Brown paper bag with cash for a Witness Vote
Do you know the amazing thing about a universally audit-able ledger?
You can follow the money. Welcome to the blockchain.
screenshot of the users transaction ledger
Using bribery for witness votes ethically wrong?
If one user does this than what is to prevent others from buying their way into witness positions. Witnesses are:
"...trusted members of the community, positively contribute to Steem and Steemit in many ways, are qualified and experienced in administration of servers, and are experienced in cryptocurrency networks and software." - @pfunk - link to original post
Why I think it is wrong.
New members are joining daily. This community is now stretching passed the initial members who knew network administration, understood the blockchain, and have invested time and energy on the community.
I just left a social media site which was created by people who bought their way ahead in life which benefited users who bought fake fans.
What next? A General Electric, Facebook, or a Government joins the site and buys control over Steemit by running multiple accounts and slowly buying witness votes? How many witness accounts would an organization need to hold to force a Hard Fork and threaten censorship or change the rewards system?
This is why I think buying witness votes is against everything that Steemit stands for.
Stand with me and against Witness vote bribery.
I will not reveal this user yet. They have a network of other users which they are moving money through and they have spent the last 48 hours spending over 1,000 STEEM to buy votes from users using their primary account.
They are sitting right outside of the votes necessary to become a witness.
If this is something you want to make sure is stopped in its tracks on Steemit. I ask you to either resteem this or write your thoughts. I have declined payout as I feel this is a community action and those should not be monetized.
The Brown Paper photograph is by Brandon Ruckdashel
It's not interesting unless you name them. How about it?
Edit:
I see that it's Jerry Banfield. Why am I not surprised?
Yup. Welcome to the audit-able ledger. I wanted to open the conversation first before naming names.
I know this community does not behave nicely towards people who sow discontent unless there is general consensus first on wether it is ethical behavior.
I think it would be hard to separate greed from crypto no matter what kind of happy attitude you project. So there are always going to be situations like this and power struggles in every crypto community, which I think is one reason people gravitate so much to the leaders of projects and put them on a pedestal. Steemit is much more fractured than that (since there must be at least tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of posts and comments a day), and on top of that Dan Larimer also kind of checked out on the project AFAIK. Uhhh I guess to try to connect to the point of why this is right or wrong, basically people are pretty leaderless here I feel. So I think people being able to sway each other fast and easy is pretty natural, whether that is with money, circlejerking about how great steem is, being a pretty girl, a whale friend pushing your posts from the start. I dislike this, but it seems as harmless as any other "problem" the site has to me I guess?
@bruckdashel
Great content!
Thanks for sharing!
Thank you! But I would strongly recommend against copy pasting your comments. Someone will notice and then the bots will come get you. Change them by a word or two at the very least.
Once the bribe is paid, can't the voter just change to someone else?
Seems like a good way to get poor quick.
1000 Steem in the last 48 hours that I could track.
Wow. That is not surprising actually!
Well the guy who is going has not surprised anyone and is apparently on a number of peoples lists for bad behavior.