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RE: A simple, radical change to Steem that could fix most of our problems.
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.
A particular whale who thinks he can use that argument to sway people into enriching him at everyone else's expense.
Anyway, I'm not sure if I can explain this better without going back to to the premise of everyone voting. And I really do mean everyone, not just Steemit. You wake up in the morning to discover that every Steemit account has decided to use its outgoing vote. No self-voting in any form, but also no sitting inactive. Essentially the utopian ideal here.
Does the system work? Your argument suggests that you think it doesn't. What I'm building here is a model Steem, a smaller one where everyone who participates values their outgoing vote over their self-vote, because otherwise they wouldn't be participating, they'd be in the larger basic PoS system on the same coin.
If the scaled-down system doesn't work without pushing money into it from the outside, then neither will the idealized full-scale one.
And if it doesn't then we need to be quietly panicking about that instead of other things.
Gotcha. See, I'm arguing that the idealized system does work, but that it involves the voluntary choice to prefer giving out to keeping to one's self. You say this is unsustainable, but I am saying it is not. The setup forces no alternative.
It could be that this is the reality, to which your response would be: how can a system designer set up something so wrongheaded to rely on an entire group to make individual "sacrifices" to achieve a societal optimum?
This is a fair point. However, I believe this to be the reality, and maybe an either optimistic part of me or an amused part of me thinks that this is why I like this experiment.
The other reason I think this is that your proposed solution isn't that far off from right now. People can opt for staking by having someone provide an auto voting service that does exactly what I described at the beginning of our discussion. Ok, I know, it's not the same because of the stigma. But don't you think people will look at the choice of taking the stake option in the same way?