It is time for Steem to wake up finally, right?

in #steemit7 years ago (edited)

As we all know STEEM value is (an will be) constantly falling if nothing changes. Most people don't like it and I just wonder why the most involved individuals are not making simple steps to reverse this.

Probably most simple solution is this - fix the bleeding to stabilize Steem value.

Fix the cap bleeding

Why is Steem loosing value? Simply because there is higher capital outflow than there is capital inflow mainly due to value diluting without additional value boosting.


Image: Current STEEM price chart taken from Coinmarketcap.com illustrating permanent nominal price drop in time

Tweak A - Cut diluting (Steem inflation)

I know there was already inflation cut for STEEM, resp. SP. However currently there is still 10% which is saying. Just to keep my value I need to be 10% more valuable each year. To provide 10% investment gain, 20% value needs to be added every year. Being frank, we must admit there is currently no such a value increase per year, not 20%, not 10$, not even 5%. Therefore inflation must be cut to 1% which IMHO corresponds with increased value measured by added content value. I would illustrate this on Cup with water where there is golden dust (which is real value) . Let's say we are able to add 1% of golden dust per year (added value by articles), but we are selling 10% more water with this golden dust each year. No wonder price of this water is declining all the time.

Short version: Set inflation rate to 1%


Image: Inflation illustration, water volume represents number of STEEMs generated (inflated) and gold in a water true internal value

Tweak B - Make users more equal in terms of reward power (modify the reward function)

This is not actually influencing Steem price that much but it makes users more happy and therefore Steem platform better for everyone. As currently there is an experiment ongoing where whales don't vote, it's quite obvious that it makes most people more happy about rewards distribution. My idea is to let whales vote but make their power closer to normal users. Simply said, shrink the reward impact range from both sides to the center.

Current situation

Current situation is quite a linear, it means, when you have 10 SP and someone has 10 million SP, his power is 10 million times bigger (it's quite oversimplified statement but it works here). It's like in this chart where only few people can give quite noticeable reward.


Image: Chart representing current IMHO bad model where power spread is enormous (0..1M)

Proposed model

If Steem modifies reward calculation from linear to let's say logarithmic, we can have much more wanted situation for most users. Whales can admit this might de-motivate them to hold so much SP but when they think about it they will profit from this much more in long-term because of making platform much better for everyone and especially for them as big holders (due to huge STEEM unit value increase).


Image: Proposed model putting all participants into similar power range (power doesn't grow linearly but logarithmically) making slower power progress with more SP.

Note: Values are just theoretical. I believe current range is somewhere from 0.00001-100$, where most people's impact is. It is like one has 1 vote and other has 1 million votes. After applying new model, range can be roughly (under current marketcap) 0.01$ (most users) up-to 1$ (whales) based on current Steem evaluation which gives the range like from 1 vote to 100 votes.

Short version: shrink the power diff gap between users logarithmically

I believe these two basic tweaks can put Steem(it) back on track with almost no development effort. I guess few hours of development and then some time to update/deploy all nodes would do it, right?

Tweak C - bring new money into system - Ads, paid content, features, etc.

This is another story and will not be discussed in this article.

How much can these (A and B) modifications take? Hours to few days with deployment at most.

You want to see some changes? Say it loud.

Let me know what you think about it and if you agree or at least if you agree that something must be done, please be loud and help to make this post more visible in any way. Then, I believe we will be able to say (at least in terms of Steem(it) platform) ...

Image credits: public images modified/created by me

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Great work :)

Thank you for your support, I hope it helps to bring some needed changes.

Current situation is quite a linear, it means, when you have 10 SP and someone has 10 million SP, his power is 10 million times bigger

No, it's not linear, there's a bias towards concentrating SP on a single account. Roughly If you have 100 times more SP your vote is 1000 times more ( logarifmic scale )
There's a proposal to make it more linear, but it was excluded from the coming hardfork.

So it's even worse than linear as you describe it.

There are two main reasons to advocate this:

  1. To discourage self-upvotes ( someone might just create a scrypt to post 50 comments daily and upvote all of it, but for now it's pretty meaningless for everyone except a dozen of biggest whales and they are supposed to be able to police each other)
  2. lottoree effect with the possibility to get a jackpot of 5-10% of total reward pool allocated for just one top-post ( that would be hardly possible with linear distribution )

I'm quite curious if @dan and @ned are still interesting in Steem(it) future. Or is it just a history project for them? I would think that they first would have big motivation to fix it, no? Anyone knows?

Well, @steemitblog is sort of "official".
@ned is sometimes commenting there.

I'm bit disappointed about 2017 project roadmap. Although all the improvements mentioned there might be valid, I miss mentioning fixing of these fundamental issues leading to project value decline and user adoption pace decline.

I've seen this one. Hard to say what it means for the future, because I don't have the exact detailed overview what direction @dan had (except that he was more pro-open-source) in mind. Might be actually good thing as @ned has free hands now and if he is business oriented, because right now Steem needs a bit of business thinking to be pushed forward imho.

Cool post, but some issues:

  1. The amount of downward pressure from existing stakeholders cashing out is more than the inflation. The demand could actually support the inflation by itself, but when you add all of the 'dumping' that is where the problem lies. Even minus the inflation, dumping would still be a problem.
  2. If you did that, whales would just split their SP into a lot of smaller accounts to get around the formula.
  1. True, but would be stakeholders cashing that fast if they can see their investment is growing in value?
  2. Yes, mechanism to limit account numbers is needed. And even if you can split many accounts, it takes a lot of effort to work with multiple accounts at the same time and meantime some technical solution to avoid this can be created.

There is nothing indicating that a change to the inflation would cause the stakeholders who are dumping to stop dumping, and the value of their investment will not go up if the dumping exceeds demand.

There is no way to prevent the people from opening as many accounts as they want. The blockchain has an API command that allows anyone to open an account if they supply it with the necessary amount of STEEM. It doesn't 'cost' anything if they themselves keep the account, because all of the STEEM from the account creation fee just becomes SP in the new account.

Connecting multiple accounts together is not very difficult for people who know how to use the available tools. Most/all of the current whales know how to use these tools.

There is double effect of cutting inflation:

  1. All rewards/mining gains will be cut to 1/10 so it means all pressures from selling new reward will be cut down to 1/10
  2. As people will be aware there is only 1% inflation, they might not sell just because in case platform is not growing fast enough (which is also current case imho)
    I agree even with points in your comment, money inflow is not solved by this and yes, some stakeholders will still sell, but they will generate also only 1/10 new SP so they will have to think twice if selling is rational for them and also they will not have so many new SP to sell. So this proposal would press the breaks a lot on outflow side.

With bots, you're right. But idea here is that whales would benefit more from platform growth (increase of STEEM price) given by satisfied users, more social-friendly environment, content grow and low inflation. Maybe one vote per one IP would help but not sure how many users are behind shared IP so we need other solution imho. Multiple accounts and bots are the problem, I admit. We probably need some kind of proven identity feature to avoid this.

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Cool! Thanks.

Thank you for sharing this, it was very usefull for me, im new to steem and still have to learn more about it .

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1558366.0
This was on bitcoin talk. I don't know if its true or if steemit is just going down because people want steem dollars where you get APR. I haven't looked into it enough yet. My dog just had leg surgery when I started to look into it so when I get a chance i will research more into this. I have to monitor my doggy all day and night... But so far i have to say I love the idea of steemit and the way its set up. I heard they are going to build a store too. As long as there is expansion and have a nice platform the price will rise imo over time ( what I told people when amazon was down to 50 dollars) People complained it was scam cause they didn't make money on quarterly earnings. Steemit is probably a bargain right now but again I have not looked into it enough yet to see how everything operates. Great article btw it makes me want to research more about steemit. You got my upvote ;)

Yeah, I also like Steemit (otherwise I would not bother to suggest improvements) but this is strictly fundamental issue if we want to have project growing and well funded due to it's value or to end it because of lack resources. So far there is no reason that price trend should reverse. It can go (and it will without changes I suggest or similar) to 0.01$ or lower to 0.001$. Then there might not even be money for development and hosting. People will complain there will be soon almost no money for rewards. That time miners go away and everything stops. The original idea was Steem is major site competing big social networks like Reddit, Facebook, etc. Like this it will be just a small marginal project if it even survives. Someone might like this idea but I don't because I've seen (and still see) Steem potential as huge. Thanks for upvoting and hope your dog will be all right.

No matter how you swing it steem is finished! Once porn became acceptable anything went...

Yeah, this is bad thing. We need to get rid of certain content but not by censorship. First I believe we need governance/voting feature, then to vote for cleanup & fork.

Lets get rid of porn first, then ....
@jimmco

It's not that easy on decentralized system like this. At least you can de-list or such a content I believe.

Upvote for been promoted :)

Thank you.

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