RE: 😨 Are You Scared Of UPVU Yet?
@danmaruschak has made a valid and even more frightening addition - with enough proxy voting, UPVU could open up the DAO for themselves.
Yeah, I read that. That is a scary possibility, and it had not crossed my mind before.
By my reckoning, Steemit has somewhere around 39 million SP and another 6 or 7 million STEEM that they could power up in a pinch (plus however much they have on exchanges or otherwise out of my knowledge), so there is some breathing room, but maybe not much.
but economically, these can't compete with UPVU.
This is why I came up with the syndication idea. If the bidbots are going to be here, I'd rather have them upvoting something like, say, @skycorridors or @stefan.molyneux or @answerswithjoe - or even better would be written content from someone like @neilstrauss, when he was here. Those types of content producers are already creating content for other sites, so mirroring here would take no more effort than posting the stuff that we see the bidbots voting for.
By itself, that wouldn't solve the governance or DAO threat, but at least it would replace worthless content with content that people would actually read or view. In principle, since they have legitimate audiences, you'd think that they would do better than the people who are using bidbots to vote on pictures of tanks.
Maybe we should crowdsource an effort to delegate SP to an influencer that they could delegate, in turn, to a bidbot (not UPVU) ;-)... Maybe Steemit or one of the trustworthy witnesses (i.e. @steemchiller ;-) could even launch a bidbot with an author whitelist, "for influencers only".
All of that is just working around the root cause, though. Fundamentally, IMO, it all comes down to the rewards algorithm. I rarely go to hive or blurt, but when I do I'm also unimpressed by most of the high-ranking content there. I know it's going nowhere, and I sound like a broken record on the topic, but I really think that something like a second price auction is the best answer. It doesn't have to be exactly that solution, but some downvote-free solution is needed that forces voters to self-regulate or have their excess rewards dumped back into the rewards pool.
And then the question arises of how badly Tron Foundation will want to protect its asset? As of today, those 39 million STEEM are worth about $10m. I know that Tron have withdrawn a few million STEEM about a year ago and I don't know how much they bought their stake for... but in my opinion, there's a very real possibility that this is an asset that Tron could dispose of and save itself the hassle (depending upon their wider strategy).
With the launch of his robinhood account, I wondered whether the idea of creating his own "ethical" bidbot had crossed his mind.
The idea of influencers joining and delegating might accelerate the shift in relative power further. Which I think you allude to 🙂
I agree and perhaps even as simply as the value of SBD. You've suggested before about "burning" the SBD in steem.dao - I didn't like the idea at the time but an alternative is that Steemit submits a proposal that transfers the money to them. It won't be popular but this isn't the type of community that will do anything about it any more so it'll just happen. Then Steemit can power it up into Steem Power, tanking the price of SBD and subsequently increasing the benefits of 100% power up - and reducing the returns available from UPVU.
It could also potentially be used to create its own UPVU equivalent. One that could optimise users returns without the requirement of posting crap.
I know the feeling 🤣 I think somebody else commented "people won't realise until its happened". I don't want to be quoting this post in a year's time saying "I told you so".
I don't know if people and Steemit would go for it, but an idea that I've been pondering is to have the DAO fund a bot that buys STEEM and then powers it up and airdrops it to people in good standing (i.e. individual humans, not powering down, no plagiarism, no bidbot use, etc.) as "basic income". Could help build out the "middle class" and address the decentralization problem.
I like the idea... the downside being that once many people reach the "middle class", it's their trigger to delegate to UPVU. A few of the people I initially spoke to when I joined had the ambition of earning enough so that they could delegate it and earn a passive income. The "Income" element outweighing the "Social"....
All of the discussions I've had in response to this post have led me to a different line of thinking which definitely warrants a follow-up post at some point. The good news is that the funds in the steem.dao are safe. So I don't know what... if anything will happen to them 🤷🏼♂️
If I read this right, that 6 or 7 million is about to turn into something like 20 million.
By my understanding, it appears that approximately 24 million STEEM will be returning to Steemit Inc. - Only approx. 9 million were in dispute and I see no mention that 15 million have been returned already. It's not entirely clear though because if they were capable of writing in plain English, it wouldn't be a 15 page document.
How do you discover this stuff? I'll see if any journalists have picked up on it that are capable of simplifynig things 🙂
I've been following that case on the courtlistener web site for months (years?). I just found it through web searches, and bookmarked it after I did (the full docket is here). Coincidentally or not, at least two of the big Steem vs. Hive price swings and some days with large STEEM trading volume corresponded with publications on that web site. Unfortunately, I can't read most of the stuff that's out there because its paywalled.
Yeah, I don't think it has been returned yet, but as I read the conclusion and the footnote on page 8, roughly 14 million should be coming back and another 8 or 9 million remains in dispute.
I wondered about the implications upon the price of STEEM and whether it was a buying or selling opportunity. I came to the conclusion it was neither 😆
The URLs for the PDFs have a consistent format so I tried guessing it for row 89. I failed.
If the ruling was on the 30th, I'm quite surprised nobody's reported on it. I can't see anything on HIVE either. It looks like you're the only person watching 🤣
I did the same. It's impossible to know what Steemit will do with the Undisputed portion or what Bittrex will do with the Disputed portion, now that they have the greenlight to make an interpleader deposit in the form of USD. I guess Bittrex will sell, but they'll try to do it in a way that doesn't shift the market.
FTR, I'm definitely not the only one watching. Steem had some really high-volume trading days that corresponded with court actions. I guess the media lost interest after the Hive FUD campaign, but traders were definitely watching. ;-)
https://hive.blog/@ theycallmedan/posts
I wonder if it's worth keeping an eye on this guy. He appears to be one of the people trying to sue Bittrex. Although it's probably unlikely he'll write about it having lost the case.
Looks like something happened today. No details outside the paywall, though. : -(
On another note, now running around 6-7 votes per block.
How much does it cost to open documents?
I don't know. I don't have a pacer account, but I just found this, which suggests that it might cost less than I would have guessed:
The image above links to the page with the Pacer links (or here it is) if you're interested. I assume pacer accounts are available for free, but I don't know that for sure, either.
Ah, thanks for the reminder - the cheating delegations have been removed so I'll do another list 🙂
It'd be so great to know what's going on there - "Set Deadlines AND Order" either suggests an appeal or a timeline for returning the STEEM to Steemit. I suspect the latter.
My guess is that Bittrex made their interpleader deposit to cover the "disputed Steem" on April 8, and the "deadlines and order" have to do with filings for additional hearings on that part of the case, especially considering that an "Amended complaint" was added today. I figure that is removing Bittrex as a defendant and replacing one of the John Does with Steemit.
Pure speculation, but I wouldn't be surprised if Bittrex has already delivered the "undisputed Steem" to Steemit inside the exchange.
Update again today. No idea about the details, but based on price action, I guess it was good news for Steemit.
It could be - I was also told that Binance are launching STEEM/USDT trading pairs which will make STEEM much more appealing to traders. It could be a combination of both but good news all round!
Yeah, I saw that after I posted this comment. My intuition says that the new binance trading pair would have more to do with the price action. However, it was the high trading volume that prompted me to check the web site that day, and see that it had been updated, so I can't shake the speculation that the two are somehow related.
Yeah, he's one of the plaintiffs. I doubt if he'll have much to say, though. I always assumed it would end with a settlement and non-disclosure agreement.
Given the history, in principle, I would hope that any returned STEEM would be used to grow the ecosystem. We'll see.
I'm not optimistic on this point. I think that if TRON were going to invest in the platform, they would already have done so and this is an opportunity to "cut their losses" a little bit more. I hope that I'm wrong.
I sort-of agree. The only counter I have to that is that Tron demonstrated some amount of investment and commitment when they deployed the TRX reward supplementation. I see four possibilities:
I have no guess as to which, if any, are correct.