SpitBalling - Whale Abuse
Decentralized Nightmare
It is obvious there is an issue on the Steem blockchain that allows those with large amounts of money to disproportionately give money to themselves. This can happen through self-voting or upvoting a pseudo-anonymous account.
@dan posted a few days ago on the importance of good governance. While I don’t know how Steem could necessarily do it, I think it is important to know that @dan sees there is a problem with the current atmosphere and actions being taken by individuals on the Blockchain.
Time for random ideas, even if they are crazy.
So let’s start brainstorming of interesting ways in which you could correct things when whales go wild.
Even crazy thoughts can help us brainstorm new ideas that nobody thought up to combat inequalities before they get worse.
My Spitballed Idea #1
It might be interesting to think how much trust we put into the top 20 witnesses.
For instance, we trust our witnesses to successfully switch over to a new fork when we make changes to the network. This is a lot of trust.
My thoughts are, some sort of system which, if X number of top 20 witnesses flags a post. The rewards can be denied, or cut in half. Or any variation of the above with whatever numbers we feel as a community is fair.
My Spitballed Idea #2
A variable that witnesses set, kind of like bias which I don’t quite understand.
This could be a hard cap, which I believe others have talked about, on portion of the reward pool someone can get in a week.
For example, if someone were to make 2% of the reward pool, but the current setting was .5% give or take, 1.5% could than be spread evenly among the rest of the pool payouts.
I am not sure if this is possible or how the pool math would work, but I think it might be an idea.
The problem then, is whales making multiple accounts. Which can bring us back to the first idea.
What Are Your Weird Ideas
Tell me what weird thing you thought of and see if it sparks a different idea. My #2 spitballed idea came from writing down idea #1.
Maybe the idea you come up with second will be amazing.
-BiasNarrative
Do you understand your keys?
@Biasnarrative brother ... Give such huge power to limited number of people as proposed in idea #1 and you'll bring in dirty political system into Steemit too. We have been electing representatives for decades in centralized systems... Where did it get us? Steemit will be a political warzone.
And putting a CAP on rewards further hurts the content creators because it's already doing a lot of damage due to it's 7 day payout. If you post your content in blog or if you post your videos on Youtube instead of Dtube and Steemit, you'll generate revenue as long as the content is on the internet through advertising. If you calculate the rewards based on a long timeframe then posting out of Steemit will be actually be much more beneficial. The only thing that's attracting content creators in Steemit is the large one time payout that they get here... And since we have a tendency to acquire instant gratification, we keep providing quality content to Steemit. Put a cap in that one time reward and no serious content creator will consider this platform a good idea to post their content! The problem is not the excessive rewards going to the content creators... The problem is the excessive rewards going to shit-posters!
I believe quality content should be valued appropriately. 90% of the Steemit posts are spam and shit.
I wouldn't mind if 1 user takes away 10% of the rewards if he/she's the one providing the 10% quality content.
Couldn't agree with you more.
And maybe you're the last person I'll bother upvoting. ;) I've spent hours writing long comments (that I hope are thought-provoking yet few people probably read). The system is flawed so the system will be abused. If you can't beat them, join them? As the saying goes...
@zool237 Actually the Steemit incentive system is much better than the centralized economic system of the real world. Don't believe me? Check @andrarchy 's videos about steemit and steemit economic system ! He's a great economist who explains complicated topics in an easy simplified manner...
The economic system we use in our daily life is even more flawed and more heavily abused... but since those economic activities aren't transparent, you never know about it. Here you know about the abuse because everything is recorded in an open ledger. Not many abusers (except a few backed up by whales) have a long life here due to the open blockchain. We have a strong community support here and most of the system abuse is countered by the community members!
I agree with you partially @creatovert. You make very interesting points with the 7 day payout window.
I don't believe it will hinder people though. The hard cap as being a percentage of the reward pool. I don't see a valid reason for one person to make such an extreme amount of the rewards in the future when more and more people use the platform, hopefully flattening the overall average percentage some people get.
Any content creater that thinks they deserve 1% of the weekly pool which I believe is quite a large number for payouts. Possibly over 500k? $8 a piece for 5k Steem... $40k. In a week. That seems excessive to demand to keep getting that much.
(I have no idea if the above numbers are even close to being accurate. I know that the reward pool is at ~700k Steem. I just don't know how much is paid out and then added back into it each week.)
While I know that some YouTubers probably make close to that, their % of overall payouts I doubt is close to 1% of all the payouts from YouTube to it's content creaters.
What do you think? Still not an okay idea? I don't think it's the answer. Just trying to work through possibilities.
Thanks for your thoughts @creatovert.
I agree with you totally in my own personal point of view... 1% share is quite a big slice!
And I know you're referring to Haejin.
His content seems to be low-effort posts to me too and it's clear that he's maximizing his rewards by posting countless times a day... with each post accounting for more than 300$
But I have never seen anyone other than him getting that much rewards.
Not even 0.5% .
I saw a guy here a week ago who had created a fictional story of Elon Musk I think... it had a pending payout of 1100$ . I did a quick glance of the post and it was a quite long, well formatted and nicely written blog post. He had put a lot of effort on it and I would say he deserved it...
If he were to post 1 post each day, each accumulating an average of about 1500$, who are we to put a cap on his rewards?
I make very little on my posts so I too feel uneasy when a single user takes a large share of rewards but I think if the content creators haven't abused the system in any way, then they deserve all the value their content receives from the community! Afterall it's the community itself who tipped the content.
I attended a meeting today in Mspwaves radio and witnesses were having a discussion about the same thing. Maybe they would have loved this idea.
But I'm more of a freedom lover you know. I think decentralized platforms will lose their value if we add strict rules like the centralized systems.
I am far from an expert on blockchain development and implementation, and may be mistaken, but it does seem that a very few have the vast majority of the power and benefit, much as some would say with fiat currencies. Most would say that is the situation you are trying to avoid with cryptocurrencies.
Regulating the number of accounts an individual can hold or total amount an account can claim each day seems reasonable to someone on the outside looking in. Not sure how to regulate what sounds like abuse of the system, but unfortunately it does sound like some have learned how to game the system and screw up what seems to be a good idea.
Sounds like any other government or fiat currency in a way.
As I tend to do, I woke up this morning again thinking about this. For steem ( or Sp or SBD or any cryptocurrency) to maintain value there needs to be a limited defined amount.
If a few control the majority available, then stability of that value and confidence in that crypto (or any currency for that matter) is to easily eroded by possible manipulation and collusion.
Would it be possible to limit an individual to a single account, and devise a system by which the individual could only own a certain percentage of the total available Steem? Beyond that point their earnings may have to go to help others, or they can maintain a smaller percentage of their earnings going forward beyond their limited total percentage, sort of like a tax (ugly word) above a certain level of ownership. That may help reduce the chance of collusion or manipulation.
Also could think about limiting the amount that an individual can upvote themselves.
Much like a newcomer, there would be only a limited amount to contribute to one's own posts, and you would have to depend on the community for support beyond that point, thus further encouraging more valuable posts.
I apologize if these thoughts are redundant or mirror others', I'm just having a flight of ideas this morning, however worthless they may be.
Regardless, these are extremely important concepts for any crypto moving forward, or people like me will be more and more hesitant to invest more $ into the system due to lack of regulations and erosion of confidence.
I am not sure how you could ever limit an individual to a specific account. That would require some sort of centralized body to control.
I also think hardcapping SP seems more hurtful than helpful for any big investors that wanna hold for a bit. Or even for the creators that have 6 million all delegated out to help others.
There are a lot of good 🐋 s and I don't want to negatively effect their ability to grow the platform just because of a few bad eggs.
But hey, answers are usually not perfect so it could be a thing haha.
This so much. Humans will corrupt whatever is beneficial.
Haters.
I think the best way to prevent Whale Abuse was the old systsem of a 2 year power down. Whales, having their fortune locked in for 2 years, would be incentivized to do what is best for the community. Now that the power down is 13 weeks, I can see how Whales might act in that way.
That is a fair point.
2 years does seem ridiculous though. If a user makes a big living on Steem, and an emergency occurs, they should be able to pull out their funds in a halfway decent time.
Maybe 2 years with the ability to emergency pull out a percentage? Not sure how that would work though. Interesting thoughts though definitely.
Thanks!
I agree that a 2 year wait is rough. I went through more of your posts and I'm not sure that would solve the problem with that trouble maker.
Hey, any ideas are welcome. Never know what will spark the real remedy we can agree on!
At least somebody is talking about it :) I know some people voting themselves for long and they have a huge Steem power :)
I do not really understand about the blockchain system that makes someone on pay with upvote that is given. maybe i should learn a lot to understand about blockchain.
thank you for the information .. very useful for new member in steemit.
Very nice ideas you shared...compaerd to the 1st one 2nd one is good i think..very use full.thank you for sharing with us...greate job you are doing...@biasnarrative
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STOPGood post....
Can any one explain how Steemit will be improved with canceling upvoting ourselves?