RE: STEEM's Biggest Villian
Correct. While the whale gains more capital, their peers do not. That gain is not derived from increasing the value of the underlying investment vehicle, although the ROI of investors derived from increase in value of the underlying investment vehicle is proportionate to the capital invested, stake weighted, in other words.
Investment for capital gains has been the primary incentive for literally untold millenia. Profiteering, of course, has been undertaken as well. However there is an intrinsic difference between the two methods: one builds value into the enterprise which increases the value of the investment vehicle, such as stock or tokens, and the other extracts the value of the production before it can inure to the investment vehicle.
Financially manipulating rewards mechanisms via stake weighting on Steem extracts rewards that would otherwise inure to creators and encourage growth of the platform, which would in turn put upwards price pressure on Steem. This is tantamount to selling the forges and presses of a factory. Both methods produce ROI, but profiteering destroys, while investment builds. Both whales gain capital, but profiteers decrease the rewards of business, decreasing the value of the investment vehicle and preventing gains of capital by their peers, and investors increase those rewards, and all their peers holding stake benefit as well as the investment vehicle grows in value, increasing their capital too.
It's not a mystery to me why we are in this strait.
If both gain capital, you might need a different
word than capital gain to distinguish the diff
between profiteering and "ethical gains?"
You know what the funny thing is, outside of the whales who ninja-mined; Most people who bought their whale status bought in as speculators and speculators are profiteers. Their goal isn’t to add value, but to get in and extract value and then bail. But nobody predicted the BTC bubble collapse or understood how it would take all the crypto down with it. So they just stared at the falling prices pot committed certain that it would go up again because Steem is awesome, more specifically it’s awesome at profiteering off the creativity of others. Steem WP Zipf’s law [Page 16 of 32.]
Do note that the values expected in the White Paper are 30 times higher than actual results.
Sadly, language is art, not science or engineering. I tried to address that by noting that stake weighting is relevant to both investment and profiteering. I don't actually consider financial manipulation of rewards speculation, but profiteering. Speculation is just bad investing IMHO. Warren Buffet is not speculating when he buys stake in a company, although the ROI is a result of an increase in the price of the asset. He generally sets out to improve the business to produce that increase in value.
Speculators are folks that just watch Warren Buffet and buy what he buys. They just expect an increase in price without doing anything to improve the business. However, doing so puts upwards pressure on the price, so it's not profiteering.
Sorry if my writing doesn't convey well the differences in methodology and impact the practices under discussion have. I don't know of any better words for the job.
Sorry if that came off wrong; I'm not trying to have a gotcha moment with you. It's just perplexing for me to comprehend the difference between the two. This especially when the blockchain considers both actions legitimate, the coding doesn't address morality at all. Whether it be "abusive downvotes" or "abusive self-votes." The abuse factor is subjective enough that it leads to so much drama. You know what I wouldn't mind seeing, is if the sum of "free downvotes" were distributed equally among all Steemians. It would at least give people the opportunity to defend themselves against abusive downvotes.
With your perspective on the matter, if you invest in Steem for the perk of the extra reward pool control, then the only benefit in that is that you get to become either an unpaid curator or and unpaid reward poolice officer. It changes slightly with the recent hard fuck, but this too is a very discouraging change for content creators. We were already fighting for scraps, but now the scraps just got scrappier. Meanwhile, trending is full of shit, all about Steem selling Steem to Steemians, preaching to the choir. It'd be nice to see a trending page that shows the top articles from several popular communities.
Society is far more valuable than mere money. Focusing on adding numbers is the main flaw in Steem IMHO. Sure, we need goods and services, but that's only a fraction of what we need, and devaluing a social network to such a tiny fraction of it's potential is the start of the slide down the slippery slope to irrelevancy.
Folks have lots of really interesting and socially valuable things to share with us here. IIRC, you and I are both opposed to rampant corruption, and strongly support individual freedom. I would part with all my money to be shed of the former and to gain the latter, and I bet you would too. Our ability to bump each other a bit financially encourages each of us when we upvote our posts. That social blessing is not the purpose of social networks, and failing to consider the far more valuable networking as more important than extracting a few coins retards Steem growth - indeed, causes it to shrink.
Social media isn't a token mine. It's real people interacting regarding real issues that really matter. Unlike money.
When you examine the history of business, even cursorily, you will find examples like Warren Buffet, who does not diminish the finances of his purchases while he does improve their business operations, and is rewarded for his investment when the value of the stock rises. You will also find examples like Bain Capital Partners, who have bought companies, sucked the last pfennig out of their coffers, and left them dead in their wake, leaving their stock worthless. Buffet's business model not only profits him so much that he has been the richest man in the world, it also profits the companies, and all his fellow investors in the asset. BCP profits themselves, but destroys the companies, and their fellow investors, for which they are constantly the subject of legal tort actions.
I note that code isn't immutable. It allows or does not allow whatever coders decide. It's not proven by eons of natural selection, or written by folks with competence in every known field of human endeavor. Good thing it's infinitely mutable, so that when facts are discovered that recommend changing the code, hard forking, it's a simple undertaking, if fraught with complexity. The Steem devs either originally created a golden parachute that transformed all the Steem they mined into fiat and making them rich, or simply didn't understand that difference between profiteering and investment.
After three years of evidence I find it hard to accord them the benefit of nescience regarding that. The code seems to constantly get forked in favor of profiteering, and never enables capital gains despite their protestations they seek higher Steem price. Self votes, bid bots, circle jerks and the like are never going to cause the price of Steem to rise, because they don't distribute Steem to a wider market that creates demand and raises the price.
Considering curation as a profit center is redefining curation. Curation is recommending good and interesting stuff, like a museum curator does. Paid per item, curation as rewarded on Steem more resembles Payola, where 1950s DJ's were bribed to play songs instead of actually curating the field and playing those the kids wanted to hear.
Payola turns out to be a crime.
Just sayin'
Points taken, I'm going to respond here maybe not
point by point, but to at least get us in one thread.