My Take on Golos Anniversary

About one week ago was the one year anniversary for the first Golos block.

There's certainly not much to celebrate on Golos. One year ago the Golos ICO collected just a bit over 600 Bitcoin. 10% of it was paid to Steemit for the license, 10% to CyberFund for organizing the fork, another 10% was personally paid to the seven founders of CyberFund.

However, 70%, about 420 BTC, was supposed to be spent for development.

Good news is that 300 BTC of that still seems to be available.

https://blockchain.info/address/3CWicRKHQqcj1N6fT1pC9J3hUzHw1KyPv3?offset=0&filter=6

The bad news is that it looks like despite 120 BTC already spent "for development" the Golos of 2018 is going to remain a clone of Steemit in 2016. While there won't be any SP delegation, there's a non-linear reward curve, a nested comment restriction of 5 levels deep, and other relics long forgotten by today's Steemit users.

The last Hardfork for Golos happened in May 2017. The next announced HF was delayed a few times until the Golos Team "officially announced" in August 2017 that there would be no more comments from them about ETA.
At that time that just seemed to be some joke, but now it's obvious they were deadly serious about it.
Also, the new Golos spokesman recently said that apparently there were some bugs were found in the code and the team is working on debugging. This explanation seemed to be rather confusing.

One month to write the code and then half a year for debugging? Really?

For me it rather looks like that just continuing to clone Steemit code wouldn't be soooo difficult - I mean, you've already spent almost $1 million USD, it should be enough to clone Steemit code one more time, right?
The problem is that the Golos founders don't want just to "clone" it because then they would have to give up non-linear reward distribution, which, as it stands now, provides enormous influence for them considering reward pool distribution.
I would estimate that the founders control over 25% of total Golos token supply at the moment. Considering that they don't hesitate to use it for voting, just a handful of people can really make the reward pool their very own sandbox.

Let's check out the results.

The pie chart below shows Golos Reward Pool distribution from about one month ago,
courtesy https://golos.io/@naminutku

Here's some brief explanation.

Violet is Golos.loto
You can vote in comments for a combination of numbers. 100% GbG is distributed to the lucky winners, while 100% Golos Power goes to the clever founders.

Yellow is the so-called Spider program, some sort of UBI which distributes 15 GbG ( about $1 USD ) for each original post on Golos.
CyberFund account [ and of course a number of others trying to get their share of curation rewards ] do vote for its technical posts, GbG collected is distributed, Golos Power earned is powered down, sold, and also distributed, minus curators salary.
Personally, I never got any "15 GbG" for my posts, so I just assume that, apart from originality, some additional hoops need to be jumped through in order to qualify.

Red is another program, Vox-Populy, founded and supported by CyberFund. These are so-called "communities" which, in fact, should rather be called "publishers".
Those who were on Steemit from early 2016 would remember featured posts, which flourished at that time. These were typically when some established account would "introduce to the public" a post of a less-known author, giving to the author of the original post the SBD earned and keeping the SP for themselves.
The same principle applies for Vox-Populy - the only difference is that author would only get 10-50% of GbG collected.
The other profits are divided between account management, account investors and - surprise, surprise - the Golos Foundation.

Dark Blue is GolosMedia, a collection of different projects run by just one professional journalist.

It looks like independent authors [ Blue color ] still could get half of the reward pool, but actually one should consider another source of passive income for a few clever ones, automated daily statistics, for which I would write off another 10% of the pool.

The funny thing about it is that according to statistics provided recently by one of Golos' top delegates, all those generously subsidized from the reward pool projects together are attracting just a bit over 1% of total external traffic on Golos.
Otherwise, about 250 independent authors [ it's about 5 % of the total number of authors active last month ] are generating about 50% of total external traffic.

However, the latest tendency on Golos seems to be that a big group of independent authors has found a way to form some bottom-up alternative to the centralized top-down reward distribution scheme enforced by CyberFund.

Last week on Steemit I've encountered two popular posts suggesting that authors should be granted the option to choose which % of post reward they are willing to distribute to curators.

This

https://steemit.com/steem/@snowflake/make-curating-great-again

And this

https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@lexiconical/allow-authors-to-determine-curation-split-and-timing-edit-30-minute-delay

Well, that's what is already going on with Golos, and that without any "approval" from Golos developers.
It seems to me that the goal could be accomplished by using some rather simple bot, which calculates rShares received and transfers the corresponding amount of GbG back to curators.

The movement started about a month ago by just one well known on Golos anarchist who proclaimed that, according to his understanding of anarchism, authors and curators should share rewards 50/50.
To enforce that he paid to some programmer for him to create a "cashback bot" and started to use it in order to get 50/50 reward distribution (roughly 80% of GbG allocated must be returned to curators).
Very soon more people picked up the idea. Some of them even paid 100% GbG back.
New versions of the bot were created for those newcomers who lacked the technical background for bot maintenance. Some help was provided in the form of free redistribution services.
Also, one new "50/50 community account" was created to reblog all posts taking part in this initiative, thus providing better exposure.

The result can be seen below, pie chart from last week. Green is for 50/50

About 130 authors taking part in this program during last week [ all together there's already over 500 participants during last month ]
were able to allocate about 13% of the total reward pool.

The latest news - not reflected in this chart yet - is, that the founder of the Spyder program has announced that he's closing it and joining 50/50 club as well.

Some people have already even started to work on the concept of a "pseudo-linear" reward bot, which would calculate cashback as a way to emulate linear reward distribution.

So let's see how things are going to develop.

Apart from the "official" golos.io there's another client site for Golos blockchain [ Just like apart from steemit.com there's another client site busy.org for Steemit blockchain ]
It's

https://goldvoice.club/

Unlike golos.io having a team of paid developers, Goldvoice is just one-man-project, working for upvotes.
However, Goldvoice does have a lot of cool functions not available for golos.io users, and it was able to quickly implement this cashback function as well, thus attracting many migrating users thanks to this 50/50 principle.

People are even saying that search engines now ranking posts on Goldvoice better than these on golos.io. That might be not such a big surprise considering the above mentioned external traffic distribution [ right now only 10% of users log in via Goldvoice but as it was said before that 5% of active Golos users are now providing 50% of external traffic ].

That might cause a snowball effect for user migration, so maybe at some point, the "official" golos.io will be used for "official announcements" only.

I guess in time the remaining 300 BTC would be successfully consumed anyway.