Where is the Trust in Proof of Brain mining?
Proof of Brain mining has led steem to becoming the fastest crypto network with the greatest transaction throughput of any other crypto currency. How does it do it?
Proof of Brain.
"Proof-of-Brain is a type of tokens rewards algorithm that encourages people to create and curate content." - https://steem.io/
Notice the word "people" in the above definition. There have been folks that would like to bend that meaning a bit, and power to them. In the Unitied Stares of America corporations are considered people by their Supreme Court, so madness is not limited to the masses.
To me it is implied that during mining/curation/upvoting (or whatever you want to call it) of steem, a pair of human eyeballs are reviewing the content in question and by their criteria deem it worthy of reward and consequently create some steem with an upvote.
It is my contention that in the process of non-Proof of Brain mining/curation/upvoting, for example a voting bot, that the steem which is created is counterfeit. Like traditional counterfeit fiat, unless removed from the economy, it causes it to be devalued. This, in my opinion, is exactly what is happening with steem as a consequence. It devalues the very blockchain by filling it with content which would not have even been created but as a means to generate counterfeit steem. It does not attract investors but scam artists who flock to the wellspring of counterfeit steem.
It is true that my minnow sliding voting bar was purchased with steem bought at the rate of 0.00024 BTC / 1 steem. But don't call me an investor as my other crypto assets are in coins which are Proof of Work. You know, the type of crypto that can be trusted no matter who or what is currently minding the ledger.
There are no counterfeit Proof of Work coins.
Why would someone invest, in the truest sense of the word, in steem? What trust is there in Proof of Brain when many of the sacred top 20 witnesses have self motivations to see such counterfeiting continue; to the point of running their own voting bots?!?!?
What other diabolical wink wink nudge nudge pyramid-like scheme may they vote to uphold next? Or simply not vote to have it changed?
If there is no trust in Proof of Brain there is no trust in steem. It is that simple to real investors.
Get your act together, those withnesses with the voting privileges to guide this project, while there's still human eyes on this site.
Never thought about it like that.
In terms of proof of brain, there are loads of trending posts which fail that basic test.
I would advocate a fork and removing the top layer who are allowing steem to be generated by bots and rubbish content
Yeah if some scheme is not adopted to deal with.the issue of non-proof of brain voting, then a real fork seems inevitable. Hopefully we will get more unbiased witnesses in the top 20 position before that happens. 😎
Vive la revolution! I say ;)
This is why I have so much admiration for the French!
Might be a bit extreme. 😎
Hopefully the counterfeiters will, simply, sell their stake and go home once a check is in place for Proof of Brain.
Thx for another informative post. Easy to read.
Please continue up with creating interesting content - it may be hard at the beginning to build reach and solid followers base.
Steemits needs solid content builders so just dont ever give up! :)
Already followed and upvoted :) Cheers,
Appreciate your input and now our connection, @crypto.piotr, as we build alliances to change counterfeit mining.
hi @novacadian
thx for your reply :)
just noticed that you didnt post in a while. hope you're okey there
Yours
Piotr
Everything is fine, thanks. Not the most prolific poster. More of a comment/curator kind of guy.
Great insights Nova, as another steemian pointed out, I've never thought it that way! But, it's true, bots are a way to counterfeit steem!!! Thank you for sharing!
Thanks for helping get the word out with your resteem, my friend. 🖒
And the problem with non-proof of brain mining, it cost people VP to counter them.
But of course, you will find some stout users of that term saying that their business idea is pure "proof of brain". It's more like counterfeiting.
I have posted before that each "content" users create will eventually just be a mining spike to be voted on, and I don't think I will be wrong if this keeps up.
You should have been at the "debate" today between @sircork and @timcliff. The gist of it comes down to the ideas that have been tossed around are not "important enough for the limited dev resources" by the Top 20.
No idea what's actually important, but hey, that's top secret. So, no changes to Witness voting, no nothing. Just pray and hope SMTs will actually be released.
Agreed, @enforcer48. Although the downvote flag is a great idea for questionsble content it is not the answer to fight against counterfeit steem. It should be a given that all steem is created by Proof of Brain and then the fellow brains can figure out its approproateness or not.
Some form of CAPCHA is required embedded ftom the blockchain, using things like the checksum of the post and the block. Leaving the details to the devs, yet if etherium can handle smart contracts a CAPCHA does not seem like a lot to ask.
This comment produced by a human.
That humor is recognizable anywhere. 100% @papacrusher. 😎
I had never really thought of the upvote bot's in this way, but I think you explain this very well and I can see that you are right - the created steem is counterfeit because the bot has no idea if the content is worth the upvote value it is giving.
I do use upvote bot's to reward posts where my own upvote is not sufficient to give the reward I feel the post deserves - in this case is the generated Steem counterfeit because I used my own judgement to send the upvote bot to that post.
Unfortunately I don't see the bot's going away anytime soon, and in reality what they fill in for is the lack of real people working through posts, manually curating, encouraging authors with relevant engaging comments. There is incredible content being produced on here, easily good enough to impress and attract investors - if the were lucky enough to see it. And they won't if they look at Trending.
Your example about employing a voting bot to put more power in one's Proof of Brain is an interesting angle. Without voting bots perhaps the Promote option would service the situation you have highlighted?
P.S.
My feeling is that a decentralized annonymous Proof of Brain CAPCHA needs designing.
Buying votes from bots is exactly the same as self voting only that way whales get a chunk too so that's fine by them
Agreed.
Giving you a full upvote for having an important discussion.
You sure about that?
IMO, DPOS is more decentralized than most POW coins, including Bitcoin. Only a handful of mining farms control consensus with their hashing power and I watched the marketshare go from 80%+ down to 35% between 2014 to 2017. I bought my first BTC for $50 in January of 2013 (and I got 2.5 BTC). POW doesn't have onchain governance and it needs it.
The DPOS block production mechanism is separate from the users and investors themselves who vote up shit content or extract value instead of creating it. Please, give that a video a watch and let me know what you think.
We're dealing with human problems here which are made worse by bad economic systems which reward behavior that hurts the collaborative commons.
I like your "counterfeit" analogy, but I don't think it's just about human vs. bot. I used Steemvoter to vote up authors automatically that I want to support because, as a human, I'm making that choice with my stake. That's still my proof of brain. I see vote bots as just another form of self-voting which I talked about in detail here. It's a problem. We need to fix it. It's combination of downvoting more content and changing the economic system.
Witnesses alone can't do much. We need consensus from the community on exactly what changes should be made and then we need to get developers involved to make them.
Appreciate your input into the discussion, Luke. Will check out those couple of links before throwing out some ideas to help put trust back into Proof of Brain for caring investors.9
Maybe it was being a child of the cold war and witnessing how the threat of mutual annihilation got us through that October of 1962 which gives me confidence a 51% attack is to nobody's interest.
Hammock time well spent! 😎
Not much to disagree with on your video renarks. Small details to be discussed, perhaps, on our road to true Proof of Brain coins.
My feeling is that a CAPCHA scheme of some sort needs to be employed to, at least, give those who choose to use it more power to their upvotes. This is suggested while fully aware that other approaches may exist to deal with counterfeitting. Could there finally be a practical use for karma points? 😃
CAPCHA and blockchains don't really work well together, but it's an interesting idea.
Check the news lately for how many chains have been 51% attacked. And those are just the ones that made the news. It happens all the time, more so than most coin projects are willing to admit.
My funniest shit coin story was when a Buddy of mine kept a network running (BBQ if memory serves) for a while by having two mining machines talking to each other in a room upstairs. He made a shit load the next year when noobs thought them a great buy. 😎
Heh. Way too many shit coins and way too much speculation. Eventually we'll have our dot com bubble moment and figure out which projects are the real deal. As far as EOS is concerned, investors have already spoken.
I can only agree with you a little over 5000%
You are onto something, @novacadian!
Think of it like two extremes:
Steem from that point of view is the experiment of "in between".
Less pure than pure PoW coins for sure.
But hopefully a lot less corrupt and corruptible than fiat systems (think Zimbabwe, Venezuela and the likes)
Why that (greatly) matters? It matters because people are not 100% economic animals. Money is not the be-all, end-all, nor the key to explaining the human (although it is an important part of the mix). People are about more than money, they are also about social bonds and relationships.
I contend that going forward, to a world of abundance (supported by technology), the "economy" will matter less and less while the "sociology" will matter more and more
This is why I believe steem is exploring and experimenting and searching for the "sweet spot" of "inbetween" in the right space, the space of social relationships and communities.
There is no external enforcement, no armed police in steem. If you want to get other steemians to move in a direction you need
Thanks for your thoughtful input, @sorin.cristescu!
We are in agreement that these new systems on blockchain technology can oft times fall short due to human behavior. Generally that undesired behavior comes about through greed; or profit as crapitalism puts it.
My feeling is that in the post capitalistic economy of the future tokens will find the user instead of the user seeking out tokens. A good example of this is an app that monitors your footsteps and rewards one in the process of exercising, the name of which escapes me at the moment.
It then becomes a Star Trek like scenario of how many replicator rations one has available; as opposed to putting in an extra shift to get more rations (though they seem to get traded between crewmembers). 😎
When we think of crypto as tokens more than currency this mind set may change.
Funny enough I was writing about precisely the same complex equilibrium with "greed only" at one end of the balance and "complete communism" at the other in a comment on a @jamesbrown musing over why there's no fusion reactor yet, despite the fact that it has been predicted for almost 50 years now.
The overall consensus is that the oil and gas lobby has no interest in a fusion reactor becoming a reality. That is a matter of course but the horse industry had a strong interest in the young automobile failing at the end of the XIXth century and that didn't prevent the car taking over the world.
It's clear that the greed of the oil and gas industry will fuel a fight against the successful development of a fusion reactor. So pure greed is not good.
But the key is to understand that if pure "A" (say greed) is BAD, it doesn't necessarily imply that "Not A" (say communism) is GOOD.
And I was giving the example of Europe which took the radically opposite approach of eliminating all source of greed and putting the task in the hands of civil servants. No greed whatsoever because no financial or monetary incentives involved.
Whether that is the right approach it's pretty easy to see: where's Europe's fusion reactor ?
My point here is that the order is important: we will not "think of crypto as tokens more than currency" first and then "the mind set will change". Rather, thanks to technological progress, we will avail ourselves of everything to our heart's content. We are heading toward a world of abundance. That won't abolish greed, which is, to various degrees, part of our genes. But the greed level will decrease.
And then, thanks to greed decreasing (but never going to zero), we will both change our mind set AND start looking at crypto as tokens. The "currency" will be less and less needed because there will be less need for exchanging stuff - more and more stuff will be available to everyone
A very good point about the effect the period of abundance would have on things; in a positive way in my opinion.
My feeling is that such a future may be less politically party based in governance, but instead more issue based, through direct representational voting using the transparency available on a blockchain.
I don't know if I should make anything of this but I just finished commenting an older post by @tibra and this very topic was discussed - @tibra seems to be rather pessimistic though
What about the brain that created the bot?
So the bot read the content and was soo fabulously programmed that it had an opinion about the merit of the content?
Tim, you are digging holes with each comment you make to me lately. Holding on my support for you as a witness by considering this comment of your's Devil's Advocacy and not raving mania.
Bots should have been banned long time ago.