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