Are STEEM Witnesses A Cartel?
Being a supporter of BitShares, STEEM, and EOS I have thought a lot about if Witness / BP voting ultimately makes sense or works efficiently and how to improve it.
It is a complicated topic and for the majority of casual Steemians it sort of is out of sight and out of mind. To those of us who have been around here for 2 years and have the technical skills and community engagement to be a witness it is actually a continually annoying thing to "witness" what is going on. Pun intended.
I think the voter decay is an interesting concept because with STEEM I see some of these people that have continually just been up there collecting substantial rewards seemingly doing next to nothing or primarily working on EOS related stuff. I get why they would want to focus on that but wow what a great deal!!! Continually get funded passively by the inflation on this chain to fund their development efforts for EOS and then never actually fall out of the money because of collusion, people aren't paying attention, other ninja mine buddies....etc. Even I have realized at times that I have witness votes hanging out there for people who aren't really doing anything anymore. Just took away some more votes today.
Lately I have had a couple of friends on here that are pimping their fresh witness nodes but if they would have asked me if they should go through the time and expense to set them up I would have said NO. There is a very long list of accomplished and qualified individuals who unprofitably tried to be Witnesses. It makes sense.
Those in power will always seek to remain in power.
Who could blame them? Honestly I would be embarrassed if I was making as much money as some of the witnesses getting little to nothing done.
There are issues with EOS BP voting as well. Collusion / Sock Puppet BPs ....etc . The stuff is tough to stop.
My Solution
- Some sort of vote decay.
- Witnesses can only be in the top 40 for 6 continuous months. Once they have hit that threshold they will be placed lower than 40 and can either chose to continue to operate at full capacity or put their Witness in some sort of "Parked" status and will have to wait 6 months to be qualified to be in the top 40 again. During that time they can take their nodes offline so they don't incur hosting expenses.
That way other people have the ability to rotate into the mix and it will make everyone work harder to earn their keep for the time they are in rotation.
What is going on now would be like if everyone's contract in the NBA was practically a lifetime contract. This isn't the way things work in most efficient systems. If you aren't ready to ball out then someone is taking your place.
The Arguments Against The Proposal
Clearly those who have gained the power and are in those positions aren't going to approve a hard fork that would put that rule in place so it would actually never get done on the STEEM blockchain. Once again those in power will seek to remain in power. It would be like Putin giving up his leader role. It isn't going to happen.
Also some would say that it will bump out some of the most qualified people who are doing a lot. As an example it would bump someone like @good-karma out for a period of time who clearly is doing a ton for STEEM. Steemit INC has enough Ninja mined stake to float individuals like that with delegated power or providing additional liquid funding to them to promote their development to make up for the temporary lack of Witness rewards.
What Everyone Should Be Worried About
STEEM has been this blockchain that has been SO CLOSE...... for over two years but since issues like this were never really addressed it continues to be a problem. These issues make STEEM less attractive to new community members and investors.
Instead of addressing issues like the terrible initial distribution, Witness Voting situation, users like @haejin these problems just fester and user retention rates are terrible and they always have been.
@stellabelle was right. The biggest threat to STEEM isn't EOS. It is GREED.
STEEM has sort of became a production testnet / funding for EOS projects.
OK I'll Say Something Nice
What has been built here is extremely hard to replicate. It takes a lot of talent and funding. If it was easy then someone else would do it but most attempts have failed and the ones that could be formidable competition likely won't be here tomorrow or the next day.
I’m afraid GREED will be a problem for EOS as well.
Regarding your question about voting for you as a witness.
I think you have the sufficient experience, technical knowledge, engagement and skills to run a witness node efficiently.
I am maybe one of the few who try to audit my witness votes and find the proper ones more or less in a regular manner, so, if you ever want to become a witness I would vote for you since I think you have the proper skills.
Steem on
Thanks for the support!
It is certainly human nature to be GREEDY in some respects so we will see issues on EOS with that as well. We have actually already seen some of that with the Block Producers.
One thing that EOS got right was the distribution allowed people a year to allocate funds to the project and future development. Also they are making good on the promise of promoting the ecosystem and continuing development of the base implementation software EOSIO and EOS VC isn't necessarily forcing people to run their projects on the EOS mainnet. It just has to be developed for the EOSIO software meaning they can run on Telos or their own private chain or a future chain that would be based on the software. So there is a lot more flexibility in that regard.
It is good you keep an eye on the Witness votes and like I said in my post sometimes I have votes hanging out there for inactive community members. There isn't a real incentive to vote for Witnesses and there isn't the decay so it is easy for people to forget about.
These are very valid points. Steemit certianly has problems in the way its concensus/governance mechanisms were designed and implemented. As you point out, the system is now rigged, and those at the top are sitting pretty, with no incentive to change it. Steem just sorta bobs along at the moment. Saying that, its got a lot of users for a dapp, beating every other blockchain-based social media I know out of the water in terms of user activity and ease of use.
What will be interesting is to see how much Mr Larimer has learned from the mistakes of Steem, and how much effort he has put into a competitor to be launched on EOS. I'm assuming there will be a Steem-like clone, but hopefully with a vastly improved initial distribution and governance mechanisms. Any insights on this, as i'm not following EOS closely ?
There were certainly a lot of things learned especially in the first year of STEEM and part of the reason there were so many hard forks in that first year. Things have improved but a couple of the things that I mentioned are tough to change after things were set in motion because it would essentially take the witnesses to vote on something being taken away from them and other benefactors of the ridiculous initial distribution so once it was in play it is hard to undo that.
STEEM is impressive in what it has accomplished and like you said it is one of the only real examples of a working DAPP and functioning ecosystem in the blockchain space.
I will be interested to see how @dan is able to address some of the issues that were ran into with STEEM. There is a team of Block One employees developing DAPPs and one of them is the next iteration of a STEEM like ecosystem but they were pretty tight lipped in Australia about any specifics regarding the platform. I didn't try to dig too hard but at one point I was having a conversation with two Block One employees about Dan's implementation of identity verification associated with the social media platform and they were both looking at each other and basically saying that they can't really talk about it.
I think in the end it will be very interesting how the system works and I don't expect it to totally replace STEEM or anything. It will just function differently and be a different sort of game that a lot of people here will just be over there as well trying to earn on both platforms.
Interesting - thanks! Will keep an eye out for dapps being released on EOS. I think you're right, a lot of people can recycle content fairly easily across multiple platforms.
I read there are a lot of debates around which direction to take EOS governance, as currently the voting for BPs is a bit dodgy, with whales in control once again (more here: https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2018/08/17/eos-whales-control-petition/).
Do you think EOS will amend this in the near future, and what about forks like Telos, which promise a 'fairer' system?
I think that amendments will be done but that there will always be a certain amount of issues. Nothing can be a perfect system. If Block One ends up using their stake to vote then that could help but also a lot of people won't like it as well. So it is tough....but I think in the next 6 months we could see some BP groups come up with some great tools and that could help set some of the great groups apart.
I think Telos and other projects can be a great thing as well as an experiment to see what governance works. That way DAPPs could run on either chain but it could be more cost effective maybe on Telos. I'm certainly not opposed to other chains. I think the competition would be good. And also those of us who had the coins at the end of the crowd sale will already have a stake in it which is nice.
I would not vote for you Brian, because you got me into Nubits which is a shit coin now 😜
The NuBits situation was brutal for sure and it tore a chunk out of me as well. Oddly enough though some of my other holding lost a bigger percentage than even NuBits though when I sold my NuBits and repurchased larger amount of other cryptos.
Hopefully you are earning more NuBits by Parking them and it can return to the $1 peg as it did in 2016 when a similar issue occurred.
yeah pretty brutal LOL... What I'm wondering is how many NUB you need to receive Parking interest because it worked the first time, over the past 3 months, but now that they are unparked I'm not being offered interest to park again.
Hmmm, that is strange. I haven't checked up on it lately. I devested the rest of my interest in it at $0.72 because I figured we were in for a bigger drop and just keep my eye on the way it looks. I'm wanting to put another bet on it in the near future but I haven't syned my wallet lately to look at the parking rates.
The whole situation was pretty upsetting to be honest because there are all kind of warning signs for Tether and somehow it has stuck around. NuBits seemed to have a more plausible system but then that didn't work out unfortunately for the time being.
I've mixed feelings on DPOS, as developer i like EOS and free txs for dApps, as investor and store of value I would prefere a cryptocurrency where the inflation is not in the hands of a few people.
I agree a lot with what you are saying. It is a double edged sword. It certainly can end up being a cartel and like you said a lot of the inflation ends up in the hands of a few people.
It is a very tough situation to balance. We would all hope that everyone would really work hard to earn their keep and there are several witnesses that I believe add a ton of value and earn their keep but then others I start to wonder and then start just shaking my head but there isn't really anything I can do about it as far as this chain is concerned.
The whole witness stuff is a bit over my head but you definitely got my vote
Well here is the gist of it. Basically the Witnesses are running the servers that are processing transactions, posts, upvotes...etc on the STEEM blockchain. They are basically the miners.
They are voted in based on the voters Stake Weight. So if someone has a bunch of Steem Power and they all vote for someone for Witness then they will end up in that spot. Well there are a ton of these Witnesses that aren't even involved in STEEM anymore but are just collecting the funds day after day after day. When others can't really get into that spot.
It isn't even really worth me attempting to run a Witnesses because no mater how technical you are and all of that if you don't have whale buddies to vote for you then you will just be wasting their money.
Check this out and your jaw will drop. @furion is a witness in the 22nd slot. He has totally been inactive here for the last 4 months and is actually working on another video platform called Viewly. But Every hour his STEEM Power builds.
Does he vote for anyone with his STEEM Power? No he delegates it out to vote bots so we can buy his vote. How nice.
Look at all the STEEM power coming into his account like clock work
https://steemd.com/@furion
I calculated 51 SP in the last 24 hours. This isn't including his earnings from delegating to upvote bots. Sounds great and we would all like to earn passive income like that but the fact of the matter is there are other people currently running Witness nodes who could actually contribute to the ecosystem and work on projects associated with this blockchain to improve it.
Then guys like me might as well forget about even pissing with it because I'm not in the "club."
Is there any way to solve this problem or is this platform just forever fucked?
Personally I think it can be fixed but Steemit INC and the large stake holders aren't willing to do what it takes to fix it.
STEEM served it's purpose already. To make the founders and early people rich. It already accomplished that.
Now doing something that would make all those large stake holders who are reaping great benefits from the system aren't going to want to do anything to fix it because it wouldn't immediately benefit them.
It would possible help the platform's survival and let it flourish but I think that is going to be hard.
There is a ton of good things about the platform and it is a proof of concept of what can be accomplished with blockchain.
What I want to do is have a platform that corrects a lot of issues with this system and incorporates advertisements as well to provide additional revenue streams and allow the platform to be more about content creation than this one is.
This sale of my house is going to have to go through and I would have to land additional funding to make it a reality.
How much would it cost to build a platform like Steemit? If you wind up doing something lemme know, I'd love to be an early user or beta tester and would be happy to promote it on my Youtube channel and try to bring over some early users.
It is a good question. Everything we are looking at just with STEEM and Steemit.com is literally 3+ years of development expense. That is a lot of man hours and none of that is including the work 3rd party people have put in with DTube, DLive, eSteem, Busy.org, Steepshot.....etc.
Having the existing code base is a huge advantage and speeds up development times a ton if someone is going to go off of this code base. To rebuild this on EOS would take a ton of talent and a ton of development cost.
There are couple of different routes a person could go with it. After Hardfork 20 some of the onboarding issues should be solved and also being able to comment every 3 seconds instead of waiting 20 seconds will solve a main bottle neck.
Then a person could take that code and rework the interface and pick which direction they wanted to go. They could pick for the thing to be more like Instagram so taking what Steepshot already is but allowing 1 Minute videos and all that kind of stuff or they could pick to go with someone like Busy.org with DLive / DTube type ability built in. Going purely with a DLive / DTube type platform I feel is tougher because the hosting expenses get out of this world expensive. That becomes a tough cookie to crack. That is why other platforms have a hard time even attempting to compete with what YouTube is. Essentially you have company worth Billions eating the cost of running that platform at a loss or barely a break even some quarters. they are playing a very long term game with it. Most can't afford to do that.
But to build what STEEM and Steemit is on EOS could easily take Millions of dollars to be honest unless someone was unbelievably talented and got a couple other core guys who were ridiculously talented and had a very wide range of skills to put everything together.
Use Vice as an example of how easy things can go wrong. They raised like $22 Million in the first 24 hours and raised a bunch of other money and then had a joke of a team and made a bunch of promises. They seriously don't know what they are doing and just hire people that know nothing about what is going on so they still haven't actually launched anything in reality and are getting sued from every angle by companies like PlayBoy.
It can go wrong real fast.
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I have slots. I will. :-)