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RE: [Steem Blockchain] How Much Steem Power Does It Take to Do Anything You Like?
The question I’ll ask me now is does the trend over time leads to more centralization or to decentralization.
The question I’ll ask me now is does the trend over time leads to more centralization or to decentralization.
Well, consider this.
We know that all activities on the steem blockchain are scaled in relation to the amount of SP that you have. In particular, the effect of your votes in terms of how much reward they provide is scaled according to your vests.
Before hardfork 19, that effect was semi-exponential. Afterwards (now) much closer to linear. However, the scaling effect is still pretty pronounced. Go digging in the Steem World views for some of the top members of the blockchain and compare the power of their 100% votes to your 100% vote.
Now consider that delegating SP to an account that has been purchased for a whopping 6 steem can fairly consistently create the appearance of decentralization without actually being decentralized as long as the voting is managed by some kind of automation. The linear effect of scaling means that you don't really lose anything by spreading your SP across multiple accounts.
As a result, given the very strong mechanical pressure which literally translates to "the rich get richer" and the ability to spread SP across multiple accounts, it's fairly obvious that the trend over time is probably going to be to more centralization of that power rather than decentralization.
The overall retention rate of the Steemit platform at something less than 10% according to the BI folks just makes that pressure worse.
The changes coming down the pipe for the next hardfork don't appear to be designed or intended to change the nature of that situation. From some perspectives, you might even think that the design is intended to make it easier to have centralized power with a decentralized appearance. Things like being able to mine for new accounts are definitely going to advantage those who already have servers and significant investment over those who might be new to the platform.
But this sounds a little bit like guessing and not a data analysis and you assume that the majority of whales don’t spread the love they are capable of. There are definitely some whales that do but the question is are the egoistic whales the majority.
More accurately, it's game design analysis. We know how people respond to systems and we can observe how they have responded to the system.
That is, after all, how you make predictions. Unless you own a time machine, you can't analyze data that hasn't happened yet.
I don't need to assume that the majority of whales that spread the love that are capable of. We can observe our experience of the blockchain. We can read all of the content that the BI group has generated regarding historical behavior of various tags and content.
So, yes, it's obvious that egoistic whales are the majority. It's extremely clear that most of the SP on the platform is not, in fact, going to voting. At all. The vast bulk of it is sitting in accounts which have neither inputs or outputs, just acting as repositories of value.
There are some extremely active accounts at the top of the chain – which are exchanges. They don't vote for much of anyone. They don't get curation value. They don't get author rewards. They exist to exchange tokens and that's all.
That is the brutal truth, whether we like it or not.