[STEEM] Predicting the Future is The Hardest Part of Being a Seer

You ever have one of those moments when you're looking back through some things that you wrote several years ago and you stumble on something which tells you that you were really onto something, something that everybody told you was extremely unlikely and opposed by every part of the system – and yet, turned out to be prescient?

Yes, that just happened to me.

In regards to a discussion of Steem-UA from September 20, 2018:

Still, Steem offers an opportunity to engage and connect that is censorship and influence resistant, and provides a financial incentive for doing so.

We have to be careful about saying that the steem blockchain is "censorship and influence resistant," because it pointedly isn't. It would be difficult for a governmental organization to position itself such that it had a controlling power over the blockchain in an covert way – but part of the problem that we have with the social network side of things as is is that it is extremely vulnerable to censorship and influence.

Want to experience censorship? Piss off Bernie. Piss off one of the major bot owners who is sitting on enough distributed SP to make sure that nothing you post surfaces above the systemic cut off. Want to experience firsthand what influence peddling looks like? Start studying the distribution of SP through the bot networks.

The true financial incentive is to be someone with a position to censor and who has influence. That requires SP, SP gives votes weight and value, votes allocate the inflationary growth of the commodity.

It's just one more venue for the same old story to play out.

If there is any one particular advantage, and this is specific to the steem blockchain rather than blockchains in general, it's that there is no privacy and no expectation of privacy. It requires technical acumen and time (sometimes a lot of time), but any transaction that occurs on the steem blockchain is visible to everyone. With allowances made for third-party cutouts, pseudonym proxies, bot swarms that take instruction from off-the-blockchain sources, and the vast array of communication and coordination that doesn't occur on the blockchain itself between entities with accounts.

Aside from that…

Sure.

It's almost like I had a direct line to the brain of certain individuals, and understanding of the mechanisms of the platform as a whole, and the ability to judge human behavior in terms of probability.

In hindsight from the end of March 2020, the perfect ability to foresee the future.

It doesn't happen that often, but when it does…

I want to point out very aggressively at this point that this is not a criticism of the Steem blockchain specifically. Hive has exactly the same vulnerability for exactly the same reasons, and a proper cynic might point out that the initial freezing of stake via soft fork was just another manifestation of this prediction. I know that the partisans out there are already warming up there flamethrowers and sharpening their knives, so let me get ahead of it by simply saying that both sets of you probably need to compete for the opportunity to plant those knives in my spine.

What can be done about this?

Recognizing, first and foremost, that proof of stake is incompatible with decentralization would probably be a good first step. Secondly, running down the advantages and real disadvantages of decentralization would make for stronger arguments. Last, thinking about systems which are less top-down authoritarian (which goes straight to something else I wrote a couple years ago) and more focused on the decentralized individual experience is an absolute necessity.

Luckily, that's not my job and not my problem. But if anyone asks, I'll be sitting over here.