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RE: Why I'm In Favor Of Witness Vote Decay
I don’t support the specific implementation that you proposed in the post, but I support a similar proposal which should have the same impact on the problem you described. I’ve outlined it in the comments of this issue: https://github.com/steemit/steem/issues/953
(Upvoted my comment for visibility.)
The fact that you are the only top witness who chose to chime in is utterly disconcerting to me.
You need to get over yourself. You are not entitled to a personal response every time you bidbot up a rant.
The idea itself is okay with tradeoffs and development considerations, and has been discussed among users, stakeholders, witnesses and devs many times.
Why, again, should YOU bringing it up again and bidbotting it up matter at all?
I've never said I'm entitled to some answer. I didn't even ask for an answer. My post has no question.
You expressed being disconcerted over not getting responses quickly. You shouldn't be.
I will comment that gradual decay is unimplementable in practice as far as I know. No one has proposed a method to implement it practically and the only method I can think of would be enormously complicated (the latter being a property of things that are a very, very bad idea to code into a consensus system).
Simple expiration is feasible and I am in favor of it. I would base it on the account being completely inactive for some period, indicating possible loss of key.
Maybe you're right! I'm not perfect. Far from it.
Same here! Also inactivity in regard to active key.
Yes active or owner key should should demonstrate some usage otherwise it may be impossible to change witness votes and they should eventually expire.
It has kind of already been said in the other replies, but your post is not the first time this has been brought up. It had been discussed many times before, in a lot of other places. Most witnesses have expressed their views on it in one way or another.
I'll give you this one at least partially. It wasn't my intention and I can understand why people feel like it. Maybe my title should have been Are you for witness vote decay and that would have been already better. I considered it at some point.
That said, I've never asked you to do any work. I'm sorry you feel this way. My post would have been a good opportunity for the witnesses to make their stance known. It would also have shown they care, even though them not saying anything doesn't mean they don't care and I'm fully aware of this.
I'm concerned vote decay or vote renewal isn't part of the next hardfork. Do you have any idea how long would it take to be coded?
Like I've said in the post, the integrity of who decide of what hardfork gets passed is at stake. The more we wait, the more it will be difficult to pass vote decay/renewal.
There is no need for a conspiracy and I've never implied such a thing. The fact is that sometimes human act selfishly. In fact, selfish behavior is more often than not, the most expected behavior.
Cryptocurrencies help us get rid of some of that trust inherently needed in conventional and outdated financial exchanges. This trust we have to put in others is unreliable. I'm even unreliable to myself sometimes so I don't expect 100% reliableness from others. Doing otherwise is pure insanity.
I want to limit this need for trust or make it so that people can more easily be held accountable for their actions, just like your support to vote renewal seem to imply.
Take care Tim! I'm passionate about Steem but I must not lose sight of being passionate about people and making them feel good about life.
The comment about "work" was in reply to your request to provide a list which witnesses were for/against the change.
Sure, but why should they spend the time to do this on your post if they have already done so? Should witnesses be expected to re-iterate their stances on issues every time a user writes a post about the topic?
I could easily come up with a list of 50-100 changes that the platform "desperately" needs in order to succeed. This one is in there somewhere, but I would not put it in the top 10.
Probably only about a day or two of coding effort. Coding is only 5% of the battle though. There is a very long process (with lots of negotiation) in terms of getting a change merged into the official repository (by Steemit, Inc.) and included in a hardfork. I would estimate the probability of success in terms of someone being able to get this into production before SMTs launch at less than 1%.
This goes back to your premise that witnesses will not vote for the change in the future because of a conflict of interest. I disagree with that premise.
I will add too, that the majority of large stakeholders who are currently voting for witnesses (@pumpkin, @clayop, @smooth, @blocktrades, etc.) are still actively participating in the witness voting process. Maybe there are some larger stakeholders that have truly checked out and are no longer using their active key (idk, I don't have data on everyone) but I doubt that getting this change in now going to have any significant impact on the current witness votes. In my view, it is mainly a protection against a future (hypothetical) problem where a large stakeholder looses their key, dies, or abandons the platform for some reason with their witness votes still in place.
I've never asked that.
I've never implied such things.
Thanks for letting me know your opinion.
Cool! I'll try to see if there are some stuff I could do to increase those chances.
It's a possibility. You can't deny it. I haven't said they won't. I said it's a possibility. It's a non-negligible one with high very repercussions.
We mostly agree. This change is mostly for protection but it surely isn't an overrated feature. What if Freedom lost his ability to vote? No matter how small the chances are of this to happem, this isn't negligible. This would be very bad. And there would be no way to know if they have lost their ability to vote.
If pumpkin (or another large stakeholder) hypothetically became inactive tomorrow I would predict that this change would become more of a priority, and would be more likely to pass.
I do agree that there is always a possibility of conflict of interest getting in the way, so in that sense there can be an argument to do it sooner rather than later, but my personal view is that that chance is quite low. The biggest thing standing in the way of the change (based on my understanding of the situation) is just the list of other things that need to get done.
Don't be too disconcerted, most probably haven't seen the post yet. It's also been heavily discussed not too long ago in @ura-soul 's post, so they may have already expressed their opinion there.
Like @timcliff, I'd prefer one of the other methods like a "measurement of activity" to determine "aliveness" or votes just periodically needing to be renewed within some period of time versus outright vote-decay. Vote decay as a particular method for addressing this issue seems a bit "strange" to me and I think it would be unexpected behavior for many Steem users.
Gradual vote decay would have significant performance impact. The blockchain would need to reconsider the age of every single individual vote to recalculate the totals.
Why would we see it? Because he bidbotted it up? I think I will decline to respond at all specifically for that reason.
@teamsteem, if you want me to pay attention to your "Trending" posts don't bidbot them. As long as you do don't expect engagement from me but I'll be happy to engage by downvoting them.
I'll ask you to please not downvote my posts specifically. I don't see this as warranted. I haven't asked anyone to answer. People that wanted to answer have answered. Me stating my concerns is a neutral expression of how I feel and in no way a form of denigration of anyone or their actions. Everyone is entitled to their own reflections. I haven't disrespected anyone.
I think the witness should care about the trending page and should keep tab on it thus why I think they should have seen it.
Noted.
I disagree. I see them as grossly overrewarded. If you hadn't bidbotted them up to the tune of hundreds of STEEM and they gained their votes organically them maybe they wouldn't be.
I would be more likely to do so if people including you didn't buy their way onto it. As things stand now the voting system is severely broken and the Trending page is near-meaningless.
We agree but I still feel witnesses need to keep a tab on it.
Many time no profit is generated from the bidbot. It's a zero-sum game many times.
It's also not very intuitive to use them and know how much $ total we bought and how much organic we'll receive. Ironically buying votes will very often discourage people to vote on a post because they feel it's too rewarded or because it didn't generate its views organically. It's a catch 22.
I used to post once a week working 20-30 hours on a post and even more and would still get flags sometimes even if I wouldn't buy votes as it didn't exist. I wasn't acting the way I was acting for the money back then and I'm still not. If I was back then, I would have split my gigantic post into smaller posts and would have made more money for the exact same amount of work.
I get your point and I'm not here to attract negative energy between the 2 of us or anyone. I'll obviously try to be more careful. I respect your choice and opinion. It's not about the $ that you're returning to the pool even though it's not negligible. There's more important to me, like how people perceive me and how I feel about myself from the way I act.
It isn't zero sum at all. Any rewards that flow out to your post aren't available to go to other posts, potentially more worthwhile ones (at least relative to payout amount). The $600 going to each of your posts could fund 1200 newbie posts at $0.50 each potentially encouraging thousands of new users to stay on the platform.
What games you play on the side with buying votes and such is your business and not relevant to the above.
It's a zero sum game for me. I put in 100$, I receive 100$ in upvote. That's what I meant. If I'm not buying the votes others are most of the time as they can just pick up the last bid and make them profitable.
It's a type of vote decay with x time and 100% decay. Both have their plus and minus. I prefer gradual vote decay.
Edit: Is that the post you're talking about because if so you're the only top witness who commented there?
https://steempeak.com/steem/@ura-soul/the-most-voted-witness-in-the-last-3-and-6-months-this-is-what-witness-vote-expiry-decay-would-look-like-kinda
Yes, as I recall, only @blocktrades and @timcliff commented on this publicly from the top 20. In reality more than a few of the top 20 literally never post on the blockchain at all.
IIRC, he posted several related posts, so I'm probably thinking of another one. There's also been discussions in slack, etc, so it's easy for me to get mixed up when I heard what, but I think most witnesses are familiar with the concepts from previous discussions.
I expect some kind of change will be made to address the potential for voters dying or losing keys at some point, but my guess is that it's not on the immediate radar for change (I'm not even sure yet that the curation changes are, and those are a pretty pressing concern, IMO).
How about the proxy votes though? Should they expire too?
It is up for discussion, but in my view the proxy should be permanent. The votes for whoever you are proxied to would expire if the person who was actually voting for the witnesses became inactive.
Yes it's much simpler to implement with simple expiration date and basically ends up the same => after X time passed, a vote counts as 0. Decay would kind of promote spamming the chain to refresh the vote and get a 100% output on it every day, while the expiration date will just create 1 post per X time
I was all in for decay until I read that.