Introducing @antihaejin: Promoting Peace and Fair Distribution of Rewards

Intro

There's a lot of opinions about @haejin around here, and those opinions have degraded into flag wars, but I'm not here for that. I'm a friendly advocate of facts and I'm here to share facts. So many wonder exactly what @haejin has done to win the affections of his generous benefactor, and while that mystery is romanticized in conspiracy theories, in large part the truth is literally written in the blockchain. We're gonna dive into the data to see what stories it may tell.

Although I am @antihaejin, I'm actually not against @haejin, but I am strongly against all this drama. I think there's a much better way to address the unfair distribution of rewards and with your help and support I will continue to work toward that goal.

A secondary goal is to diminish the use of the term reward pool rape and instead advocate for unfair distribution of rewards. The former phrase spreads a violent image that serves nothing good.

Any rewards earned by this account will be used to support the fair distribution of rewards, including downvoting poor or overvalued content. Today, all my votes are dust, though with your support I hope to make a measureable impact on reward pool distributions.

Who is @haejin?

@haejin is a cryptoanalyst who created his account on steemit with a delegation (so he wasn't trying to be anonymous) on 2017-06-27.

He waited until 2017-07-11 to write his first reply. Of course, it was a post by another crypto analyst and he shared his insights.

He posts extensively about many cryptocurrencies and offers a technical analysis of these markets. His first post looked at ETH and like most of us starting here, got two upvotes which were both dust and of no value at all.

Now, unlike many of us here, @haejin is a grinder. He began posting and did not stop, showing up to produce new content day after day. He has now become one of the most well known voices on Steemit. Of course, not exactly because he's an accomplished blogger.

He's so well known today because every single post he writes comes in with a $200+ value consistently. This has spawned two general camps, those that follow him trying to capture curation rewards, and those that are outraged and work to downvote and diminish all rewards.

I'm overlooking a third group which is certainly real, the crypto-interested who are actually listening and carefully reviewing his posts. They are the innocent here as this is the entire point of Steemit, to engage with content of your interests. From this perspective, they are not relevant to our consideration here so I've politely set them aside, and you should too.

Who is @ranchorelaxo?

In you didn't already know, the reason all of @haejin's posts today are worth $200+ is because of @ranchorelaxo. This account has over 1 million Steem Power so a 100% vote is worth $221.48 today and @ranchorelaxo upvotes every one of @haejin's posts. At 100%.

His account was created on March 3, 2017 and he paid the 35 STEEM fee so presumably this is an anonymous account.

And here's where it gets interesting. The day this account was created, over 50,000 STEEM were transferred in from @blocktrades. Given the price of STEEM at that time, this was about $5,000 USD.

Over the next few months, we see several more transfers in:

Date	STEEM	STEEM Close	Cost
3/3/2017	51,264.19	$0.097724	$5,009.74
5/14/2017	45,197.35	$0.755364	$34,140.45
5/14/2017	22,690.81	$0.755364	$17,139.82
5/23/2017	35,530.41	$1.240000	$44,057.70
5/27/2017	12,117.63	$0.819755	$9,933.49
5/28/2017	110,412.15	$0.957411	$105,709.80
5/29/2017	171,478.48	$0.970867	$166,482.80
5/30/2017	108,032.98	$0.925792	$100,016.07
6/3/2017	37,242.69	$1.300000	$48,415.50
6/4/2017	179,410.37	$1.300000	$233,233.48
6/5/2017	164,230.94	$1.720000	$282,477.22
6/7/2017	123,346.33	$2.090000	$257,793.84
6/9/2017	102,063.05	$2.490000	$254,137.00
6/10/2017	106,378.14	$2.240000	$238,287.04
6/11/2017	20,745.52	$2.450000	$50,826.52
1,290,141.04		$1,847,660.46

Just look at the first two transactions. On March 3 he paid $5,000 for 51,264.19 STEEM. Then, just over two months later, he paid $34,140.45 for only 45,197.35 STEEM. There was another transaction that day and this continued over the next month until he had nearly 1.3 million STEEM in his account, costing a net of just over $1.8 million USD.

Quick point of fact, all these numbers presume he executed a buy on the day the STEEM was transferred in, which may not be entirely true, but for our purposes does not distort the overall story and is therefore appropriate to view from this perspective.

You don't just push a few million dollars into the blockchain quietly, everything is out in the open. As you would expect, the CEO of Steemit, Inc. @ned noticed this and sent a transfer of 0.01 SBD to @ranchorelaxo with this memo:

hey - ping me on steemit.chat @ned

I haven't seen anyone else mention this yet, so it's certain to fuel those conspiracy theorists. I do wonder if that chat ever took place, it would sure add some perspective.

The very next day, on June 12, 2017 @ranchorelaxo made his first reply to a post discussing the security of private keys and he offered:

great post

A quick review of the comment spam posts identified by @spaminator will show that this phrase is top among them. This is almost poetic irony.

After this passing remark in the annals of Steemit, he lay dormant for some time.

How did we get here?

Griding it out

As I mentioned, @haejin is a grinder. A true grinder, who shows up and puts in his time every single day. Here's a quick graph of the count of his posts by month.

He's consistently producing close to 300 posts per month and has been doing so from the beginning, well before these massive rewards came to be.

If we look at the total value of all his posts by month we'll see he was gradually building up, with a noticeable jump in November:

First of all, in November @livingfree began upvoting many of his posts. Today, we'll see his upvote is worth very little but he does have over 400,000 SP with most of it delegated. I've verified that all of his delegations began in January of 2018 so he had his full SP in November, however he did only vote 1-2% for @haejin at the time.

On that, another presumption in our data here. When I talk about voting SP, I'm using the SP of the account today. I'm not sure how you would find the SP on a particular date, or if that's even possible. Again, the full story may be off slightly from our data, but generally I believe an account SP should be generally consistent and therefore a reliable presumption.

In any case, @haejin was starting to get noticed in November. In fact, he even received a few upvotes from some pretty big names around here when he wrote about the uptick in the market price of STEEM on November 27, 2017. I'm not gonna call them out here, but it's all in the blockchain for you to verify yourself. Obviously, at that time @haejin was just another user who happened to produce interesting and valueable content which was rewarded appropriately, by many people including those who have earned the respect of the community. All of this is to say, there is legitimate support for @haejin and his work. Or was.

@ranchorelaxo starts voting

As I mentioned, this entire time, @ranchorelaxo was sleeping, with literally no activity at all on the blockchain. Then, on December 9, 2017 he woke up with a vote on a post about BTC at exactly 2017-12-09 23:18:00 UTC.

I note this time, because at exactly 2017-12-09 23:31:36 UTC, just thirteen and a half minutes later, @haejin sent a transfer of 0.01 SBD to @ranchorelaxo with a memo as follows:

I am very grateful for your upVote! Thank You! If you'd like a crypto analyzed, please don't hesitate to let me know!

This leads me to believe @haejin about fell out of his chair when he got that vote and was quick to express his gratitude.

The next day, @ranchorelaxo made just a 5% upvote on this post from a different user, again about BTC. Then he went back to sleep.

But only for a short while. On December 18, @ranchorelaxo woke up and made his presence known. He began giving 100% upvotes to every single post @haejin writes.

This did not go over quietly, many people quickly became outraged and began using the unsavory term I had discarded earlier. In his own form of outrage, @haejin wrote a post asking for delegations to fight against the drama that was unfolding.

Presumably to assist in repelling these protests, on December 28 @ranchorelaxo delegated just over 300,000 SP to @haejin. Just 10 short days after he first began rigorously upvoting.

Just over a month later, on January 14, 2018 @ranchorelaxo assigned @haejin as his witness proxy, giving him significant influence over the witnesses who are responsible for the security and stability of the blockchain that they literally produce.

The outrage begins

After @haejin began pulling in tens of thousands of USD per week, the community took notice. Now, I don't wanna get caught in the crossfire here, but I will say I cannot disagree with the outrage of these groups. The systematic distribution of rewards in a highly centralized manner goes against nearly every principle forming the foundation of STEEM and the entire blockchain. However, as all the adults in the room know, violence begets violence and unlike the usual online flame wars, the casualties here are tangible and hit people where it counts, in the pocketbook.

There are many people who rely on income from their activity on Steemit to literally survive. After expressing their thoughts on this topic, they have seen rewards erased by the soldiers on the ground in this war. Again, I'm not taking sides, but I will say there is a war in the streets, bullets are in the air, and collateral damage is a real outcome in this environment.

Let me step down from my soapbox now. My larger point here is that there is a better solution.

The rules of blockchain

Fundamentally, all of the outrage here is unfounded because every behavior that is frowned upon is allowed by the blockchain. Now, this system was written by humans and as such is subject to all our fallibilities so really we need to have a discussion about what makes sense today, given the experience we've had and the things we've learned over the years. Again, let's view this like adults and learn from the past to make our future better.

If you read the whitepaper you'll understand that one of the overarching principles is that an investor can bring a ton of cash to the table as a power grab in the blockchain. The general idea is if you're willing to risk your capital, you should bear the potential rewards. The underpinning principle here is downvotes, if you push yourself around the community can offset your power with their own.

This is great in theory. In practice, if you are a small fish the sharks have more than enough power to push you around and literally destroy your account with just a couple downvotes. It cuts both ways, to the extent they can create and award tons of value, they can easily erase that same value with a downvote.

Do we need to change the rules? This is where it gets tough because one of the overarching concepts of decentralized authority is that everyone can operate freely within the confines of the system. If we start to narrow those confines and reduce the scope of our influence, to a certain degree we are re-centralizing power. The contrarian argument is that power is already centralized with actors such as @ranchorelaxo and this is a way to offset that. Like so many things in this world, both arguments have equal weight and value which plants us squarely at an impasse.

The only real 'rule change' in the blockchain I would advocate for are self upvotes. I understand the idea of using that as a mechanism to drive visibility, but humans are ego-driven and the tendency for abuse outweighs any potential benefits. By producing content you are implicitly giving your vote and your ability to influence visibility is limited to your followers, which is a reflection of the value the community derives from your posts as they would not follow you otherwise. Self upvotes are inappropriate and unneeded.

Playing by the rules

As I mentioned, the rules dictate that we can downvote @haejin's posts into oblivian, but we face two significant challenges here.

First and foremost, he has significant visibility today, primarily because of these upvotes but also because of all the drama. That said, he gets tons of upvotes, again from people trying to leech curation rewards, but also some who are genuniely interested in crypto and appreciate his analysis and want to reward him.

The larger issue is the $200+ value of the @ranchorelaxo upvote. It takes a whole lot of minnows to reach a value that high and for those whales already at this level, they generally prefer to do good and spread the wealth rather than play sherriff and regulate the blockchain.

This point was recently made true by @thejohalfiles, who has a vote worth $212.70 today. He started making a few 100% downvotes on December 20, then a few in January with some continuing into February.

While his downvote erases a significant amount of rewards, even with that power he alone cannot entirely stop @haejin's reward train.

Here's a list of all the posts which were reduced to zero rewards:

date	title	URL
2018-01-15 16:44:03	STEEM vs SBD....DO NOT UnderEstimate SBD!!!	https://steemit.com/@haejin/steem-vs-sbd-do-not-underestimate-sbd
2018-01-15 21:49:06	Matchpool GUPPY (GUP): Target $5.38 (427% Profit Potential!!)	https://steemit.com/@haejin/tqkovviu
2018-01-15 22:32:42	ZCoin (XZC): A Sling Shot to $595 Probable!!	https://steemit.com/@haejin/zcoin-xzc-a-sling-shot-to-usd595-probable
2018-02-22 04:26:06	Bitcoin (BTC) Evening Update: The Right Shoulder Formation!!	https://steemit.com/@haejin/bitcoin-btc-evenining-update-the-right-shoulder-formation
2018-02-22 05:04:54	GIFTO: Broadening Pattern	https://steemit.com/@haejin/gifto-broadening-pattern
2018-02-22 11:55:42	Bitc(BTC) Morning Update: Tree Count vs Forest Count	https://steemit.com/@haejin/bitc-btc-morning-update-tree-count-vs-forest-count
2018-02-22 12:39:21	APPCoins (APPC): Tree and Forest Views	https://steemit.com/@haejin/appcoins-appc-tree-and-forest-views
2018-02-22 12:59:18	DOGE Coin Shouldn't be Dodged!	https://steemit.com/@haejin/doge-coin-shouldn-t-be-dodged

I'm almost hesitant to point out the few from last week which have not yet locked.

The larger point here is that even the support of one whale is not enough to entirely correct this.

Why are they doing this?

Now, here's an interesting perspective. Let's take a look at the price of STEEM from December 16, 2017 forward, just before he started upvoting @haejin and this drama unfolded.

As you can see, the price went from around $2 and first shot up aggressively above $8, before finally settling in closer to $4 today. If we watch the traditional stock markets, drama and conspiracy theories clearly move the needle as people react to news such as this.

Now, it's a tall order to suggest that @ranchorelaxo came in and literally moved the market with a few upvotes, but even so his actions are all part of the larger market and while not the sole cause, all of this is certainly a contributing factor to the market activity.

Whether all of this is true, or even intentional, is not entirely important. The view here is that @ranchorelaxo is almost assuredly a crypto investor who pushed close to $2 million into steem and hasn't powered down yet. And his bet has proven solid thus far as Steemit itself shows his account value just over $4.3 million, more than doubling his initial investment. And this story ain't over yet.

The more elaborate theories about the relationship between @haejin and @ranchorelaxo likely fall far short from the truth, which is more likely that a crypto investor pushed money into the market, saw @haejin as an active voice in cryptos generally, and saw some advantage to supporting him.

Whatever the true basis of their relationship, one fact we can rely on is that his efforts are likely focused on maximizing the return on his investment. While I certainly can't argue against that generally, this is a self-sustaining community that needs the loudest voices in the room focused on the long-term perspective and stability of the blockchain itself and the Steemit community. Acting in that ego-driven self-interest is not something the community should support.

One offset to this argument, which I can't quite resolve, is that I have one piece of evidence which does not support the theory of maximimzing his return. With an upvote this big, @ranchorelaxo receives considerable curation rewards. The strange part, here's all of the rewards he has claimed:

timestamp	sbds	vests
6/21/2017 14:45	0.167	167.680027
2/20/2018 15:34	156.255	10481683.12

In the history of time, he has claimed only two of his curation rewards. As best I can tell, he has tens of thousands of USD in unclaimed curation rewards.

To be fair, when we're talking about an account worth over $4 million USD a few grand is a rounding error, but still. This part of the story is a little confusing.

Where do we go from here?

My intention with this post is to cast some light on the facts that I've discovered in the blockchain to foster discussion of all these issues, but from a community perspective, so we can all consider what to do to support the entire ecosystem long-term, rather than focusing on short-term profit.

If I could wave a magic wand, the quickest solution I see is to get even one more whale to bring enough SP to the table to have a measureable impact on the reward pool distributions. In the simplest sense, if the community starts to drastically reduce the payouts on @haejin's posts, those curation leeches will quickly subside as they realize they will receive no rewards for their now wasted votes.

I'm trying to have a balanced perspective here so let's talk even more about the perfect solution.

As I mentioned, @haejin is a grinder who is putting in the time and did grow naturally to capture a ready and willing audience, before @ranchorelaxo ever showed up. Those users and @haejin himself deserve a fair playing field and all those votes shouldn't be summarily erased.

What I'd like to see are downvotes sufficient to offset only those illegitimate votes. That's a strong word and I use it somewhat unfairly here, but the point holds true. Basically, to start we should erase the @ranchorelaxo vote and then any others that can be clearly identified as either curation grabbing, or just feeding the machine that spreads hatred and violence. These latter points are hard to quantify but we can determine broadly how many of his voters are actually interested in crypto and upvote the same as they would a good post in #photography.

A larger goal here is to reveal the value in the long-term, community-oriented perspective to @ranchorelaxo and get him to shift his behaviors. He has a significant amount of influence that could be used to support the blockchain in ways that will ultimately drive far greater value for him long-term.

Even if the market shot up and he wanted to capitalize his gains, it's 13 weeks to fully power down and as the crypto markets have long establish, a LOT can happen in that time. In short, let's encourage @ranchorelaxo to stick around and be one of the admired members of the community.

Your thoughts?

So have I opened your eyes to any new perspectives or insights into this crazy little story? What do you think of the points I've made and what, if anything, should be done?

With only my tiny delegation this post is likely to disappear into oblivion if I don't capture any immediate interest so please resteem if you think there is anything of value for the community to discuss here.

I hope this is a start to a very interesting conversation!