Steem is much more inclined to a tiered rewards system rather than linear scale
What I mean by this is, someone was asking @Anonymint why his voting power was always fully recharged and he never used it. His SP is 2637 ($5000 or so). This is a relatively decent size sum of money indicating someone who has had a string of successful posts. Meaning people who post good or popular content would likely be one of the most logical choices for who should curate content.
That is not how the system works, though. You have the equivalent of Bitshares voter apathy again. On Bitshares you were voting in order to try and preserve your investment by regulating delegates. On here, you're voting more for curation economic gain, but the curation economic gain is minuscule for someone like Anonymint, so there's no real reason for him to do it besides doing someone else a favor.
It's kind of the opposite of Bitcoin game theory if you're under a certain threshold of SP. The incentives that are supposed to exist don't exist. This disincentivizes small purchasers of Steem or SP and is one of the biggest flaws of the system. You have to be invested with a ton of money to make the act of curation worth doing as a manual form of labor.
Which brings me to my next point. It doesn't actually have to be this way. The problem can be somewhat addressed with a tiered reward system. Think of it in the context of something like the Darkcoin masternode collateral lockup system. Once you lockup an arbitrary number of SP, it could trigger a threshold of package benefits.
Instead of weighting linearly from $0 to infinity, you could establish tiers and having $2000 of SP for instance, could change to a non-linear weighting. This might require a big restructure of the entire system, but that's never stopped Larimer before. Tier II could be $10,000, Tier III $100,000, and Tier IV $1,000,000.
The goal of such a system is to increase the power of smaller holders to give them some type of purpose in participating in the system at all. The whales could obviously Sybil attack with multiple accounts to benefit themselves, but it would just be replicating the current system if they did and not gaining any benefit above that.
Numbers example:
Let's say a $1000 SP holder currently has a voting power of 1 and a $100,000 SP holder has a voting power of 100. If you weight voting power by tiers and change it to non-linear, the $1000 SP holder could have a voting power of 2 while the $100,000 SP holder still has a voting power of 100. If the large holder decides to Sybil attack, his voting power just goes back to 200, so it's the same 1:100 ratio of voting power as before.
Before some large SP holder complains and says they don't want their power diluted, yes, you actually do, and I'll explain why. The reason a tiered reward system is needed is because when you see lots of big SP holders all powering down simultaneously, even if you personally don't want to power down, you know how much sell pressure that's going to create, so you're required to power down as well to maximize your returns.
By putting in a tiered system, you at least put in a floor of where the game theory doesn't force everyone else to power down based on what whales are doing and all sell at once in a rush to the exits.
(picture source: http://madmax.wikia.com)
You can't look at @anonymint and conclude there is voter apathy. The fact is that there is all kinds of incentive for most people to vote. By voting, they offset dilution. They elevate content they like. They benefit a platform they are invested in. And it's fun. I think it's clear @anonymint is not a big fan of Steem and he participates here for different reasons than most people. Which is fine. But the point is that he is a poor example to base your case on.
As for your comparison to Bitshares voter apathy, that's really not a good comparison. In addition to having none of same dynamics in terms of incentives, part of the apathy with Bitshares was that people didn't want to vote for dilution in order to develop more platform features. They preferred to let the system stabilize and avoid diluting their holdings. Whereas with Steem the dilution is predetermined and, as mentioned above, stakeholders can offset dilution by voting. So these are two totally different scenarios, and not particularly good for comparison.
Well, I guess we can agree that Anonymint is not the ideal research specimen, but I still think there might be more benefits than losses in a tiered system. I'd like to see what people like Smooth and Larimer think about it and if Larimer ever considered going with a tiered system before deciding on linear for one reason or another.
Great choice for the image on your blog!
Not only that, but if the whales didn't do that, it would open the vulnerability for dolphins to collude and game the system.
There just isn't any solution.
Yea, I realize this is a very hard problem to solve, so I'm not seeking perfection here, just some type of plausible improvement over current state. Everything with blockchains is just compromises and trade offs. And wtf, I just clicked your link and we are using the exact same terminology while describing the same problem in the same hour and I did not read your comment section beforehand.
Correct me If I am wrong, but isn't what you are talking about is the SP slider that has been introduced.
Am I missing something?
Can you expand a bit on this?
Ok I looked into it now, and i was wrong. What was introduced is the SP lider for whales, where they can decided how much of power their vote will have
I like the idea of a tiered system. I think the biggest obstacle to practically implementing specific gains from specific levels would be inflation and dilution. So I'd make a "twist" of the proposal, implement a "rank" / star system where these ranks/stars/tiers are always aiming a percentage of voting power. Say 0.00001%, 0.0001%, 0.001%, 0.01%, 0.1%, 1%, etc. In this way you solve the "moving target" of SPs-inflation-dilution.
While i think this might be a potential alternative to the current 'low reward' system for accounts that are not powered up to china and back, I'm not sure if it's the be all end all. Steemit needs a bunch of iteration to go from beta to consumer ready, but we seem to be picking up traction.
I'd personally enjoy being able to do a 'mega' vote of some sort on content I really love. Let me spend 50% of my voting power on one vote, to actually give a noticeable number rather than pennies.
That is an interesting idea, but the fact that voting power is diluted down to 20 votes a day or whatever is another form of Sybil prevention to prevent gaming the system that might be undermined by mega votes.
Very interesting. I'm still trying to figure out how this actually works so I appreciate your post. Thanks