RE: Normie Talk - HF21 Explained (SPS + EIP) What it is and what happens next
Man I hope this HF gets rejected. Not holding out high hopes for that of course. Why does an obviously beneficial thing (worker proposal system, although funding it from reward pool instead of from vesting interest is... beyond stupid) have to get bundled up with something that at best is a "try it and see if it works" and is actually more likely a "terrible for everyone except bid bot users and delegators/owners" (honestly, we don't have to "wait and see" what behavior changes will come - an incremental incentive to "good behavior" that still doesn't even come close to matching the rewards possible from delegating to bid bots will not have any appreciable change in user behavior - that is basic game theory, we can say with 100% certainty that the vast majority of people will still choose the most self-benefiting course of action, which is still not aligned with anything like behavior we would like to see. Interestingly this will likely drive even more people to delegate to bid bots as there is no risk of downvotes to a delegator there as opposed to self voting, and the new reward curve ensures that you have to use a bid bot unless you are a huge investor to begin with, otherwise you lose out). Gah.
This is much like how politicians work in the US. Take what was a simple proposal for a HF to fund who knows what...which if run correctly will be a good thing and add in a bunch of other ideas at the same time that aren't related so they pass because voting no would be voting against funding Steem's future.
I agree reject this and put it into at least 2 HF's.
I don't see this at all as "terrible for everyone but bid bots". There's plenty to suggest that the equilibrium will shift a bit. Every component to this EIP is assuming maximizing behavior to boot, so not sure where you are getting this conclusion from.
50/50. +Curation leakage, +curation bonus. Less delegators, less upside for bot.
Convergent Linear. Small bids become useless, less demand. Also upside for curation. More effective to downvote higher posts. Less profitable to split votes on many posts.
Downvotes. Risk for bidders, less demand (hence profitability).
I am tempted to say you must be joking, but I will assume you are serious. There is no possible way that the downvote pool can exert negative pressure against bidbot use. The amount of SP controlled by the "pro bidbot camp" if you want to call it that - the amount of SP controlled by users who directly delegate to bidbots, own bidbots, and/or use bidbots, is far greater than the amount of SP controlled by accounts that actively use SP* and oppose bid bots. Good luck trying to win a flag war against bid bots. If you think for one second that any kind of organized campaign to flag posts that use bidbots wouldn't meet organized counterflag opposition, then you obviously haven't been paying attention. The rest of the measures could all have been carefully crafted to create even more perverse incentives to use bid bots. 50/50 curation... you may not have looked at the big picture of curation, bid bots already earn the vast majority of curation under current system. Bid bot operation will be instantly far more profitable. There will be zero change to the incentive to delegate to bid bots, that is currently and will still be the optimal strategy even over 100% self-voting, so predictably, it will be the strategy that the majority of SP holders take to optimize investment. And the worst thing is the reward curve change, which actually incentivizes users to use bid bots. Anyone who can't get a post organically past the threshold where the new curve passes the old curve, will make less than they used to (which is... everyone except whales and the small number of users lucky enough to get whale votes). Anyone who uses a bid bot to get their post past that point in the curve will make more than they used to. Add it all up and we should see a large increase in the use of bid bots and a large increase in the profitability of bid bots.
*The "actively use SP" distinction is drawn of course because of the huge amounts of SP held by Stinc and not used. If Stinc wanted to use their stake to flag big bot use it would be another story of course, but that wouldn't require a hard fork. Stinc could end bid bot use overnight if they wanted to. They don't.
I am not joking, and I seem to have a very different analysis and I'm hard pressed to find a way that will make you see it the same way. You didn't address any of the points I made, but to be fair I should have pointed you at a starting point since I was summarizing the arguments.
See for example https://steemit.com/steem/@tarazkp/50-50-curation-and-bots-getting-more. Double the curation, double the leakage. Bots have to work to mitigate that, for starters.
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Part of the problem with this HF is with so many changes at once, they all impact each other. The likely impact of 50/50 curation on bid bots in a vacuum is different (IMO) than the likely impact of 50/50 curation combined with reward curve change. But even in a vacuum, I totally disagree with tarazkp analysis. Even under current system it is easily possible to earn curation returns far greater than 50% by front running bid bots, and yet the sum total of SP spent in this manner is a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of SP that bidbots are voting with and the total curation they get. Change the curation % (IMO) isn't going to change the big picture there. A small number of savvy users will see an increase in the return they get front running bots, but in the big picture this isn't even noticeable. If you haven't already, run a query to bring up the top 100 curation earners on non-self votes. It will be populated almost exclusively by bid bots. The big picture is so big that the amount of SP thrown around to front run bots is not even visible next to the mountain of bid bot SP that you can see from space. But more importantly, this isn't happening in a vacuum. You can throw out all the numbers in that post, because the new reward curve changes the math considerably on bid bot profitability - in the wrong direction! A huge swathe of users who are currently able to earn (small amounts) of SP through posting and commenting without using bidbots, will now find almost all of their earnings falling below the dust threshold. In terms of user numbers and not SP, we are talking about a huge majority of the active users on the platform who will see significant reduction in earning. The incentive to use a bid bot to boost your post farther up the new curve is going to be huge.
Hard to say the degree in which this will happen. Even a small nudge can easily change the balance in who delegates, who snipes curation, and who bids. The data may point to total dominance in earnings now, but it also obscures key points including the returns to delegators. It's also at the extreme of what the current incentives pushed forward. And of course it will not reflect what happens with downvotes.
I disagree with your assessment that downvotes won't happen against bot voting, because it's clear that it will. The curve assists here as well because it is more efficient in an impact/rshare to downvote larger posts, and that is where it will be directed. It is admittedly the largest unknown in this mix of changes, as well as the most critical part, but any increase in downvoting behavior will already affect things for the better.
One thing also to point out is that all bot voting essentially needs to go big or go home. Low to Medium size bot bids (in aggregate across bots) will simply disappear. Increases the risk as well as the reward. I don't have the numbers here but it's hard to say how many will continue with it.
There is a danger here as you say. If downvotes don't happen, this behavior could crowd out everything else, although the convergent linear caps the degree in which this can actually happen. I would say that it's also an incentive to downvote the other posts that are now crowding you out, if you are one of those bidders. (Or a bot owner that wants to make it more attractive).
Interestingly, I was treating the system as one big bid bot but the reality is also that they can no longer promise guaranteed returns, and revert back to models where they just do raw bid pricing instead of their min/max ROI parameters. Which can get very weird. There's quite a lot that bot owners will need to do behind the scenes to make sense of this environment, that I even think some may simply just drop out. In which case it may just be a handful of competing large bots at the end.
The smaller authors and commenters will see an immediate impact as you say, though I don't think it goes below dust. You can see in the parameter they chose that it's at worst halving the amounts. And I believe that after all the incentives shift, it will reflect a better distribution overall, which is conditional on the above, which we disagree on. Because as you say, the lion's share is dominated by bots. If you manage to chip away the incentives, you can slowly unravel it to a degree.
Anyway, what you are saying highlights a situation that I admit is a possibility, but I suppose I have a better feeling about the downvote behavior and incentive structure than you do.
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WE had DOWNVOTING Communities before but what did it changed ... ah YEAH NOTHINGG, only a few get holded for a moment... but shitty posts are all around STILL and they still get paid for it... so this THEORY isnt worthy... i understand the HOPING of this CHANGINGS , but all i can see is, the SOLD VOTE will be more worthy than before because the payout get doubled, and they CREATOR will get LESS... so where is the MAGIC... what will it drives into a better thing ... i cant see it
Your reasoning doesn't follow. 25% Free downvotes is a big difference compared to what we had before.
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okay then i really missreaded this downvote way... but at the end we will see what it will change... because when i use it, we will see in what kind of war its maybe end...
Very true @carlgnash
ps.
Would you perhaps consider using "enter" from time to time? To separate blocks of texts? It would make it much easier to read.
Yours
Piotr
LOL my fingers are on a direct connect to my brain, I type super fast and tend to spill it all out in a big block. Feedback duly noted :)
Run a bit of historic data through the new rules. It is very likely the bid bot economy will get a huge boost from the EIP. The narrative for the EIP is interesting, but based more in wishfull thinking than in actual data or simulations. But anyhow, there is no stopping this at this point. Best thing to hope for is a contingency plan for when the wishfull thinking turns out not to pan out and the EIP turns out to hurt the economy.
Historic data is meaningless because it does not take into consideration new incentives appearing from the new rules. I fully admit here that if the downvotes don't occur, it will be a disaster. But I have a good feeling about that just based on the economics of it as well as various levels of commitment, and the fact that some already do it even though it costs them right now (obviously, talk is cheap).
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I had high hopes for the down votes, but after runningthis poll, now I no longer do.
Based on this poll and actual data of downvotes and retaliations from the analysis's I used to run from @pibarabot, I'm pretty much convinced there is verry little economic insentive to make use of free down votes.
There is pretty much a culture of fear and retaliation surrounding the use of down votes on this platform.
There's not much stake represented in that poll. What's the analysis from @pibarabot? There's definitely an economic incentive to use all of the free downvotes, and it doesn't even matter who you are (although obviously the more stake, the more impact).
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Actually there is a tangible economic incentive not to use the free down votes:
retaliation!
I used to run a daily script that processed all flags done on one week old posts, until Steemit Inc killed my code by implementing API rate limiting a few months back (here is a sample graph of one day. One thing that stood out was that the same accounts kept showing up in different roles, either as flagger or flagee. On closer inspection, a substantial amount of down vote weight could be attributed to some form of retribution for earlier flags against accounts with likely relations (voting proxy or non-standard recovery account) with the flagging account.
I don't know what to make of it except that people flagged despite being retaliated against, and despite the current opportunity cost from doing so. I get that retaliation is a deterrent, but I'm pretty sure free downvotes will be flying in different ways than what you are analyzing. (Whether it holds or does something productive or is ultimately detrimental overall all remain to be seen)
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Retaliation isn't all bad. Alice and Bob get into it with each other, and that means that Charlie walks away with the money. Maybe Charlie was actually doing something right by not being seen as downvote-worthy by anyone.
Point is, if Alice and Charlie both behave exactly the same, both notice Bob does something bad, like calling in bid bots on a post tagged for one of the top curation initiatives (something I've used flags for myself a couple of times, and have been retaliated against a couple of times as well), and Alice was the only one acting on it by attenuating the bot votes with a down vote, then behaving like Charlie is incentified above Behaving like Alice by the retaliation by Bob.
For the flagging to truly work without negative incentives, I think we would need some kind of flagging SP that can be delegated separately from regular SP to semi-automated services. Without something that can shield those who for example want to use their free downvotes for attenuating false curation bot upvotes against direct retaliation. As the EIP comes with nothing that shields us from retribution down votes, I'm afraid the incentive to act is still negative.
That is harmful nonsense. Old data will show what the new insentives are. You can than middel second iteration data accordingly, rinse and repeat, but you need to run the new rules against the old data just once. If you don't, the whole new incentives narratives will be nothing but speculative fiction.
And that's exactly what it is. You can run the new rules on old data, and that's exactly how you get the immediate distribution at hard fork time. But after that, you can't predict anything. I don't see how you can claim that this has any predictive power. After all, you aren't going to be able to estimate how many downvotes are going to be issued, for starters.
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The troubling thing I still see is people assume inactive/passive investors even want to become/have the time to be active ones in the first place.
Chance are many of inactive/passive just delegate and only check in quarterly or monthly to ensure payments are still flowing. At best they might have someone managing a crypto fund for them charging a flat fee which would not cover the costs of manual curation. It’s not like they are going get a physical letter mailed to their house explaining HF21 by Steemit LLC or the owners of the bot they have delegated to.
Then you have the mind-numbing time consuming and troubling issue of trying to distribute those kinds of votes the large accounts have. If an investor can afford $1 million high-risk investment (which is what this is) chances are it’s not a very large amount of their total wealth or they are able to recover quite quickly if it ends in a total loss. Which means this is not a lot money to them regardless of what curation is paid.
Unless they are high risk-taking junkies in which case I don’t see them being inactive/passive with such an investment when they can shape the landscape to a certain degree and have fun doing so. Either case purely investing for dividends and forgoing the impacts on the initial principal amount is a sure way to end broke. We keep acting like curation dividends is a magic bullet that will fix everything.
An active investor with millions in influence wanting to maximize profit would make their own dapp/partner with others and use it to push users towards it. Not with the goal of earning dividends paid out via curation. Rather massively increase their principal investment entirely. Not to mention I would not be shocked if several projects on the blockchain would already have an evaluation in the millions to tens of millions of dollars if someone wanted to buy them out. Far greater than what their current SP is or what it will earn them in any reasonable amount of time.
End of the day Witness are more or less acting like they don’t have a choice if they wish to remain a Witness. It’s time for everyone else to find ways to adapt to the future landscape. That is after all what we should expect from game theory.
I agree with the not bundling all in one, as do many others. I also agree that this will be a “try it and see” as most economic changes are, but I don’t see the benefit to bid bots here if I’m honest.
I do think that the only aspect of the EIP that will effectively change behavior is the downvote pool, and that will only work if it’s used by large stake holders in a positive way. Many have said they will, but yeah we will have to wait and see for that.
While I don’t necessarily agree with all the proposed aspects or how they are being bundled, I do agree we need to make some changes.
Unfortunately it’s hard to communicate that or come to a consensus as a community as we have many users who also somehow think that “votes should be equal” no matter of stake, or that individuals who have large stake should just give it away for free.. and then those same individuals feel that is completely ridiculous that a small portion of a shared pool (that they don’t even own) could be redirected to a project that benefits the whole chain.
A bit of entitlement and short term thinking, complete lack of understanding of the Steem ecosystem, as well as being ruined with the idea of “come blog and get paid” has left us with unrealistic expectations from both small and large stake holders alike. Plus the rewarding of contributions that only remove value without adding anything in return. If we continue down this path there won’t be anything left imo.
Anyways, I fully support a funded SPS, in fact I would like to see more inflation go to it.. as I think it could add true value. As far as EIP, I’m not sold on it entirely and would very much prefer to see it put forward on its own.. but I do think the tandem of the three components make sense in a way, I just am concerned for what that would look like for many users. As we really won’t know until it’s attempted.
Actually, I would argue that we are seeing the success of crypto social sites that do reward evenly by giving all participants equal voting authority. Minds.com and LBRY are drawing in the big names from Youtube, Twitter and the other places while Steem gets a link posted at best. Stake-based social medias might just not work, or perhaps most people just don't like the unfairness of the influence it gives the minority over the majority. Either way, I'd say Minds.com and LBRY, though young projects, are kicking Steem's ass.
And that’s fair to say, but Steem is DPOS... so that’s sort of how this works. There are other alternatives for anyone who does not like stake based 🙂
You are right in saying everyone can choose what they want to use. But telling people "if you don't like it you can go somewhere else" is a very unwise policy for such a small project as Steem. Its still in its infancy and its survival is not even close to being assured, so it should hand-hold its userbase.
Also, DPOS does not have to go to the extreme Steem is taking it. For example, the HoboDAO intends on adding a Loom Network DPOS website to its long-term roadmap, but one's total amount of HBO will not give you wildly large votes over anyone else. The reason for this is that whales are a form of centralization and thus a security risk. Our aim is decentralized journalism, while whales with equal vote authority to stake get to have more opinion than the overall community, which makes no sense for a decentralized system. Its a contradiction in Steem's very purpose.
Uncapped influence based on how much you have staked leads to an all-or-nothing system. This is a problem because most people on social media sites are whimsical and that's just not likely to change. Where is Myspace? My point is that if a social media site demands large investment to get anything out of the deal that its a non-starter strategy.
Saying all that, allow me to make my key point for both the last comment and this one. I'm trying to explain that the market seems to be telling us that our rewarding system based on stake won't work, but that doesn't mean DPOS doesn't work. Resource credits are a brilliant idea and it makes perfect sense that SP stakers receive benefit through a delegation economy of RCs.
Perhaps the world will not accept the notion of whale/orca/minnow/plankton vote levels. We might need to make voting for the reward pool equal, however, the resource credit system can still compensate whales through a delegation market of RCs. The RC system is an excellent way to reward investors because they benefit from all the many communities that desire access to the Steem network.
People are claiming that SMTs will solve the disparity problem and downvoting harassment. I strongly disagree on both counts. The problem with SMTs is that they will almost always be practically worthless. STEEM/SBD will remain what people want because its a universal internet money, while most SMTs will be hardly better than wordpress token features that have been around for years. In order for a token to matter to anyone, it needs to either be useful in many places, or the one place that you can use it needs to be incredibly popular. And this is why the STEEM reward pool system needs to be palatable to more than just early investors like a common pump & dump project, but to billions of people.
Love the idea about the rc credits being and investment vehicle instead of stake based voting. This place would be a lot more fun with more equality of opportunity.
I understand your points and I think they make sense but I don’t actually understand the point of debating whether or not Delegated Proof of Stake, therefore stake based voting, is something Steem should do away with. I am saying it’s what STEEM is at its core. Not “if you don’t like it go somewhere else” more “you came to a DPOS platform, you can’t expect for it to be anything different than a DPOS platform.
This is why communities are so needed. Anyone can make their own economic policy and distribution etc through communities and SMTs while still being on the Steem chain.
I just think we tried it and its not working, that's essentially what I am saying. So, I am suggesting that we refocus toward an RC market incentive for investors and let the crowd employ the "wisdom of the crowd" approach for all content. It would be better than letting the ship sink in my opinion.
Lots of money in it too, think about how rich you are in RCs. Most people with even a small amount of SP have more resource credits than they need in a day. In the economic model I'm suggesting a community founder would have to rent your RCs from you in a dlease.io like site in order for this late arriver to Steem to be able to provide Steem access to his community members. Investors would love that idea, as they do with EOS. Its turning Steem integration into the shiny new thing that all community founders just got to have.
Oh, this community doesn't have Steem integrated? What a dump! I'm out...
Its the best of both worlds, because the stakers would become much like miners in this system, reaping the passive profits they want and providing a high SBD reward value due to all the money the whales have locked up in the network. In fact, EOS even markets this idea and tells people in its Coinbase course that owning just 1 EOS could in the future be enough to receive "space rent" from a dev team or entrepreneur.
That should be Steem's move toward communities, and it would even allow the users in those communities to feel the system is much more fair, because their votes would be relatively similar in value. In this version of Steem, RCs would be something the average user never even thinks about, because it would be like servers, just something the site administrators deal with. Do that and drop the inflation rate in half and you'll see the investors FOMO right on in...
Its not a wild idea, its exactly what EOS is doing right now and it is attractive to investors. Also, if you think carefully about the SMT concept, Steemit Inc.'s plan kind of is what I am suggesting, only, I am going as far as saying we should de-couple the reward pool from SP and not care about SMTS. The SMTs are nice and would be profitable to STEEM holders, but 90%+ of SMTS are going to be a joke and Steem Engine is already rocking that side of things. STEEM is where it is at, and its STEEM that communities will really want to earn because its universal currency.
I think he is a saying there could be a hi-bred approach like stake weighted voting at the level of Witnesses and Management.
Without allowing those with huge amounts of stake to control the content.
While I don't think that will ever happen with Steem, some of the SMT and community sites might take that approach. I happen to agree that our distibution combined with DPOS is a huge problem with wisdom of the crowd type curation, there is no crowd. There are a handful of account that can take something to the top of the curve or knock them out of visibility and they don't represent a middle line.
Agreed though, it is unlikely to happen, I don't mind that it gets brought up because there are ways to mitigate our distribution issues, even if we don't choose to implement them.
In fact although Palnet's distribution is still wanky, they at least don't have nearly the distribution problems Steem does and while it is still imperfect, it feel it has a better chance of succeeding than Steem based content sites.
Sometimes one wishes a comment were resteemable. This is one of those comments. Spot on analysis I wish everyone understood here.
If you are referring to my comment, thank you. :)
Interesting to hear a confirmation to my idea that using STEEM would best be left to function as a utility token for voting for witnesses and renting out Resource Credits. That's my long-term vision for STEEM anyway. All curation could be done using SMTs in communities where the distributions of the tokens used could be much more even or concentrated into the app owners who'd be genuinely motivated to reward the highest quality content the most.
I'm beginning to think that using the base layer tokens for curation is a failure. That doesn't need to mean Steem as a whole is a failure. Steem has feeless transactions for users and apps going for it. It's also fast and developer-friendly.
Well, we have similar ideas, only, I think SMTs are nothing but buzz. I think it is a mistake for Steem to try to be the social Ethereum, as it seems every blockchain is trying to be Ethereum now. Even Bitcoin Cash is trying to play the token game.
Don't get me wrong, token creation is very valuable, but only a very small number of SMTs will manage to have an economic value. The launch of SMTs would pump STEEM price but then it would experience an unwind similar to Ethereum. I argue that Steem has a different value.
The Steem blockchain was designed to be the backend to future blog and social frontends. In that world, STEEM would be a universal currency on all those sites. No SMT will ever be able to do that.
What I am suggesting is that STEEM holders act like miners, generating resource credits with their stake and renting it out to community administrators and bloggers. The more SP you have the more RCs you can sell. But as for the Steem inflation or reward pool, I would hand the distribution of that over to the "wisdom of the crowd" with equal weighted voting.
This would solve many problems. It solves: Bidbots, Self-voting, reward pool "milking" and downvote harassment from wealthy accounts.
SMTs are a good idea, but if they were the main reward, honestly, I would say Steem would end up going nowhere. Steem needs a universal currency that can be used throughout the web and I believe what everyone is going to want to earn is STEEM itself or at least SBD.
I don't find tokenization a problem in the least. A few dozen have already been created on Steem-Engine. The PAL token seems to be working fine. Its USD value is something like 14 cents at the moment.
Anyone could create as many accounts as they wished and game the system that way. This is why Voice has an account creation system where all accounts must be associated with a hash of a set of unique biometrical data acting as Proof-of-Life. That is the only way to create an account-based system that cannot be trivially gamed.
They can only game the system because RCs are used to create accounts. The trick is to separate the incentives of investors and content curation. Burning STEEM to create accounts is an effective method for doing it, but is problematic for on-boarding. The bio hash concept is fairly good, but Minds.com uses a phone number. The phone number idea is my favorite, because you can identify the burner numbers, requiring the individual to actually use their rule phone number. Its not perfect, but it is helpful.
Alternatively, what if we beefed up the reputation system? We could make a person's vote value be based on the account's reputation level. Right now reputations are worthless digits next to a name, but the old Silkroad black market taught a valuable lesson: if the reputation system is crucial people behave themselves.
I think creating a better reputation system could be a worthwhile endeavor. But I'm afraid that, too, would be gameable using off-chain money transfers to buy into a higher reputation if it depended on endorsements. On the other hand, that would, after all, put money into the pockets of the little guy.
I certainly hope you are right but any way I slice it, this looks like a win for bid bot operators and a loss for all users except for large dolphins, whales, and users lucky enough to get votes from large dolphins and whales.
TBH this
I like 50/50, neutral about the curve & separate downvote pool, dislike the idea of SPS taking away from author/curation pool.
Funding the SPS from vested stake inflation makes way more sense to me than taking it from author/curation pool. What does a couple of % of inflation matter to a large investor when the variations in price on a weekly basis are more than that? I don't think it would even move the needle as far as an investor deciding whether or not to invest and stake a large amount of steem, while taking it from author/curator will definitely move the needle for actual users of the network.
100% agree. I thought that’s what was going on until now.
I fought for it coming from vesting
lost
The biggest problem I think isn't that this HF is going to happen, the biggest problem is that if things turn out as bad as you and I fear it will, there apparently is no contingency plan. As if HF20 never happened and didn't show us how hard we need solid contingency planning.
Well, actually, this is a regression from HF20. There was a contingency plan in place during HF20 - there was a "kill switch" coded into the hard fork that would have allowed the witnesses to switch back to the old bandwidth system without needing another hardfork or patch. Stinc just asked the witnesses not to use it during the period where the resource credits were stabilizing and no one could transact on the blockchain. Something like that is desperately needed here, but we have gone backwards since HF20 and there is no kill switch coded to reverse the proposed changes if things go south.
Many of us agree with the concept of not bundling in the abstract. There is also the practical consideration of costs of hard forks and not being able to do them very often.
The merits of EIP are discussed elsewhere including by me so I won't rehash that here.
Meh I think the "cost of hard fork" argument is a cop out. In the first year of Steem there were... 17 hard forks? And since then there have been 3? There is no good reason to bundle the economic incentives with the DAO, with the exception of the obvious reason that the economic incentives have much weaker support than the DAO and might not actually be approved on their own. Which to me, is the primary argument for why it shouldn't be bundled. A bunch of half-baked measures with a net effect that is hard to predict (some claim - I don't think it is hard to predict personally, I think it is a loss for all users except the very largest users and bid bot owners) shouldn't be slipped through on the back of something with wide support.
During most of those 17 hard forks (not sure if that is the exact right number, but there were definitely a lot, mostly in the first few months) there were almost no users, no third party apps, either none or one exchange, etc. The situation is completely different now.
I think we need some kind of a forum for these kind of discussions, chat rooms and posts that get buried after a week won't cut it anymore.
Yes as smooth said, there is a forum that has been started. You can find it here - https://neosteem.com/topic-list?category=hf21
I think @thecryptodrive is trying to promote a forum for Steem development discussions. I don't recall the link for it.
@prisminside @smooth, yes that's the idea behind the forum. I am collating what I can from internal discussions to help make them more public, included some timelines and testnet info etc, the link is this https://neosteem.com/topic-list?category=hf21 (sorry it has some bugs on mobile, should be fixed in the coming days)
Good to know, I'll use that in future when people ask where these changes are being discussed since right now, it seems these changes were made without any community input for a bit too many people, I think.
Agreed! instead of just finally doing the right thing and disallowing bidbots let's just fool around and hope for the best. As for the downvotes there are some pretty rabid downvote trolls that go after people they are going to be thrilled to get more downvote power! What would really benefit all is equal votes for everyone but that is never going to happen ... bidbot users are going to make a ton more money and us real content creators will get even less than we are getting now what a mess ...
Disallowing bit bots would be pretty hard if not impossible to undertake. You may be interested in my humble proposal of how they may be countered.
There really is no way to ban bidbots, but there is a way to be rid of them entirely. We just need to apply code to human nature. Currently Steem allows unlimited rewards, and this allows substantial stakeholders like bidbots to extract ~90% of rewards. By capping rewards the emunerative potential of rewards pool rape would be eliminated.
Consider that the median payout (last I checked) was .01 SBD. No whale is going to drop a massive vote for that return. The average payout was ~15 times that, and there are only 35 whales. So the very few whales are extracting massive payouts on the very few votes they cast, and this is why the average is so different than the median payout.
Huey Long (a Louisiana politician during the Great Depression who was assassinated, probably because the following proposal struck such a chord in the folks being financially destroyed by banksters during the Great Depression) proposed that no one should live on less than 3% of the median income, nor on more than 300%. Applying a similar algorithm to payouts would end newbs getting nothing for their early posts, encouraging retention, and eliminate bidbots, because no one would bother to buy a vote that could only earn them .03 SBD. No self-voting, circle jerks, or botfarms would be worth the work to set them up. However, content creators already work for that, so the vast majority of them wouldn't be harmed, and but little if they were.
Since before the dawn of history investors have relied on capital gains to reward their funding enterprises and profit them financially. This does no happen on Steem. No one relies on capital gains for profit on Steem, because there are no capital gains. Since substantial stakeholders can extract the value of the content by deploying their stakes and receiving almost all rewards, that value goes to whale wallets, and never increases the value of Steem.
Ending profiteering would restore capital gains as the mechanism profiting investors for underwriting Steem. Capital gains are create when the price of the investment vehicle rises, in this case the Steem token. Even with the Huey Long algorithm limiting payouts in Steem, the increase in the price of Steem would increase the financial rewards inciting content creators to produce good content. The higher the price of Steem, the greater the incentive to produce good content, and the greater the difference in incentive between the minimum payout and the highest, again, increasing incentive to produce good content. Also, as the extraction of rewards by profiteers ended, the median payout would rise towards the average, and increase the median by at least an order of magnitude. This would be beneficial by encouraging the greatest number of content creators with a ten-fold increase in payouts for their efforts - even neglecting a rise in Steem price.
Lastly, it is the content produced by creators that is the marketing mechanism for Steem. All our posts and comments can be found on search engines, and folks spotting good content are attracted to have a look at the platform, and if they like what they see they can join up. This grows the market for Steem, and that increases the value of the token. Profiteers are extracting the funds marketing Steem, again preventing capital gains.
The only people that should really take issue with this are profiteers seeking to take the value of the content via the weight of their stake. Some authors do occasionally get organic payouts significantly higher than what Huey Long allows. I have, and most of my posts currently do. I'd still rather see bidbots and all profiteering ended, since that would enable capital gains to increase the value of my stake, even if I'd receive less Steem for all my posts. That's only taking into account my personal wealth, which I don't really do, and ignores how the network effects would improve our platform - maybe even enabling us to crush centralized Fedbook Libracoin organically.
I would very much sacrifice all - ALL - my financial rewards on Steem to see our community crush censorship prone government funded Fedbook. Not even joking.
EIP is going to drop payouts for creators by over half anyway, while still encouraging rampant profiteering. Actual investors are discouraged from buying Steem for investment purposes today because ROI (profit) is gained not by traditional capital gains but by serially self-voting or delegating to shady bidbots - and experienced investors want to stick to investments they understand, not become profiteers.
Ending bottery is pretty simple in this way. All we really need to do is encourage capital gains, and prevent profiteering.
I've gone round and round with substantial stakeholders, developers, and consensus witnesses regarding captchas, and surprise - no one likes them. Captchas also do nothing to encourage capital gains, nor discourage profiteering by self voters, circle jerks and similar collusion.
A final note: Huey Long proposed the 3% - 300% limites, but there are various other choices that would work fine too. Most important is that rewards nominal to enable profiteers to bother with them need to be prevented. It's possible that after capital gains increased the price of Steem enough, nominal profit to justify profiteering would become available. However, at that point the obvious benefits of capital gains and the cap would strongly encourage folks to discourage that douchebaggery to the degree necessary. Maybe then the downvote pool would be justifiable. It sure isn't now, as it will only give substantial stakeholders free flags to censor folks they don't like, and a warchest for them to retaliate against those minnows foolish enough to think their free downvotes were wise to use against profiteers. The problem with downvotes costing VP is only stopping censors from censoring more. It is retaliation that prevents reasonable people from flagging whales.
Thank you for the wonderfully thought out reply, @valued-customer. One can only assume from the STEEM version of a Huey Long assasination (your flagging) that you have hit a nerve. 😎
That's exactly why I actually am happy Bernie is flagging me. Nothing better proves my points.
Well said! ✌
I also hope that this fork will be rejected @carlgnash