๐จ Are You Scared Of UPVU Yet?
With nearly 31,000,000 Steem Power, UPVU is by far the most powerful user on Steemit. By comparison, steemcurator01 has just under 10,000,000.
I'm sure you're familiar with UPVU but here's a brief introduction anyway (most of you can skip down to "Why Do Some Users Dislike UPVU Then")....
What is UPVU?
UPVU is a service which you delegate your power to and in return, they will upvote 1 of your posts every day. In addition, you'll also receive additional Steem in the form of a Wallet Transfer. If you don't write a post, you get a larger Transfer but this will have a lower value than the rewards from the upvote.
The reward from this single vote will eclipse the equivalent that you'd get through self-voting so as far as maximising your returns (your ROI), it's in your interests to submit 1 post per day, every day.
So it's great for the investor and there's currently no better ROI available on Steemit.
Beyond Investment
So it's great for investors and the rewards from these upvotes are occasionally put to good use. Some Steemit users use these rewards to provide prizes for contests - redistributing a proportion to the community.
Why Do Some Users Dislike UPVU Then?
As mentioned above, for investors it's great. It can be used as a "savings account" and can provide an impressive ROI.
For the community though, things look very different.
The Inability To Curate
If users delegate their power to UPVU, their votes to other authors is lessened and as many delegate 100% of their power, their upvotes are worth nothing.
It's possible that if these users didn't delegate their power, they'd have little incentive to stay on the platform and wouldn't upvote others anyway. So in this regard, it's pretty much a null-sum game. If anything, their power remaining on the platform props up the price of Steem and makes those that do upvote others more valuable - although their receipt of upvotes reduces the reward pool so even this element is debatable.
The Necessity To Post Something... Anything...
There are many accounts that write their daily post. A picture of a coin... a tank... anything. They're here to maximise their returns and this is the only requirement to do so. The community sees this picture of a tank earn $10 and think "I know, I'll post a picture of a tank too" and then wonder why their tank is worth nothing.
Since the only requirement is to post something, there's no incentive to engage with the community. To add the "Social" into this "Social Media".
Engagement reduces... the sense of community reduces... the motivation to post good quality content and support others reduces... Newcomers who join "to get rich" are unable to do so. Shame. Newcomers who join to get some emotional fulfilment from their interaction with others quickly realise that the community is actually quite small. This fulfilment is difficult to accomplish but it is possible - I'm still here but there are many that aren't.
Then there's this - of the most powerful 1,000 users, 75% of their power is delegated which is where much of UPVU's 31,000,000 comes from. Which means that there aren't many users with the power to manually curate and highlights the importance of the work that the Steemit team are doing through steemcurator and booming support. But I'm not here to suck up to Steemit, I'm here to share a point of view so let's get to it...
Opinion: Steemit Is Becoming UPVU
UPVU's growth is far quicker and more significant than any other user. We're not far off the point at which UPVU will have more voting power than all of Steemit's accounts combined. This doesn't sound important but given the shared reward pool, as UPVU's relative voting power increases, Steemit's relative voting power decreases.
Assuming a constant price of Steem, a steemcurator01 upvote today could be worth $10... this time next week $9.99... the week after $9.98... you get the picture. Whereas the equivalent UPVU vote will be worth $10... $10.01... $10.02...
In time, the consequence of this is inevitable. To earn any rewards, you MUST delegate to UPVU. Steemit is full of investors. Steemit is UPVU.
Can Steemit Stop This?
It can... other than the obvious outright ban, Steemit could implement a "vote" cap - a single upvote only being worth a certain number of VESTS (or e.g. $10). Or a rule that prevents somebody that you've delegated to voting upon your content. Given the automation of upvoting services, this would have to be done at code or API level and I'm sure there are plenty more ideas but importantly (and the likely reason nothing's been implemented YET)...
if Steemit Inc. stops or bans UPVU, many investors will leave and take the price of Steem down with them.
I also believe that for a stop or ban to happen, it will require support from the community appointed witnesses which have some notable names that we know and love. We know that they have the best interests of the entire Steemit ecosystem at heart, WE voted for them.
Now welcome to the really scary bit...
it won't be long before we have ZERO input into who these witnesses are.
In UPVU's latest announcement, to further maximise investors ROI, you have to proxy your witness votes to them.
If you turn on the UPVU Boost function, a proxy that delegates the governance voting authority to upvu.proxy is automatically set.
When the UPVU Boost function is turned OFF, the existing STEEM reward is reduced by 50%.
As of today, that's 31,000,000 Steem Power potentially proxied to UPVU to choose Steemit's witnesses and therefore the sole decision maker on the future of this platform. No more xpilar, no more steemchiller, etc. - just UPVU.
So the window is closing. As UPVU Boost gains traction, Steemit will slowly lose its ability to stop it.
Have Your Say
I'm well aware of my bias and how I've positioned this article - as well as knowing that some of you reading this have delegated large sums to this service. I'm interested in hearing your thoughts.
World of Xpilar and the whole team have worked hard to build our community and Steemit to get where we are today.
I am a user of the upvu service, but I use it to the advantage of increasing my SP and it gives me an opportunity to give more upvote to our users. I have 262K SP and of those I have delegated 146K to upvu
For now, I see my delegation as right to be able to increase my SP
and take out a little for myself and pay for the expenses I have with server rental and the apps we have on steem.
But such services should never be here if they can not run a blacklist and follow it up when it comes to abuse
Another thing is that it should only be allowed to use 50% of its SP for such services as for example for upvu
The other 50% you must use to vote for someone other than yourself
Yes, you may be right, maybe everyone who has fought for this platform will come up with something new
I was very happy a few days ago when our witness "xpilar.witness" came among the top 20 witnesses (19th place)
But then came proxied to UPVU and everything changed after a few hours yesterday
As you can see now, "xpilar.witness" is in 23rd place
We have received many votes from the community recently which made us move up to the top 20 witnesses
What is happening now is a robbery from all those who believe in us and voted us on the list and now see that their votes had little significance to be able to place us among the 20 best witnesses
Yes, our witness is back ๐
many big voices came in the last few days
I had you in mind when I was writing this post as you're one of the few who balance both sides of the equation.
In general, the investor side is increasingly outweighing the blogging side which might be OK for STEEM but not good for Steemit. It's starting to feel like STEEM and Steemit are dividing into "Investor" and "Blogger" whereas when I joined, they were dependant upon each other. I'm not so sure that they are now ๐ค
I had a very quick look into this and didn't see anything unusual - those in the 17-20 spots received some new upvotes but the same people upvoted you (they appeared to just be upvoting the top 30 witnesses). I wonder if users who support you have powered-down and reduced your support. I don't know if this kind of information is available to look into though.
There are lots of options that could "save" the blogging element of Steemit. I certainly feel that something is needed to change the current direction. I just don't know what is required for an idea like this to progress.
Hola @xpilar, apenas y puedo entender de lo que hablan sinceramente, pero imagino que son modalidades para interactuar dentro de la plataforma, cรณmo si eres inversionista, accionista o empleado, algo asรญ??, que pena pero aรบn no comprendo.
Hi @the-gorilla
Friend of mine (@xpilar) just shared link to this publication with me.
Truth be told, I never really liked upvu and what it stands for and I would never support it with delegation. And it stands for "centralization of power". Currently future of entire blockchain seem to depend on that one account alone :/
At this moment is seem that future of Steemit depends on UPVU and future of UPVU depends on success of failure of Steemit.
Perhaps ... just perhaps ... they would do a better job than current STINC team and hopefully they will use their enormous power and influence to bring some value to this platform. After all - in order for them to continue doing their business - they need steemit to survive.
Time will tell. Stopping them at this stage may not be possible without de-railing and crashing entire platform and blockchain.
Yours, Piotr
That's increasingly becoming my point of view.
This is where my trail of thought has started to lead. Whilst I believe that UPVU will destroy the blogging element of Steemit almost entirely, they can't afford for the underlying STEEM token to lose its value so they have launched initiatives like SteemPunks.
Whilst replying to your comment, I've read a comment from one of UPVU's founders and I've decided to share this post and my concerns with him.
Greetings @crypto.piotr,
Right said Peter, I agree with you ,
If Upvu want, it can breakdown entire steemit blockchain single handedly
Because of the power it has, I think we can not do anything as it has became number one acc with the help of many people and many people trust their services so :/
To the extent that the reward pool is just used to funnel coins back to people for holding SP it just becomes interest on SP. If people were proposing eliminating the reward pool and increasing the SP interest rate to some big number like 200% people would see that it's economically nonsensical, bigger numbers of coins but the value evaporates from the coin because there's no usage model besides "the number gets bigger". I haven't looked into how UPVU works, but it seems like it's basically a self-vote aggregation service -- instead of jumping through the hoops of creating ten self-votable posts per day and self-voting them you delegate to a big user who votes to give you the equivalent reward on a single post (except more, because the "convergent linear" rewards model punishes smaller votes). I am sympathetic to the problem of there not being enough easy-to-find good content to use legitimate upvotes for, but if the system is just largely self-votes then it doesn't work.
If we're pondering troubling possibilities related to overly-centralized witness vote control it might also be worth considering that Witness proxies also impact DAO proposal voting. Someone with enough witness votes can just start directly transferring lots of SBDs to themselves if they want.
I hadn't considered that. That's 2.5 million SBD that (if UPVU so desires), could quickly become available to them. Wow.
You touched on an important topic for me. I could never limit myself to writing posts, I always wanted to see the global picture. I'm not against automation. Automation is designed to make people's lives easier. But in automation such as bid bots, I've always seen the danger to this platform. And all that I saw you set out in this post.
I must say at once that the Steemit team cannot do anything about this situation. Their main task is to support the successful financial activities of this platform. Every businessman aims to ensure that his company is profitable. This requires investors. Investors need profit, UPVU gives investors what they need. It turns out a kind of symbiosis.
What are bloggers for? They create the look by publishing content. Imagine you are the CFO of Steemit. Bloggers will be nothing more than plankton for you.
The Steemit team supports bloggers in every way so that they make a profit and do not leave the platform. The Steemit team came up with clubs to keep the share of SP bloggers from declining so quickly. But the SP UPVU is growing much faster than the SP of all bloggers combined, so the share of SP bloggers continues to decline.
Thus, the Steemit team found itself in a situation where it wanted to help bloggers, wanted the platform to remain social, but could not do anything.
The question arises, how to ensure that bloggers do not disappear and Steemit does not turn into a mining farm? How to prevent such a situation:
from becoming like this:
At the same time it is necessary not to harm investors.
I see only one way out. Give bloggers the opportunity to earn even more, especially those in the #club100. To do this, the Steemit team will have to give as much reward as UPVU distributes, so that bloggers grow at the same rate as UPVU users. Of course, there will not be enough existing steemcurator and booming accounts, you will have to use additional resources that they have.
Contrary to popular belief, this will in no way negatively affect STEEM inflation and its price. The STEEM inflation remains the same in any case, as the pool of rewards remains the same. What matters is not inflation, but the outflow of money from the platform to cryptocurrency exchanges. The average UPVU user sells much more STEEM than a blogger in #club100 or #club75.
If you have read the comment to these words, then here is a medal ๐ฅ for your effort and patience.
You touch on a lot of points and I see a similar sentiment that has appeared in other replies and some discussions I've had off-chain.
Or perhaps the question is... does it matter if bloggers disappear and Steemit turns into a mining farm? Something I've pondered since reading the replies upon my first day of posting this which certainly warrants a follow-up post soon ๐
Similarly, you and everybody who's commented deserve a trophy ๐ for reading it to the end.
Not much time, but here is a rushed reply in stream of consciousness. It reminds me of a post I wrote some years ago. Of course, rereading it now, I realize that I hadn't considered the tragedy of the commons in my thinking.
Possible value-enhancing use case for bidbots in their current form? Syndication networks, where someone is already creating decent content on another platform and they use bidbots here to widen their distribution? Maybe syndicators could squeeze out vacuous posting?
In general terms, I have two main thoughts. (i) is that I have no idea how things will turn out in the long run, but mostly I still trust the profit & loss mechanism over the long term; and (ii) is that if blogging is 10% of a big number, that could be better than 100% of a small number, so maybe having a front-end to filter out the unappealing content is enough.
Finally, I don't have time to look for the link now, but there was a paper a few years ago showing that with the right ratio of witness votes, a single actor can't dominate DPOS. Unfortunately, with Steem's number of block producers, the right number of witness votes was 4, so unless/until Steem fixes that, there will always be a risk of monopolization of governance.
@danmaruschak has made a valid and even more frightening addition - with enough proxy voting, UPVU could open up the DAO for themselves.
This for me is the biggest unknown. IF the 30 million Steem Power disappeared, the percentage of rewards going to quality bloggers would increase. But this percentage would have a lower dollar value. It's possible that these 2 balance out each other although I have no idea whether this is the case or not.
In my opinion, the 10% has decreased in the short time since I've been here and continues to decrease. Crap feeds crap and quality encourages quality.
You've got some great ideas regarding bidbots and how the Steemit ecosystem can be enhanced but economically, these can't compete with UPVU.
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.
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 ๐
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 ๐คฃ 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 ๐คท๐ผโโ๏ธ
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 ๐
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 ๐
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 ๐คฃ
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.
What about simply changing the number of witness votes per user to 5?
And regarding the DAO, those funds should be burned ASAP and it should be dissolved.
that is a thought, then upvu.proxy can only vote for 5 witnesses
So simple and more often than not, the simplest solutions are the best. The only question is then what happens to the users votes that have already gone to more than 5 witnesses.
I've been reliably informed that the money already sitting in the DAO is protected but I don't see any point in that much SBD inaccessible to anybody and just crying out for a hacker to have a go.
In my opinion; there are diverse perceptions from the look when it comes to UPVU; to many investor its an avenue to bring profit back from their investment and which Is not a bad ideas ? Ofcourse it's not bad, but, still their expectations has it be met? Plus is UPVU has not changed the rules of the account creation itself?
These are many questions we all have no single answer to it, but, I am sure of things before the split of Steem & Hive the issue of "centralized " was the Genesis of the division between this two platform, majority of people rise against the fact that some BID bots are milking the Pool from the platform which lead to seriously chaos and at the end, the split occurred!
Reasoning with your points in the ABOVE:
The goals of this great platform against the "Centralizes" and you point out from this above point, UPVU has become more than anyone could imagine, how can you stop them? This 30,000,000 Steem Power we are talking about here was contributed/delegated by the Communities right?
Then, it is up to those investors to decided if they are happy with running system of UPVU; Steemcurators01 , SC02, SCO3 et al, they all have been doing great work so far and their impact can be felt on small account and big accounts, but unlike UPVU is a Community support to strengthen UPVU goals and objectives! But who knows if the investors didn't look/ see anything wrong in the system!, We must remember it is their money, you can't decide for them, but I will employ them to see it from another angle, aside their return profit from the investment, is there anything negative coming from UPVU account that needs urgent attention? If Yes something should be done, if No, then it's UPVU investors to decide that.
Lastly, UPVU delegators has the final decision, but if an account could have more Steem than Steemit.inc itself, then what I call centralization/totalitarianism could occurred and if there is no law or rules or guidelines then I sacred of the consequences this might brought to Steemit. Not to be judgmental, but to express view, if UPVU could give 50% back to Investors and 50% back to Community since those Power came from the community too I presume it will be a good idea , but like I said early, this decision is left between UPVU and its Investors.
Thanks for sharing your view.
Regards,
I can't dispute anything that you say - the investor / blogger relationship is one which was vitally important when I joined - both were required for success. Now the relationship is heavily weighted towards the Investor at the expense of the blogger.
The reference to Steemit essentially reacting to "market forces" is true. Steemit has become what its users have made it. Similar to the way in which a new industry (e.g. social media like Facebook, etc.) regulates itself. i.e. self-regulating. But... if an industry fails to regulate itself appropriately (e.g. Facebook again), then legislation is imposed by governments (i.e. Steemit Inc) to ensure that industries behave within some bounds that ensure its of benefit to the wider society.
At some point, this "legislation" will be required on Steemit if the blogging element is to survive. The STEEM token will live on irrespective of what happens to the blogging side of things. Unless it's decided to "let anarchy rule".
He invitado a muchos usuarios a unirse a la plataforma y este es para mi un gran problema porque me encuentro con que miran eso y piensan exactamente esto, es dificil poder explicarles cuando apenas estan entrando en este mundo.
Desde hace tiempo conozco la forma de trabajo de la cuenta Upvu y es sorprendente como ha crecido desde que llegue, apenas era un poco mas poderoso que Steemcurator01 ahora ya es el triple de poderoso.
Pero seguimos con los mismo ahora incluso mas fuerte, las personas creen que haciendo publicaciones tontas pueden ganar mucho dinero, estan matando el buen contenido.
No, not scared, but I think it's really sad what happened to 'my' STEEM ...
You describe a disturbing trend. I understand that something needs to be done about this, but I can't really imagine what exactly needs to be done.
In general terms, one process must be opposed to some other process. This process must be initiated by the STEะMIT team or other major SP holders
Investors need UPVU, bloggers need decent rewards. A balance of interests is needed, and this task must be solved by the developers and the Steะตmit team.
Clubs 100, 75, 50 help keep tokens inside the system. Maybe there is a sense of additional incentives for club members in order to increase their overall SP as opposed to UPVU? But I don't think this will be enough.
I agree with this... if bloggers are to survive in the long-term.
If bloggers do not survive, then the blockchain will turn into a crypto farm. He will lose his originally declared positions. I'm not sure that this will suit everyone, even investors.