Balance

A lot of people have been messaging me recently asking about the inner workings of @ocdb. I can see that it's drawing a lot of attention and I don't mind sharing about it as everything is open-source and public, which many dapps on Steem share the same characteristics of. Not to mention there is not much kept secret considering that if someone does not want to share info about its project, the activity on the blockchain can surely give you a sense of how it works.

I am very proud of our community and I'm not saying this from a pedestal thinking of myself like someone amazing who came up with something great, what I did many could've built themselves and the whole reason it exists is cause of some very awesome people who put work into it for the sake of the greater good of the ecosystem it resides in.

What I am saying is that there are still a lot of unnecessary services on Steem who in my opinion should not exist in a trustless system as one of the advantages of it is that we don't need them. We don't need to pay people to use the Steem blockchain, we don't need to pay people to read anything we want on Steem and we shouldn't have to pay people to give us a chance at investing in this ecosystem by our activity and the value of our content.

I understand there are some that will always choose something more premium, much like buying a low quantity of something irregardless if they get a much better price if they bought it in bulk. There will also always be the need for instant attention and the ones fighting about being the best at that will have to keep the competition amongst themselves.

Not everyone though, the people who seek long term solutions and want to build their presence for a long time to come will seek out safer ways to do it. I'm not saying that @ocdb is the safest way possible and the fluctuations in price did lead to a few days of instability but there's no thing such as no-risk in life. The people have proven though that they would like a place with a better distributed stake among authors they enjoy reading and produce quality original content. They see a lot of value in a future where a lot more people are involved in the way the reward pool is being distributed.

While this may seem to some as just a patch on a system with the wrong incentives of curating quality over quantity, I see it as a way to make the current rules more fair to the creators. In my eyes a lot of reward pool is still being distributed to people with low interest in the future of the currency. You could compare it to a Bitcoin miner that has sold all of his Bitcoins and has resulted in paying a fee to rent hash power as cheap as possible and make sure he gets the most out of the rewards of every new block just to sell those coins too.

You may say that the same thing could be said between some of the whitelisted authors too, that they would use the ROI from buying the votes to just constantly sell it, and although I don't have any statistics or have looked into it, I don't think that long term holders interested in growing with the ecosystem and community to see where this experiment will take us are in it for the short term gains. The short term gains will get smaller the more people that use it, although demand may cause more people to invest, that is not completely guaranteed as there may pop up similar competition even for a non-profit distribution bot. If @ocdb doesn't keep on improving and staying up to date someone else could possibly offer a better incentive but the important thing to remember here is that they are competing vs something that is already doing something great for the platform compared to the services riddled with middlemen.

What would you do if you were an active author sharing your work on Steem and you found out that if you're in the @ocdb whitelist you can buy a certain vote daily that offers you a guaranteed return over a period of time? Would you stick around and see what you could do with your account when the time comes your votes are worth $10? Or would you take the $10 in Steem at low prices to sell it for a currency that only depreciates in value in the bank.

I'm sure most of the users on Steem have already understood how your tokens can grow proportionally with your account. A user holding 1,000 Steem earns the same percentage as someone holding 100,000 and over cycles of new heights and shakeouts those using @ocdb for their content and delegating to it to grow themselves and each other will realize over time that it won't be as important how much Steem you can sell, it will be more interesting to see how much SBD or interest you can generate.