Hi @inertia, I'm a collaborator with @l0k1 AKA @elfspice on this so I'll join in a little here.
If I number you points of contention, I would say #2 (arrogance) is subjective, #4 (spam scaling prob) needs research and #5 (appearance of scam) is speculative so I won't address them.
The other two though I will:
#1 - self voting is about peer review
While it's true that the bottom line will always be we are free to use our stake as we please (I'm a strong supporter of this), for me this point questions the validity of self voting being allowed as it is post-HF 19. It's clear that self voting is more rewarding since HF 19 so this is a problem, so much so that people are overly incentivized to vote for themselves over others.
Our position on this is supported by the whitepaper and while I am not confident I can say what the "culture" of Steemit is, "peer review" is certainly something which I wish to maintain.
From the whitepaper:
The challenge faced by Steem is deriving an algorithm for scoring individual contributions that most community members consider to be a fair assessment of the subjective value of each contribution. In a perfect world, community members would cooperate to rate each other’s contribution and derive a fair compensation. In the real world, algorithms must be designed in such a manner that they are resistant to intentional manipulation for profit. Any widespread abuse of the scoring system could cause community members to lose faith in the perceived fairness of the economic system.
So while we can pressure people socially to follow this, the incentives have to be there, and that's the problem that needs to be addressed. Whether you listen or not to the rationale @l0k1 makes before such a change is your business as your stake is always yours. But we are promoting the idea of a system level correction.
#3 spam adds entropy
I agree the usage of the term "entropy" here is quite opaque. It refers to Shannon's information theory, where entropy is maximum when all outcomes of an information producing machine are equally likely. So I guess he is saying that spam is self similar information, and so adds entropy, because the more of it there is the more probable the next piece of information produced on the blockchain is similar.
But this point needs to be developed and I invite @elfspice to do so.
Since moving onwards from focusing on the larger share of reward allocations self votes, to the situation in the Witness schedule, where a smaller share, but a constant rate for each witness during their time in any given slot, and the mutual and self-voting that does not decay, and every vote is multiplied by the stake (which is growing, rapidly, in the case of top 19s), the self voting on the forum is a sideshow, and irrelevant.
Except in that the witness situation means that, second to the founding members of the chain, who mined and mutually voted and self voted their rewards to an untouchably high level, have the power to pick and choose which of some significant proportion of the witnesses may hold their top spots, the witnesses who are beneficiaries of this racketeering, are the second largest party with influence over the rewards allocations.
Being that, as I am sure my analysis will bear out in the near future, at least one member of the founding group of steemit, inc, is the superstar of self voting (I dare someone to fish out every one of @dan's votes and prove me wrong), the hunch I have is that when I complete a comprehensive analysis of voting, witness voting, rewards payouts and transfers out to exchanger accounts, that I will discover that the amount of Steem being syphoned out by Steemit, Inc, and their gaggle of Witness Ghouls, will be far in excess of even triple the 'were we just paying the inflation out evenly) ratio, compared to stake, will be revealed.
This is more than just a bad game for newbies. This is a racket, where the founders and their collaborators, are stealing the money, via undue allocation of the rewards pool, which up until 3 months ago, was at a 50% dilution per annum, not just consuming the life and times of thousands of tiny accounts of people working hard to win a share of the rewards pool, but more importantly, of those who have ploughed in in some cases up to a million or more dollars of fiat currency or bitcoins.
I'm sure that I'm gonna get swatted at again, maybe a few choice adhoms, but I don't give a fuck anymore.
I'm looking forward to the spectacle that is going to be potentially the most epic case of a financial scam prosecution, in the history of the USA
Maybe I will even get some compensation, but I don't think so. I made plenty from my first 6 months dedicated work, and I believe that I can see a timeline for the future pathway of the steem price, over the next two months, and if my estimates are correct, my next profit, from my hard work and prescience, will be at least 4x what the last was.
And then I can finally move on, to build Dawn, to move to Siberia, to build my workshop, and the EM propulsion system and energy scavenger/magnetic battery that I have designed.
I have to agree with you that Steem Inc founding members and miners have too much control over both who witnesses are and where rewards go (including presumably back to themselves, though will wait for data on that claim). I believe this happened in HF 17/18 where Ned swooped in and changed his witness votes depending on who was adopting the HF.
While it's totally fine to use your votes however, this kind of concentration of power makes the idea that Steem as a DAO a farce. @demotruk maybe you were right about the idea that voting can be corruption, at least at the highest level of stakeholding.
Interesting view. Do you think that the Steem price will move to zero over the next 2 months? If so, what's your mechanism for betting against it?
Not against bitcoin, but bitcoin against the dollar, not zero, but maybe even as low as $1000 or even $800. This will directly impact steem if its exchange rate does not accelerate against BTC, it will mean we fall as BTC falls. But that doesn't matter.
Even if I finish my task of assembling a giant collection of blockchain analysis, and clearly name and quantify the amount of intentional manipulation going on, look at how long it has taken for the air to fall out of the ICO racket-markets, of which barely 2, maybe, will ever amount to anything.
2-3 months is about typical for the latency of financial systems adjusting to the facts of the marketplace, mainly because the central banks put on such a spectacle, and use the government guns to suppress the information.
People will run to steem if btc plummets, giving you the acceleration upwards I mentioned, and then once the dust settles on segwit, we ride its recovery upwards as well. I may even be underestimating how high it will go before the market figures out, in a part thanks to my investigation and deduction work, that the company behind this, and the mechanisms they baked in, are designed to milk the very investors who will push the price up so high.
Hopefully I am correct in my estimation of the timeline on this, because it will be very convenient for me, in my future plans. I need at least $50k worth of industrial grade inorganic chemistry equipment to manufacture diamagnetic materials, robust resonator chambers, and hundreds of miles of high quality electromagnet windings, rare earth magnets, and probably I will also need something to build quite high strength, non-ferrous frameworks (possibly titanium).
My estimate is not based on what I want, however, but simply, the typical peak to trough ratios well known as fibonacci retracements. The next, and maybe last, peak, of the Steem price has to be at least double the previous at $4.31. Thus $8 is my guess. But it can hit other ratios above this level, thtat are progressively smaller by a fibonacci reverse sequence (the next two price levels above it would be 5 more, and then 3 more, and then 2 and then 1. Thus, all else being equal, the maximum potential for spiking is about 19.
This number 19 is coming up way too often. Did you know that in the Qur'an the number of angels who preside over hell is 19?
Thanks for the info, and good luck with your general plans. Although I rather hope you're mistaken regarding the intentions behind, and the fate of Steem and other cryptocurrencies.
Cryptocurrencies, in my opinion, is the project initated by the NSA to prepare the ground for a centralised, single global electronic currency, which has permissions that enable the 'Authorities' to revoke your access to your funds, if you should happen to say something they don't like.
However, I believe that Satoshi was not employed by the NSA, but rather a rogue, who devised a system that solved most of the flaws in the NSA's flawed models, which by the way also inspired the recent anonymising ZKP based protocols (there is an ancient paper by the NSA dating back to the late 90s that lays it all out, in a rough, and totally preliminary architecture design).
Thus, it is my view that in fact what has been going on with Steem, is an attempt to discredit open blockchains, in favour of controlled, corporate/government blockchains. Notice how every other country is announcing blockchain systems for all kinds of things.
This is just a warmup. Steem embodies the core concepts, in a muddled, and corrupt form, of what the 100% anarchic free blockchain will look like. I am working on what I think it should be, once I'm done with playing the Adversary against the corruption I am certain exists. And possibly even, connections to Intelligence organisations.
I've considered this kind of thing myself, but in nothing like such depth. It does seem unlikely that open blockchains would have been allowed to flourish unless they were 'under control'. I'd be interested in any links you have to help confirm or refute your hypothesis, and if you write a book/paper at some stage, I'd like to read it.
Are you anonymous, or do you have a public web presence?
You can chat with me on Telegram at https://t.me/steempunk and I am about to switch to Busy.org, as I also caught out eSteem in 'minor' mischief, and chainbb also in more major, but not so mischievous mischief.
I was working on Dawn, precisely because of these suspicions, which my post-alcoholic brain-in-transition has driven me to such intensive thinking, has now got even more, substantial evidence in the form of game mechanics 'bugs' that allow this exploitation. See my recent post about the number 19 and Dan Larimer, for some somewhat crazy coincidences and semiotics, and my post about eSteem also lays out a rough sketch of the game mechanics 'flaws' and how they play out.
Dawn will not be a controllable blockchain. Whether I decide to implement it or not, really depends on opportunity and resources. I have @faddat back from the near self destruction of his life in Cambodia, who is now starting the path of eliminating the causes of his neurological/psychiatric problems, and I have good reason to believe he may a powerful future ally, when he has made progress to recovering his health.
I can't specifically point to any pro or con citations about this, I just remember one of the steem-coop guys, who is a mathematician, and deeply interested in game theory, started talking about multi-party prisoner's dilemmas. The cogs ticked over and the conclusions started to arise.
So, first port of call for you will be in looking into multi-party prisoners' dilemmas. Then look at how the witness game, the blockchain itself in its infancy, and the growing problem in the 'community' of more and more exploitative, malicious and vicious players.
Not only that, I suspect that specific accounts at steemit.chat had a hit put on them using a hacker-for-hire, and after being 'smacked down' in a particular issue report I made at the steemit github, which mind you, Issue does not mean bug in the simple sense but can also mean logic errors that lead to exploits - I have also been blocked from posting more.
After thinking even further through, I am glad now that I took down my witness, because it would have allowed the breach of my l0k1 account, if they could breach steemd, and then, the docker between them and the file containing the sensitive data.
I had a dream this morning, that someone had their fingers in my wallet and were trying to scoop coins out of it. Then it changed into my leather key-wallet. Pretty big warning, I think. Note that I had effectively restrained them, in the dream, and the last thoughts before awakening were that I had to shut these robbers down for good (the dream ones). Same as the ones outside the dream.
You really post some dark shit.. xD
Where can I read more about Dawn?
This is very interesting. My father who passed away talked about this and I always thought he was the only one who thought this way and was possibly losing his mind. Always keep a little gold on hand.
We are far from the situation where there is a compulsory, Legal Tender blockchain currency. I doubt even if they do pass such laws that it will stop the 'black market' in crypto money. All the ways to try and stop it are able to be bypassed. It's much too easy to make the traffic look like 'legal' traffic types, if you have to conceal it. Blockchain chatter is literally called 'gossip' by the way :)
I believe peer-review is a fine interpretation, but it's also an indirect, emergent property of the protocol, not the direct intent.
Does this mean you advocate some kind of on-chain policing of self-votes?
It is the intent, this is clear from the whitepaper. No it's not direct as such, as emergent properties can be planned. Look at any complex system simulation of ants for an example.
I don't know what kind of on chain policing there could be, but I would oppose anything that is not a general rule. Maybe something like @edje 's idea of a committee would be like that. It's not something that I think would work, better to realign the rules to encourage the emergent positivity and mutual benefit.
I'm not sure if you read @rycharde 's post here but I think point 13 is a really interesting idea to reduce the effectiveness of self voting and so-called "circle jerk" behavior, via incentives as opposed to policing.