Why I'm In Favor Of Witness Vote Decay
Not only am I in favor of it but witness vote decay needs to be a priority. To put things into perspective, if @freedom aka @pumpkin were to lose his/her ability to vote, this would mean that every witness that currently has his/her vote would keep it indefinitely regardless of their actions.
@freedom has such a big influence on who gets to be a witness and this example helps illustrate the importance of witness vote decay but this influence isn't limited to this one account. There are currently a lot of votes that might have been cast by people that have lost their ability to change their witness votes.
The longer someone has been a witness, the greater their potential to have accumulated those kinds of votes. Those votes help those witnesses cement their position. The more we wait, the harder it could become to pass witness vote decay as vote decay would potentially be opposed by those witnesses.
Witness vote decay consists of a rate at which witness votes lose their weight/influence. So let say we introduce a witness vote decay of 1% per week then every week after someone voted for a witness their vote would lose 1% of their influence until they would recast that vote. After 1 year a vote will have lost 52% of its influence if it hasn't been recast.
This primordial feature is already in use on some other DPOS blockchains. Stand up and request witness vote decay to be introduced! I can't make it happen on my own. No matter what, this initiative won't stop here for me.
The dark blue line is @freedom's vote.
Source:
In case you missed it, I put some time into producing a version of that graph that removes the pumpkin vote, so we can see what it would look like without it. Many of the top 20 actually stay in the top 20, but a few move out.
I also put a couple of days into coding an algorithm that produces the list of witnesses as it would be if witness decay was introduced - without attempting to guess who would revote (which obviously many voters would).
I'm about to launch a new channel on Steem called Steem Ocean Undercurrents that includes regular blogs on this kind of data. Stay tuned!
Awesome work! I had missed it. Also, we need to take into consideration that if @freedom's vote didn't exist maybe some votes would be cast differently than what they are currently.
Very interesting. I don't your description here is partially correct but I've look at the post and the data is indeed very interesting.
Thanks! Oh yes, I'm sure many things would change in such a dynamic system with so many individuals involved. I could improve the algorithm to take into account how active each of the voters are that were removed due to the decay, to make a guess at how likely they would be to revote - but I have more important projects to put time into currently really. I will post more updates showing the 'movers' in the witness list when I get time, soon.
Faster decay should occur for inactive witnesses.
I was glancing through the posts, but was noticing that the mention of automatic re-voting services does not seem to be addressed. Is there anything we can do about that, because wouldn't that nullify the whole idea?
Exactly. As long as any account is selling its vote to an upvote service or something similar or even being part of a curation trail it will show up as a live account.
we are mainly talking about witness votes here, not post votes.
Think you are misunderstanding @a0x1's point. Seems they are touching on the point of people using a witness auto revoter and there beinh another metric, presumably involving other account activity such as post voting, to determine if the account is active.
Think the premise is that a witness revote for an otherwise inactive account should not count.
Yes, an auto voter could be created for witness votes too. Ultimately, bots can carry out any activity on here, so I'm not sure there is a foolproof way to code these kinds of features, but they will have some effect in important cases, such as where users literally physically die (and don't set an auto voter).
@reggaemuffin had the idea of requiring a witness vote to have been changed during a 6 month period in order to prevent votes from starting to decay or being cancelled. This would mean that autovoting would have to include the changing of accounts being supported too. This could be done by crafty bot coders - but I still think the benefits are worth it.
I don’t support the specific implementation that you proposed in the post, but I support a similar proposal which should have the same impact on the problem you described. I’ve outlined it in the comments of this issue: https://github.com/steemit/steem/issues/953
(Upvoted my comment for visibility.)
The fact that you are the only top witness who chose to chime in is utterly disconcerting to me.
You need to get over yourself. You are not entitled to a personal response every time you bidbot up a rant.
The idea itself is okay with tradeoffs and development considerations, and has been discussed among users, stakeholders, witnesses and devs many times.
Why, again, should YOU bringing it up again and bidbotting it up matter at all?
I've never said I'm entitled to some answer. I didn't even ask for an answer. My post has no question.
You expressed being disconcerted over not getting responses quickly. You shouldn't be.
I will comment that gradual decay is unimplementable in practice as far as I know. No one has proposed a method to implement it practically and the only method I can think of would be enormously complicated (the latter being a property of things that are a very, very bad idea to code into a consensus system).
Simple expiration is feasible and I am in favor of it. I would base it on the account being completely inactive for some period, indicating possible loss of key.
Maybe you're right! I'm not perfect. Far from it.
Same here! Also inactivity in regard to active key.
Yes active or owner key should should demonstrate some usage otherwise it may be impossible to change witness votes and they should eventually expire.
It has kind of already been said in the other replies, but your post is not the first time this has been brought up. It had been discussed many times before, in a lot of other places. Most witnesses have expressed their views on it in one way or another.
I'll give you this one at least partially. It wasn't my intention and I can understand why people feel like it. Maybe my title should have been Are you for witness vote decay and that would have been already better. I considered it at some point.
That said, I've never asked you to do any work. I'm sorry you feel this way. My post would have been a good opportunity for the witnesses to make their stance known. It would also have shown they care, even though them not saying anything doesn't mean they don't care and I'm fully aware of this.
I'm concerned vote decay or vote renewal isn't part of the next hardfork. Do you have any idea how long would it take to be coded?
Like I've said in the post, the integrity of who decide of what hardfork gets passed is at stake. The more we wait, the more it will be difficult to pass vote decay/renewal.
There is no need for a conspiracy and I've never implied such a thing. The fact is that sometimes human act selfishly. In fact, selfish behavior is more often than not, the most expected behavior.
Cryptocurrencies help us get rid of some of that trust inherently needed in conventional and outdated financial exchanges. This trust we have to put in others is unreliable. I'm even unreliable to myself sometimes so I don't expect 100% reliableness from others. Doing otherwise is pure insanity.
I want to limit this need for trust or make it so that people can more easily be held accountable for their actions, just like your support to vote renewal seem to imply.
Take care Tim! I'm passionate about Steem but I must not lose sight of being passionate about people and making them feel good about life.
The comment about "work" was in reply to your request to provide a list which witnesses were for/against the change.
Sure, but why should they spend the time to do this on your post if they have already done so? Should witnesses be expected to re-iterate their stances on issues every time a user writes a post about the topic?
I could easily come up with a list of 50-100 changes that the platform "desperately" needs in order to succeed. This one is in there somewhere, but I would not put it in the top 10.
Probably only about a day or two of coding effort. Coding is only 5% of the battle though. There is a very long process (with lots of negotiation) in terms of getting a change merged into the official repository (by Steemit, Inc.) and included in a hardfork. I would estimate the probability of success in terms of someone being able to get this into production before SMTs launch at less than 1%.
This goes back to your premise that witnesses will not vote for the change in the future because of a conflict of interest. I disagree with that premise.
I will add too, that the majority of large stakeholders who are currently voting for witnesses (@pumpkin, @clayop, @smooth, @blocktrades, etc.) are still actively participating in the witness voting process. Maybe there are some larger stakeholders that have truly checked out and are no longer using their active key (idk, I don't have data on everyone) but I doubt that getting this change in now going to have any significant impact on the current witness votes. In my view, it is mainly a protection against a future (hypothetical) problem where a large stakeholder looses their key, dies, or abandons the platform for some reason with their witness votes still in place.
I've never asked that.
I've never implied such things.
Thanks for letting me know your opinion.
Cool! I'll try to see if there are some stuff I could do to increase those chances.
It's a possibility. You can't deny it. I haven't said they won't. I said it's a possibility. It's a non-negligible one with high very repercussions.
We mostly agree. This change is mostly for protection but it surely isn't an overrated feature. What if Freedom lost his ability to vote? No matter how small the chances are of this to happem, this isn't negligible. This would be very bad. And there would be no way to know if they have lost their ability to vote.
How about the proxy votes though? Should they expire too?
It is up for discussion, but in my view the proxy should be permanent. The votes for whoever you are proxied to would expire if the person who was actually voting for the witnesses became inactive.
Yes it's much simpler to implement with simple expiration date and basically ends up the same => after X time passed, a vote counts as 0. Decay would kind of promote spamming the chain to refresh the vote and get a 100% output on it every day, while the expiration date will just create 1 post per X time
I was all in for decay until I read that.
I think that solution is :
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I’m for it, when EOS did that... it made lots of sense. It will keep the voters and witnesses more active... and connected with the community.
I'm glad we agree on that one and I'm glad you're taking the time to let everyone know!
Right on
I like it, why not make the decay a little bit faster, lets say 1/365 (= ~0,275%) a day!?
Couldn't agree more. The only thing better than this is account based witness voting which is what I've been calling for also. But that would require the oracles which aren't out yet.
The challenging part is getting the top 20 witnesses to vote for this change, since they have more to lose than to gain from this. I think this should be forced in by the community and the witnesses that don't like it should be known so the community can unvote them to get this passed.
The more we wait the more difficult it will become.
Many of the issues you are discussing have been talked about over the last couple of weeks and months.
Are you going to vote an opinion a day up to trending, to rehash stuff we have all been discussing for a while?
If you mean the post about linear rewards and this one, I'm very well aware they have been discussed. I don't think my posts were over the top or unwarranted. I'm not the only one.
Can you tell me what is the stand from each witness on that matter and don't you think it matters? This is the first logical step for me to learn.
I'm really sorry if my actions make you feel bad. It is in no way my intentions by posting these posts.
No, I don't know the position of each witness on this, but if that is the goal, I would recommend following the lead of the guy who posted a spreadsheet listing the positions, because 10 posts with the same discussions is not helping anyone understand where everyone stands on each topic.
Your actions don't make me feel bad.
Cool! Well, witnesses stating their stance under this post is helping me work on such a spreadsheet.
NOT Going to Happen. NOT Going to Happen. NOT Going to Happen.
Those in power will seek to remain in power.
The witness situation is pretty fixed at this point and for the most part they don't see a problem at all with this platform. Everything is working just fine for them.
Everyone else is just a complainer.
STEEM is a production level testnet for the most part for other projects with funding to take certain lessons from it and try not to repeat a lot of what has happened here.
There are probably more witnesses than you would expect that are in favor of some form of the proposal.
Let's say two years from now if the top witnesses realize that it would have been best for the long term health of the chain and the community it is too late and other people are just on other chains doing the same thing. It is already happening. The same exact thing is replaying on some of the other DPos chains. It just becomes a money grab and then everyone gravitates to greener pastures or tries to have a hand in 4 or 5 different chains.
Guys like me just try to catch little waves and really can't go deep on this project because from the start it was rekt. So I have to focus on chains that are earlier in their life cycle like EOS.
The biggest bottleneck for feature requests like this is developers who are capable of developing a change that is “production ready” If someone could make a proposal in GitHub and coded it up, I don’t think consensus (witness approval) would be that big of an issue.
7 hours past and still waiting for significant witnesses to respond or to agree on this.
Perhaps there should be some type of term limit as well...
New People will bring New Ideas/Innovation... Technology tends to always be improving, so new people will help bring new thinking while hopefully keeping some of the "Old Guard"... The US Senate is perhaps an example of this possible type of rotation. ALSO... perhaps some type of compensation can be earned in an advisory Role because of their knowledge/experience/wisdom... HOWEVER, it should not just be given, it should be EARNED.
Previous witnesses should be able to come back after a designated time period.
As TeamSteem is suggesting, people in positions for too long become somewhat unapproachable, not willing to entertain new ideas/concepts... especially if their position have become "cemented" into the system.
Sorry, am a bit rushed but feel @TeamSteem is bringing up a VERY important aspect of Steemit and it's community.
Cheers !!
I enjoy reading your comments @sacret-agent. I'm glad to see we agree about witness vote decay. So far I'm not in favor of term limit. I'll propose something else that should else more competition among witnesses.
@TeamSteem
I respect your knowledge/wisdom AND dedication to the Steemit Community.... I've known You personally for over a year and know You have some of the highest Integrity of anyone I've ever had the opportunity to meet here on Steemit. There are probably many others but haven't directly spoken/interacted with them.
I hope we get an opportunity to do some video/audio sessions because there are some very important topics that could help a great number of people, not just here on Steemit...
For example, I'm getting close to 70 years and got an aggressive Cancer about 5 years ago... was losing weight daily... got down to 124 lbs. and I'm 6'1". I actually got scared, even though I know Cancer can be cured... Did it for my Dad years ago but my weight was dropping FAST. Will give the details when we can get together.
Thank You 4 Being YOU...
Cheers !!
Woah. I'm deeply sorry to learn that. I really hope you're feeling better these days. Let's catch up soon. Also, you don't look your age at all.