RE: @thesloth @thedumpster @thedelegator @steemservices @danknugs @nextgencrypto @berniesanders You can't flag me if I don't post anymore
Well, you have a point about perhaps morality not being the issue here. It's how it looks, for a start, because using your reputation and money to promote your stuff upwards looks like you are abusing a social network system where your visibility is supposed to come from those who upvote it, because they like it, not because you were lucky enough to become a favourite of one of the people in the community who are using fraudulent methods to fund their development and pay for nice shiny things, at the expense of others.
And that's where the morality comes back into the picture.
Isn't it interesting that despite your relative popularity, I have got a higher reputation than you? But this means nothing in this 'money is everything' system, except that it's harder to shut me up.
Although I have bantered with you and I disagree with you on some points, I have never tried to "shut you up". In fact, I have poked you, argued with you and read your responses.
I have had many, many posts that did not earn well. I have said unpopular things to some people and I even upvoted your comment knowing it might make Bernie unhappy. Your higher rep proves that you likely have earned more than I have on the site. The difference is I was in a position that allowed me to power up what I did earn. Now my account has a decent vote.
Life's not fair, I wish you could have powered up all that you earned as well. However, I didn't touch my earnings and I reinvested them. I continued to post and I have always given myself a vote on my own posts and on some comments when it makes sense. I consider it a payoff on my investment.
It's doubly unfair in a system that is supposed to be about peer review when actually it's about a little oligarchy-review.
Yes, the correspondence is very strong between how much vote power and stake was applied to my posts, and how much it boosted the reputation. Because I am working on a fork of Steemit, and because the issue about whether bernie can hurt my reputation needed to be cleared up in my mind, I dug around specifically to find the code that sets these rules. So I now know with high confidence that he is gonna be flagging my account for weeks before it even drops below 50.
I was not in a position to not cash out my earnings, because at the time I stopped powering up, I was doing my best to not spend the small extra income I started getting from the dutch welfare agency, and the winter shelter was closing and I was going to be back to sleeping on the street in the cold, and that would have probably led me to squander my resources on coping with that instead of on more substantial beneficial expenditures that would help me continue to raise my position. That's why I bought miners. I still did not do so well with the purchases I made there, but I am still substantially ahead of my costs, so I have time to remedy this. The mischief of bulgarian customs is not making life easy, however. I cannot guarantee that anything order online will actually arrive, or will not incur a severe tax bill.
I wish I had moved back to Sofia instead of trying to get residence permission to stay in Serbia, I could have done so much more with my money here. The language barrier was big, and the administrative costs I was paying for that registration were costs that all came to nothing, in the end.