RE: 😨 Are You Scared Of UPVU Yet?
Not much time, but here is a rushed reply in stream of consciousness. It reminds me of a post I wrote some years ago. Of course, rereading it now, I realize that I hadn't considered the tragedy of the commons in my thinking.
Possible value-enhancing use case for bidbots in their current form? Syndication networks, where someone is already creating decent content on another platform and they use bidbots here to widen their distribution? Maybe syndicators could squeeze out vacuous posting?
In general terms, I have two main thoughts. (i) is that I have no idea how things will turn out in the long run, but mostly I still trust the profit & loss mechanism over the long term; and (ii) is that if blogging is 10% of a big number, that could be better than 100% of a small number, so maybe having a front-end to filter out the unappealing content is enough.
Finally, I don't have time to look for the link now, but there was a paper a few years ago showing that with the right ratio of witness votes, a single actor can't dominate DPOS. Unfortunately, with Steem's number of block producers, the right number of witness votes was 4, so unless/until Steem fixes that, there will always be a risk of monopolization of governance.
@danmaruschak has made a valid and even more frightening addition - with enough proxy voting, UPVU could open up the DAO for themselves.
This for me is the biggest unknown. IF the 30 million Steem Power disappeared, the percentage of rewards going to quality bloggers would increase. But this percentage would have a lower dollar value. It's possible that these 2 balance out each other although I have no idea whether this is the case or not.
In my opinion, the 10% has decreased in the short time since I've been here and continues to decrease. Crap feeds crap and quality encourages quality.
You've got some great ideas regarding bidbots and how the Steemit ecosystem can be enhanced but economically, these can't compete with UPVU.
Yeah, I read that. That is a scary possibility, and it had not crossed my mind before.
By my reckoning, Steemit has somewhere around 39 million SP and another 6 or 7 million STEEM that they could power up in a pinch (plus however much they have on exchanges or otherwise out of my knowledge), so there is some breathing room, but maybe not much.
This is why I came up with the syndication idea. If the bidbots are going to be here, I'd rather have them upvoting something like, say, @skycorridors or @stefan.molyneux or @answerswithjoe - or even better would be written content from someone like @neilstrauss, when he was here. Those types of content producers are already creating content for other sites, so mirroring here would take no more effort than posting the stuff that we see the bidbots voting for.
By itself, that wouldn't solve the governance or DAO threat, but at least it would replace worthless content with content that people would actually read or view. In principle, since they have legitimate audiences, you'd think that they would do better than the people who are using bidbots to vote on pictures of tanks.
Maybe we should crowdsource an effort to delegate SP to an influencer that they could delegate, in turn, to a bidbot (not UPVU) ;-)... Maybe Steemit or one of the trustworthy witnesses (i.e. @steemchiller ;-) could even launch a bidbot with an author whitelist, "for influencers only".
All of that is just working around the root cause, though. Fundamentally, IMO, it all comes down to the rewards algorithm. I rarely go to hive or blurt, but when I do I'm also unimpressed by most of the high-ranking content there. I know it's going nowhere, and I sound like a broken record on the topic, but I really think that something like a second price auction is the best answer. It doesn't have to be exactly that solution, but some downvote-free solution is needed that forces voters to self-regulate or have their excess rewards dumped back into the rewards pool.
And then the question arises of how badly Tron Foundation will want to protect its asset? As of today, those 39 million STEEM are worth about $10m. I know that Tron have withdrawn a few million STEEM about a year ago and I don't know how much they bought their stake for... but in my opinion, there's a very real possibility that this is an asset that Tron could dispose of and save itself the hassle (depending upon their wider strategy).
With the launch of his robinhood account, I wondered whether the idea of creating his own "ethical" bidbot had crossed his mind.
The idea of influencers joining and delegating might accelerate the shift in relative power further. Which I think you allude to 🙂
I agree and perhaps even as simply as the value of SBD. You've suggested before about "burning" the SBD in steem.dao - I didn't like the idea at the time but an alternative is that Steemit submits a proposal that transfers the money to them. It won't be popular but this isn't the type of community that will do anything about it any more so it'll just happen. Then Steemit can power it up into Steem Power, tanking the price of SBD and subsequently increasing the benefits of 100% power up - and reducing the returns available from UPVU.
It could also potentially be used to create its own UPVU equivalent. One that could optimise users returns without the requirement of posting crap.
I know the feeling 🤣 I think somebody else commented "people won't realise until its happened". I don't want to be quoting this post in a year's time saying "I told you so".
I don't know if people and Steemit would go for it, but an idea that I've been pondering is to have the DAO fund a bot that buys STEEM and then powers it up and airdrops it to people in good standing (i.e. individual humans, not powering down, no plagiarism, no bidbot use, etc.) as "basic income". Could help build out the "middle class" and address the decentralization problem.
I like the idea... the downside being that once many people reach the "middle class", it's their trigger to delegate to UPVU. A few of the people I initially spoke to when I joined had the ambition of earning enough so that they could delegate it and earn a passive income. The "Income" element outweighing the "Social"....
All of the discussions I've had in response to this post have led me to a different line of thinking which definitely warrants a follow-up post at some point. The good news is that the funds in the steem.dao are safe. So I don't know what... if anything will happen to them 🤷🏼♂️
If I read this right, that 6 or 7 million is about to turn into something like 20 million.
By my understanding, it appears that approximately 24 million STEEM will be returning to Steemit Inc. - Only approx. 9 million were in dispute and I see no mention that 15 million have been returned already. It's not entirely clear though because if they were capable of writing in plain English, it wouldn't be a 15 page document.
How do you discover this stuff? I'll see if any journalists have picked up on it that are capable of simplifynig things 🙂
I've been following that case on the courtlistener web site for months (years?). I just found it through web searches, and bookmarked it after I did (the full docket is here). Coincidentally or not, at least two of the big Steem vs. Hive price swings and some days with large STEEM trading volume corresponded with publications on that web site. Unfortunately, I can't read most of the stuff that's out there because its paywalled.
Yeah, I don't think it has been returned yet, but as I read the conclusion and the footnote on page 8, roughly 14 million should be coming back and another 8 or 9 million remains in dispute.
I wondered about the implications upon the price of STEEM and whether it was a buying or selling opportunity. I came to the conclusion it was neither 😆
The URLs for the PDFs have a consistent format so I tried guessing it for row 89. I failed.
If the ruling was on the 30th, I'm quite surprised nobody's reported on it. I can't see anything on HIVE either. It looks like you're the only person watching 🤣
I did the same. It's impossible to know what Steemit will do with the Undisputed portion or what Bittrex will do with the Disputed portion, now that they have the greenlight to make an interpleader deposit in the form of USD. I guess Bittrex will sell, but they'll try to do it in a way that doesn't shift the market.
FTR, I'm definitely not the only one watching. Steem had some really high-volume trading days that corresponded with court actions. I guess the media lost interest after the Hive FUD campaign, but traders were definitely watching. ;-)
https://hive.blog/@ theycallmedan/posts
I wonder if it's worth keeping an eye on this guy. He appears to be one of the people trying to sue Bittrex. Although it's probably unlikely he'll write about it having lost the case.
Looks like something happened today. No details outside the paywall, though. : -(
On another note, now running around 6-7 votes per block.
Update again today. No idea about the details, but based on price action, I guess it was good news for Steemit.
Yeah, he's one of the plaintiffs. I doubt if he'll have much to say, though. I always assumed it would end with a settlement and non-disclosure agreement.
Given the history, in principle, I would hope that any returned STEEM would be used to grow the ecosystem. We'll see.