RE: Normie Talk - HF21 Explained (SPS + EIP) What it is and what happens next
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