RE: Why I Advise Against Linear Reward
I stand behind the original whitepaper's argument
Then you are either a fool or irrational. To continue to stand by a theory when observed data don't agree is not the basis for any conversation I care to have.
At a minimum it needs: a) a reasoned explanation for the discrepancies, and b) additional qualifications and refinement to agree with new observations.
Come up with a theory that is predictive and also explains observed behavior. I will be happy to discuss it. The refuted white paper theories not so much.
In the long run, if the platform, Steem price doesn't perform well then the biggest holders lose more from gaming the system then the price drop
Everyone does. There is no special role for 'the biggest holders' here (even if that term were defined, which it isn't).
Dust farming is vote farming.
Let me clarify that. Superlinear reduces the quantity of content that people need to consider downvoting. That's beneficial as a labor saving device.
Provide a formal disproval of what is in the whitepaper. We disagree on the data but you haven't provided any holistic data.
Someone losing millions of dollars from Steem price drop does lose more than someone who loses only a couple of dollars. They lose the same proportion but that's not what I was arguing.
I stand by those who say the whitepaper theory hasn't been properly refuted. I hope you can respect that. This is my honest conclusion from my limited human mind.
We had a year of experience with n^2. The theory that the largest stakeholders would police each other was shown to be false. People were shown to be more concerned with seeing to their own rewards than spending valuable vote power downvoting others.
To complement that observation with theory, the economics of being more concerned about the value of their steem investment that personal gains don't hold up. For any stakeholder (at least <50%) the personal reward is greater than the share that hurts the value of that stakeholders share of steem's total value. The rest of the cost is borne by others. A system with these tragedy-of-the-commons properties is badly designed and needs refinement or replacement.
The "large" numbers are irrelevant and are being thrown out for scare value. A large stakeholder may care less about millions of dollars than a small stakeholder may care about couple of dollars. You can't generalize. Furthermore the incentives to self-reward scale accordingly or in the case of superlinear, more than accordingly. The one at risk of losing millions can gain thousands or more per vote. The one at risk of losing two dollars can gain either proportionately or less. There is no sounds argument here that supports large stakeholders being 'good shepherds". None. If you think there is, please make it, step to step, and showing specific incentives (in at last a qualitative sense) without resorting to scare numbers.
Most people care about their investment. Even Warren Buffet cares about his investment. Maybe a minority don't but on a whole, they care. If they don't care we can't predict what they will do anyway, regardless of the economics.
You're talking here in terms of the number of people. Someone who has 1 million Steem is more vested than someone with 1 Steem. They don't have the same amount of $ to lose, not the same vested interest.
On Steem the incentives are counted in Steem. If people don't care about their Steem it's futile to try to predict their actions based on economics. So the majority shareholders have more to lose and should according to behavioral economics care about the net worth of the Steem network. Their own net worth health first pass by the value of the Steem rather than their reward.
Yes of course but this applies at any size. Someone who has worked his or her ass off to accumulate two dollars worth of SP may care about it more than a while with a million dollars worth. Don't be blinded (or attempt to blind) that "large" dollars figures somehow automatically convey some more sincere or "better" intent. They don't.
Sure, and everyone can care or not care about their Steem. The amount being 'large' doesn't inherently change anything, except maybe how YOU perceive it.
That doesn't follow. It can apply (or not) equally to stakeholders of any size.
I've used the term more vested interest.
The amount matters. Different amounts will be perceived differently for people but what people value they don't want to lose.
Could you re-phrase that?
Someone with 2 STEEM may very well be as concerned, if not more concerned, about its value dropping than someone with 1 million STEEM. Pushing all of the influence over rewards to the latter an then relying on them having 'more to lose' from the value of STEEM decreasing is nonsense that does not work, both in theory and in practice.
There is no incentive of good stewardship that scales with the size of stake, as the whitepaper suggests (as do you). It's a false model.