Why distribution is important
In a world where technology is ever evolving and people becoming obsolete for more and more jobs due to robots, cryptocurrency will be a very important tool to redistribute wealth.
The way things are now in countries such as the U.S where people are lobbying against wealth distribution it doesn't look like things are going to change in the near future. The people here all know a bit about the weaknesses of the dollar and everything else wrong with the economy not only in the U.S but throughout the whole world. This is something that we have a chance to change now, though. In case you weren't aware yet, we are creating a new asset class with cryptocurrency, the rewardpool is creating new coins daily which are being distributed to users.
I'm not going to go too deep into everything wrong with Steems current economic rules, but if you think about it; things are already getting a lot more like fiat than how I envisioned the coin to work when I first got here. Hell, I've even been called a communist by people who use Steem only for themselves and don't see the value in redistributing stake. Not only do they not seem to understand the advantages of a healthy distribution for the DPOS technology and why low prices are a good way to help with that as well, but to go as far as to call curators names who are still trying to do the right thing is a bit sad.
I recently saw a screenshot of the last words on the internet of Stephen Hawking when he had an AMA on Reddit.
Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poorif the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution."
This sentence can easily be compared to the Steem blockchain as well, without comparing machine-producers as bid bot owners let's just think about the big accounts today who are just using the voting power for their own gain. I don't want to tell people they are doing the wrong thing, everyone is aware of the broken economics and their only solution to not be left behind others in growing their stake is by delegating to bid bots and letting users buy those votes for advertiesement, but even the whole bid bot economy is flawed considering most of the buyers are getting a positive return for advertising their content.
Yes, we need free downvotes, yes we may need higher curation rewards to re-incentivize investors to delegate to curation projects instead of bid bots and to make it profitable for curators to get back to curating and focusing their voting power on other authors instead of vote-trading or delegating for max ROI. We also need to make sure to look out for abusers even if these changes come into effect, there will always be people looking out for themselves and ignoring the network completely or which has been proven after 2+ years is that some may be here without even believing that this currency is going anywhere. They just want to leech as much value as possible and bring that into another currency or fiat and many of us are just letting it happen cause we are too focused on max ROI and ourselves to care.
I do understand that some of these people may think "oh well, Steem is still so young, it doesn't matter what happens to it right now it will still survive". Sure, but those gaining stake unfairly now will have that stake forever. If they sell then that's fine, people who earn stake without sweating enough or putting in their own money will sell it easily than those who have earned each Steem with a lot of work and effort behind it. There are also people out there knowing where Steem is going and making sure they are earning as much as they can without caring about the network effect or what makes the blockchain stronger than others - distribution. Who knows what these users will do in the future with their acquired stake if they are already abusing it.
Anyway, what I want to get to is that this is our chance to create something amazing where we are the people in charge of what we do with this currency. We can either heed the words of possibly one of the most intelligent human beings to have ever existed in this world - or we can make the same mistakes that have been haunting us ever since and brought this economy to its ruins and have so many people in the world suffer because of it.
I really hope people will be more open to change in our economic system and that we find a great balance together to enter the future with the right foot.
Thanks for reading.
[image source pixabay.com]
Excellent write up and what Id say if I could put my thoughts ito words. There is far to much me me me and people just grabbing and converting. The people grabbing the most are some really big players here who are simply greedy. Ive bleated about this since I joined but it will be greed that will kill this economy. Thanks for speaking out, too many whales and witnesses look the other way and dont give a damn. Steem aand crypto should be about a fairer and empowering economy and NOT justa techie version of the existing totally flawed system
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Completely agree.
It is like a techie version of flawed economy.
The system should be encouraging for everyone then only more people would adopt.
Making money of newbies and minnows and not giving back is totally unacceptable. People are forced to do this.
As you said the big players , I must say not all, don’t give a damn as they are accumulating the wealth now and can affect the steem price when it goes up.
Thanks for commenting mate. What the bigger grabbers need to remember is that without us little people, they will have nothing to feed off. The system should bebfair and distributed which is why this is such a good article and especially important coming from someone with influence whomis a big time witness . Kudos for him for writing it :-)
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Very true.
thought provoking article
So what would you have people who put in a million SP DO? Redistribute their investment's earnings to everyone else? That's just crazy. If you come in here with 100 SP vs somebody with 1000000 SP, of course, that person is going to earn more - he/she is risking more and therefore has higher rewards. You can tell this person to contribute more to the platform because it will be for the better and in the long better for their investment but again, why should he/she be the only one forking their own dollars into the ecosystem? Investors invest for the BEST GAIN and if the best GAIN is of the nearsighted nature and at the expenses of the platform's growth, then it's all too human.
You miss the point. The point is we are trying to create a fairer system of wealth creation and distribution of that wealth. You are looking at the situation from a traditional economic model.
As I said, what's the point in any of this if we don't try a new way of financial distribution. I would much prefer to see the rewards balanced between creator and manual curator.
I also disagree about your risk/reward model. If someone buys in with 1000000SP I'd suggest they are more likely to be able to afford the risk. I'd also suggest that the time is a vastly more precious commodity than cash and as such, time spent here working hard is vastly more valuable than any cash investment.
At the end of the day, what did you or I contribute to the genesis of this blockchain which afford both of us the opportunity it does? Do you not think that we have a moral obligation to at least use the place as a community for the betterment of all rather than simply a place for a cash grab?
YOU have been provided with an opportunity by someone else and obviously have a few dollars to start with and are now pulling many dollars in cash out. What are you doing to give something back ?
Give? You want somebody with 1 million dollars to come in and distribute their wealth? No, I believe I got the point exactly. WTF? Communism yeah I get it. I like it too. But be real here. Morals? You can argue about morals all day and year long all you want, but if you have this kind of money yourself, you wouldn't want to NOT earn any return on it. Sorry it's how the world works. As far as contributing goes...Money makes the world go round. If all you're spewing is rethoric and somebody is spewing hard cash their contributions is what will get things done...Not TALK.
This is one of the best platforms possible when it comes to distribution.
It has many issues but despite all those it does massively contribute to something barely any other platform does: distributions takes place as we speak, write, breathe here.
Truth to be told... it is rather the utopia for most. Compare Steem with all its issues to $LIKE.
Luckily there are all the problems because they allow us to develop and design alternative options.
Now it would be nice if the Milkers actually understood how awesome this platform could be for them if they thought even as little as two to three years ahead only, rather than throwing parties right now.
Addendum: I don’t believe in UBI. Not in UBI as the default necessary solution. But I believe in UBI for those knowledgeable enough to opt in to such society.
When technological unemployment begins to hit the economy in earnest, you will have tens of millions of people living in squalor in the U.S. alone. By hanging onto opposing "communism" you will create a hell on Earth. Ideological opposition to UBI is the most destructive kind. What are you going to do when all those people turn to crime to satisfy their basic material needs? Increase the size of your already huge prison industrial complex tenfold?
You’re preaching to the choir. I’m not a libertarian or conservative.
But that doesn’t mean that I think the solution will not be flawed, but that due to the lack of caring to understand.
I’ve written and cared about the singularity since a while. Recently also wrote about Larimer’s Universal Resource credit.
I even don’t live in first world anymore and I can tell you that development nations who now grow because of globalization and outsourcing, yet not have fully understood family planning, are up for a very rude shakeup.
And so will the libertarian and conservative nations be. But the thing is they don’t care [about others].
I do tho and I am a supporter of UBI. And grew up in a socialist (read center left) family in Western Europe.
Preaching to the choir. But there’s nuances.
Yes, UBI for users contributing and proving their skills of creating helpful tools for the platform. Guess that does kind of sound like communism.
No, it doesn’t. Communism requires no proving nor creation. It requires just drones. Sweatshops.
UBI turns the clock back 5 to 6 decades and gives everyone, also those too burdened now, the opportunity to become entrepreneurs again. Without worry for baselevel obligations.
In communism the system tells you what you do. You are the machines.
Communistyo :D ahhahaahaha
Anyway, I am fascinated by how many people know about the brainwashing and how media is pushing this -isms and -ists to be in our mind just so we can hate each other. I find it funny how those people still use those terms when you want to share. FOR FUCK SAKE! I still cannot understand the mind of the people who think that it will be better if they think only about themselves.
WE ARE ONE! And yes this seems like some ''everything is good'' thought but this is scientifically proven. We are one organism on this planet but we are not used to looking on things from that scale. They are trying to teach us in school not to exit the box and that scale because they know that we could change something.
When we look at things on a bigger scale we can see our Cosmos, we can see what are we made of and how big our home is. It can make you think more about the things that really matter in the world and that's what's bugging them. They don't want it.
When we look at them on a smaller scale, we see that we're all made os the same atoms. The only thing that is different is that those atoms are arranged differently and that's why we don't look the same. TAA DAAAA! But, they don't want us to know this.
For all those that are afraid to exit their comfort zone, I dare you to do it. I dare you to help the community and see how it works out. If anything, learn from @acidyo and respect his and other's time that they're putting in this community. Not for self-gain, but for the growth of him/her and you!
If we're going to use the same mentality to solve the problems as we used it while creating them, we're not going to improve anything. So, let's decentralize our mind a bit more, shall we?
I think that everyone can easily develop dapps and tools for steem due to the dezentralized nature is a huge advantage. I see also the problems, but this keepa me here.
$rewarding 80% 14 min
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Yeah and that's great, I'm just hoping people won't step into the same mistakes as we have done with fiat here.
That's a nice idea for a bot btw, I've been asking people before to create a tool that let's me time my votes before it casts them automatically later. Is there any more info I can read on it somewhere?
It's a boon to comment upvoting as well where you don't want to lose out on curation rewards (and, post HF20, not have the author lose them, too,).
$rewarding 25% 15 min
Yeah, they should really have removed the penalty from voting on comments, it's more like a handicap right now.
Or they could've kept the penalty in place only when self-upvoting comments. But, as usual, some Steemian will always come up with a workaround. That's what's so confidence-inspiring about this ecosystem!
Wait, comments also have that 15 min mark, where upvotes before it go back to other posts?
Command accepted.
The bot is open to everyone, but works best after giving @rewarding the posting authority similar to steemauto. The bot is currently in beta, I will write a post soon. You can find more information here: https://beempy.com/rewarding
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Thanks!
You must use SteemConnect to give @rewarding your posting authority. Then you're set to use the commands like in the above. It's very simple.
Command accepted.
I think right now we have more focus on marketing.
Development doesn't matter anymore here.
Marketing is key.
Steemmonsters being the perfect example for this.
This issue has been discussed over and over again yet no change, it only gets worse, more bots are being coming up.. At the end of the day, people are going to do what they will do.. After all, it is their Investment and Money, so they believe they have the right to do whatever with it regardless of the negative impacts it has on the community.. I won't blame them much, humans are greedy and selfish by nature..
Let's do the best we can do individually regardless of our stake in the system, hopefully things will get better..
There is no problem with more and more bots coming up, as you can see here in the comments there are plenty of good bots too. I am mainly talking about the selfishness of some users and those creating middlemen services which bring little value to the blockchain and unfairly enrich the creators based on greed of investors, i.e. bid bots.
When I say bots, I meant the ones being selfishly.. Sorry I wasn't clear earlier..
Have you checked Steeve out yet? It seems to offer a good front end with option to filter out bid bot posts. You have the reach to start shifting people over to front ends like that, perhaps even do a campaign for limited time where you curate only not promoted posts?
https://steemit.com/steeve/@steeveapp/steeve-now-in-public-beta-personal-recommendations-and-the-world-without-bidbots--voting-trails
Equally greedy, maybe more, are humans who come here without forking any of their own money and expect those who do put in a lot of their money to carry all the burden of making the platform work.
Steem-UA is a wonderful example of a project the likes of which there should be more of. I'm not sure how higher curation rewards would impact the distribution of new STEEM minted. I think @tarazkp is on the right track when emphasizing the community aspect of Steem. Having a living community can help raise awareness and motivate people to act for the common good to a greater extent. Steem-UA rewards for engagement. Should there be a similar project for rewarding users for delegating to projects advancing the common good, complete with a high level of publicity for those who delegate the most - both in absolute terms and in terms of their relative stake? Maybe the social reward would help compensate for some of the financial loss suffered for delegating for unselfish reasons? The social reward may also lead to a higher financial reward. Also, having a strong network means that a user who faces financial hardship and is forced to power down and sell a part of their SP has a better chance of recovering it thanks to having a strong network.
I personally think Steem UA is a terrible project. It upvotes automatically no matter the content. It also rewards the highest SP holders the most. It doesn't reward for engagement, it rewards more for length of time on platform! Longer you've been here, the higher your rep is likely to be and the more Steem you will have earned, much easier to achieve 2 years ago than now. It also highly regards witnesses, some of whom don't engage at all directly.
As for some of the shitposts it upvotes. It simply depends on the depth of your SP, not the value and effort you apply.
Exactly, it only rewards ppl that came in 2016 the most. Just because they have more early followers. But it means nothing. It doesn't tell who is active today.
The 2016'ers should be rewarded for investing in the system early and not cashing out. Just like 2017'ers like myself expect a future reward for putting up with an immature system like this and even investing some money in it.
The balance between having the fair share of wealth distribution and keeping the incentive on for people to create more ‘machines’ to automate wealth creation. Previously, we are experiencing the failure of socialism due to the labor output was by human being, but now the situation has changed where machines become the output source. Will we need to have restriction on ownership of the machines? Rather than perpetually owning one, the ownership stake shall decay and finally owned by the people through distribution with blockchain (automate)? A very interesting economic problem to really give a deep thought.
I love steemit it will always be my first love. It has been frustrasting to me lately since the hf and I have been spreading my efforts around but this help remind me we all get what we put in and I let RC issues effect how much effort I have been putting in. Thanks for the reminder. I was never going any where but the effort I have put in lately has been half assed. This post has motivated me to put that effort in again.
Can I ask what issues with RC you've been having please? You have a high rep and lots of SP so what are your difficult experiences?
It was right after the hard Fork I haven't had any in a few weeks but I was still a little bit rub the wrong way and was letting myself kind of hold a grudge over it. Exactly with the SP and the high rep I should have never had any problem posting at all is how I felt. I made me feel like all my hard work was for nothing like the developers were saying screw you to the little guys even though many of us little guys do a lot for the platform. I do a lot of giveaways for steem swag so I took it personal when I couldn't post. I took it way too personal and reading this today kind of made me realize that. I know one thing doesn't have to per say do with the other. Basically Acidyo reminded me it is about the community not about the developers or the greedy ass scammers.
I definitely agree with you here, people will abuse a system when they find a loophole for their own benefit. Those who abuse the platform don’t really care about the platform, only that the platform is a just a resource from which they mine and make their money.
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For machines to do all or most of human work is far in the future. The idea of giving money to people just to stay alive be it in poverty or luxury so they can pursue their life's hobbies sounds great on the surface.
But we are dealing with humans here. Free housing, free food, free clothes, free everything. What kind of human will that produce. Think a little deeper on what that will do.
This is not just about things being "free", its spreading distribution more fairly to where effort is being put in, not considering as much if that effort is being brought by a user with 10mil SP or one with 10.
Ok I misunderstood. I'm all for fairness and reward for good effort' :-)