" is precisely how we are distributing wealth to participants. The stake solution opposes this.
And as a related point, I'm sticking to the original vision that the the voting should reflect some measure of value for activities that occur on this platform. The perception that this is working would be attractive to potential users, and this is in the interest of stakeholders. I think the white paper says it best, as I referenced in this post. I would be interested to see your rebuttal for that particular passage about the prisoner's dilemma setup. It's likely related to your earlier comment about stake rewards going to others as a pyramid scheme, which I'm not able to see.
If the system relies on taking rewards from inactive users and distributing them to active users, then the system is dependent on a continuous supply of inactive users. And thus doesn't really work at all in the long run.
When you talk about staking advancing the platform, you're making two contradictory arguments: that the Core Game is inherently valuable, but people won't play it unless (money available in the game) > (money put into the game) * (1 + inflation rate). Those can't both be true.
We have a lot of voluntary players already, and the idea that it would just revert to PoS is not consistent with the choices many Steem users are already making. If the Core Game is inherently valuable, or can be made so, then it will attract users when it's at par with staking. If it isn't, then we're all living a lie already, an unsustainable one fed by Steemit's unused stake.
That's essentially the bet we're all making here, and while the white paper is a wonderful marketing tool it's not a proposition we have a lot of empirical evidence for. The main evidence is that we're here.
This is the one really strong argument I see against this plan: that bid-bots are good. Or more broadly, that having a market for our core resource provides opportunities for entrepreneurship and for intelligent buying, which lead to upward mobility. But the bid-bots are the market-makers, at least until something comes along to replace them.
Basically restating some of the above: if the Core Game has inherent value rather than just being a complicated method of rewards payout, then people will choose to play it. There isn't a PD here because "defecting" is strictly worse than not doing so if the social/content mechanism has positive value. If the social/content mechanism does not have value, then Steem is a fraud and none of this matters.
You could look at my system as an experiment designed to test whether that's true, I suppose.
The main disconnect I have with this, and is relevant to PD, is about the behavior of current high staked whales, some self voting, some delegating, active, etc. You've heard even from the whale's mouth quotes like "why am I manually curating and delegating to groups like a sucker while other whales just vote themselves without a care for others?" It's certainly not because they are making the core game better for themselves. They are making it better for others, at their own expense (opportunity cost wise).
I suppose you are saying that the whales that engage put a monetary value on their engagement with others which is higher than just self voting, but I don't think that's really true. I believe that some of them acknowledge that the platform can only survive if there's enough of them contributing to making the core game better for others (and attracting users). This is a hard statement to show support for, admittedly. It's rather based on statements from certain whales and thought experiments like these.
Having trouble with this. I'm interpreting this as meaning that the following two statements can't both be true:
Not too sure about the formula, may need clarification. But I think I'm starting to see that the difference in our lines of thinking lie in the belief about why we are here today.
Is it that high stake actors are valuing social interaction over the value of their self vote? Or is it that they believe that the platform can only succeed if they forgo immediate gains for spreading out stake to others?
Hmm I would say the perceived value of the game... depends on the actions of its participants. And depends on the value available in the game as well.
Thanks particularly to conversations with @meno, @personz, and @eonwarped that helped me crystallize this.
actually a really great post.. this definitely would help the steemit ecosystem.. also major flaw is still in place... this is how fiat enters the system... will write a post about what I mean by that...
Great idea. Following you. POS is a solution.
You got a 28.55% upvote from @ocdb courtesy of @tcpolymath!
Quite ingenious! I am all on board !
Very interesting. Really a possibility to be thought of. There is this abyss in return investors, and in the short run. Of investors in Steem's social network, which includes the Steemit application. Either way Steem need investors. In the Brazilian community we are trying to grow, based on the social network. Some prefer to autovote, and vote for their own comments, those that end up being the main investors. I believe that some of these mechanisms should be withdrawn. Unfortunately, I believe that those who stay on the social network have much more to add, than those who want to return in the short term. Thinking about the long term, are those that will be part of the purpose to which the platform was made. But I understand that we need to attract investors, and keep them, for the good of us all, especially the ones that are starting. Congratulations on the proposal. If you think about it, who knows, you can reduce these poles a bit among the models of investors here.
Sorry I'm dumb and don't 100 percent understand, but under this system i would get rewards for the amount of SP I have, but wouldn't have to do anything? You can just sit back and collect rewards based on how much steem you hold? I was just reading reading another post on switching to a one person / one vote system (which I love the idea of) and I didn't quite get where your steempower fit it to it.
Steem is broken though for sure and needs a radical change to how it works....
You would have the option of either taking rewards in Steem or in voting power. So if you wanted your rewards in cash you could have them.
@tcpolymath I know I'm late to the party, but could you make a follow up article explaining the math behind this idea of having Steem investors getting 100% of their stake rewards.
I'm asking about the math because, correct me if I'm wrong, I think Steem currently has a monetary inflation rate that is decreasing at a fixed yearly rate. Would your proposal require Steem to be minted at an ever increasing or exponentially increasing rate of inflation?
In this new hypothetical proof-of-stake system for Steem if we set the inflation rate at let's say 2% would upvotes raise the inflation rate above the baseline/default inflation rate?
I'm not saying that I want Steem to have a deflationary policy; I just want to point out that the success of Steemit Inc is primarily measured by and for better or worse primarily determined by the price of Steem. I think having an inflationary monetary policy with a speculative cryptocurrency i.e. a crypto coin whose value constantly fluctuates is a bad idea, because some content producers are trying to live off the value of Steem and I think most people don't want the value of their income to constantly fluctuate.
Would it be possible, in your opinion, for all investors and users to invest in Steem and only receive their stake rewards in SBD and would it also be possible to have an SBD that is actually relatively price stable like Tether's TUSD or MakerDAO's Dai?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Steem currently has a diminishing rate of monetary inflation and would your proposed system require Steem to adopt an accelerating rate of monetary inflation, to put differently?
Would the fear of raising the inflation rate be the primary reason as to why Steemit Inc chose to divide the stake reward among Steem's various types of users/participants rather than have each and every user receive a stake reward that is exactly proportionally to the amount of Steem they invest in?
I would also like to ask if the circular effect you talk about when describing how proof-of-stake coins work to increase their own value over time is in fact a positive feedback loop. The critical mass effect that you say is required to make a proof-of-stake coin become popular and self-sustaining in the long-run sounds like the reason why ICOs exist in the first place if I'm not mistaken. I think ICOs are better at creating the required critical mass for the widespread adoption of a proof-of-stake coin than mining or airdrops, the latter of which has recently become very fashionable. Could you also more clearly articulate what you mean by "critical mass" in a follow up article?
I would also love to hear your opinion on the U Network (the UUU token) and if it can effectively solve the upvoting problems that currently plague Steemit.
I'm not really pushing this anymore, though I'm ok that some other people have taken it up, so I'm really not going to do followup posts, but I can answer that briefly.
I don't see why this would be necessary. There's not any new Steem being created, just a portion of the rewards pool is getting carved off to give to people who would rather have it directly. So when the inflation rate is 8%, you would be able to elect to get 8% directly, or have your 8% tossed into the voting rewards pool to be distributed by that mechanism. The rewards pool would be driven entirely by people who had elected to do that. So the inflation rate could keep decreasing, that would be fine.
My understanding from what Ned has said is that the primary reason for the upvoting system is to get Steem into the hands of as many people as possible by making it possible to earn it in what's essentially a free-to-play system. I may be reading into that too much, though. (In any case, while it has worked to get a lot of people a little Steem, it kind of flopped at putting an effective amount of Steem in the hands of a broad populace.)