New Boss, Same as the Old Boss.
If crypto takes over, how will the elite maintain the status quo? Will it really be that difficult? All they have to do is maintain the shape of the pyramid.
Cryptocurrency is already highly centralized, and the elite can easily leverage their position to centralize it even further. The path to a better future will be blocked until the weight of the old system finally caves in on itself.
Central banking was an amazing invention when it was first created. It actually was based on the tenants of decentralization. It took the power of wealth away from royalty and gave it to more people than was possible before its inception.
Today, this archaic system has had time to settle in and become just as broken as the power of kings and queens before it. The powerful always find ways to solidify their positions by burning the bridges behind them so that competition cannot follow. Will cryptocurrency follow the same path? Maybe.
If everyone on Steem today became a millionaire or billionaire would the world change for the better? The evidence suggests that a big portion of this population will simply abuse their position and 100% self-upvote no matter what happens. This is exactly what the elite expects to happen, and it is exactly why many of them aren't afraid of crypto. They know human nature.
They know crypto will be a hugely disruptive force that causes trillions of dollars to exchange hands, but they also "know" that the shape of the pyramid will always maintain its shape which will allow the greediest most evil psychopaths to ascend to the top. They have the monopoly on greed.
I've seen this behavior mimicked in the most unlikely of social circles. Join a guild in World of Warcraft and you'll see that the same nerds that got picked on in high school turn around and do the same thing after ascending to a position of social power, even if that position is simply one that exists in the confines of a video game. The smallest amount of power can go to the head of anyone and corrupt anyone.
Evening the playing field.
Crypto allows anyone to enter the space and compete for inflation within a more fair system than fiat. At Steem we only give witnesses 10% of inflation, and we control the other 90%. Even if we print 50 million coins in the last year (we did) for 20% inflation we can simply choose to self-upvote and reduce that devaluation to 2%, or we can choose to gift that money to others who we believe bring value to the platform. Scratch that, we can gift/nullify inflation to anyone we see fit for any reason.
What do we get in return for paying the witnesses 10% inflation? We get resource credits that allow us to transact on the blockchain. I'd say this is well worth the price. What do we get for allowing central banking 100% control of all inflation? Debt-based slavery. Seems like an upgrade, but it could still mimic the old ways in the long run.
Break the cycle
The only way to break the cycle is to come up with systems that no one is in charge of. If bid-bots are a problem, the answer is not to try ban/punish bid-bots and those who use them. This is the centralized "solution". The answer is to turn everyone into a bid-bot and create a free market with zero friction that pushes centralized rent-seeking services off of the platform.
Conclusion
If someone is in charge, then we are doing it wrong. Unfortunately, the problem is always easier to identify than the solution is to implement.
It's not that centralized solutions are bad or unwise, so one way to deal with it is to ban. That way the integrity of curation sustains and isn't discarded for a competition vs bots in aims at doing what bots do cheaper to beat bots. In that way, a centralized approach works swiftly and maintains the premise of flagging as well, which is to deal with abuse, aka make abuse costly. It seems that a free market approach of pretty much "if you can't beat them, join them" attitudes would turn this into something other than a tokanized social media, but into a pay for play kinda "advertising" marketplace.
I understand that centralization creates positions of power that get seemingly always abused, but if everything is transparent then the chance of abuse requires a lot more than threats or bullying to be pulled off, and even with finness there is always scrutiny and caution because of the crowd, as a mere utterance of the evil centralized label usually evokes all kinds of remarks about how this place is decentralized, so abuse is highly unlikely or audaciousAF. Even so, the benefits to risks ratios could be tipped to make it less likely, the eventuality of which cannot though ultimately be denied as if given a long enough timeline someone will successfully usurp power and complete control through some enclave of authority in the system, but that's not the same with giving everyone with a certain rep/participation-score tools to initiate a moderating action that others can freely take part in and requires a certain threshold for others validate the act but which could also incur penalties just like the one who initiated the moderating act which gives everyone the tools to respond to abuse, which is what bidbots/self voting is and why flagging exists instead of upvoting only.
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In order to ban and censor things the entire service has to be centralized. Steem isn't centralized in that way so banning things is impossible. This witnesses will process every valid transaction. There is no censorship, there are no invalid transactions as long as the core rules of the platform are followed. A transaction signed with a valid key will be executed.
I am not advocating a
solution
I'm saying that every centralized service on Steem can be destroyed with a decentralized solution. The first and easiest step in the right direction is to decentralize the service itself and undercut every single middle-man leech tapping the pipeline. If users want to buy votes, they at least shouldn't get taxed by a whale.
Make the service free and we will find that less coins are being dumped on exchanges and more minnows and plankton are powering up. The chance of a whale dumping 1000 coins on the market is far greater than the chance of 1000 plankton dumping 1 coin on the market.
Force the free-market to bear the brunt of volatile risk. Bid-bot operators are basically forced to charge for their service because there is no way they'll run it at a loss. By decentralizing the risk that fee disappears, as the risk is distributed to every buyer and selling in the network.
The second more difficult step is to decentralize the trending tab. If everyone sees their own custom trending tab it will be much harder to game by purely pumping up payout value. In fact, some users will shadow-blacklist vote sellers so that people who buy votes actually have a lower chance of appearing on these custom trending tabs.
All of Steem's problems are caused by centralized solutions and can be fixed with decentralized ones.
Not necessarily, the top 19 witnesses can ban and censor technically through a consensus mechanism. They can rewrite the chain.
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So every witness has to agree and then on top of that hope they don't splinter the community and cause a fork in the chain. Seems pretty slim.
All top 19 have to agree. What do you think Dan was talking about when he made this remark?
https://steemit.com/blockchain/@the-ego-is-you/re-dantheman-the-problem-with-byzantine-generals-20170130t142131108z
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Very nice. The problem with @dan's love of DPOS is that it makes him blind. Don't get me wrong, it is amazing that he created a new consensus algorithm, but if one group has a lot of coins and they use their influence to rig elections, then it isn't hard to elect 20 witnesses that are all corrupt.
Luckily, crypto is so new and unsettled that literally no one in the space want to do anything that might kill it. However, once crypto goes x1000 again and becomes unkillable, we might see the corruption start to seep in.
Lets start with this: is banning/freezing accounts, removing data from the chain and otherwise moderate how people can interact with the chain a bad idea and if so why, and if not is it then a good idea and why, considering that it's implemented as decentralized, not necessarily dPOS but proof of participation and through participation score levels?
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Literally anything can happen on any chain with enough consensus. I'm having trouble seeing the point here. Ethereum hard forked to steal back funds from a single hacker.
With a proof-of-stake implementation all that really matters is how trustworthy the stakeholders are. Luckily they have a built-in financial incentive to be trustworthy or their stake becomes worth less.
Thoughts to share - Crypto has been a small rebellion!! a revolution against a 1000's of years old greed machine - Of course they will kill it (by corrupting it - did it through control off exchanges and putting $$ on it, then manipulating - and making people greedy, then they just mugged people to rub it in faces)...but for a short moment in time they panicked, the fear was there enough for them to look up (...and some very powerful people were engaged to kill it, not just some random market forces or FOMO - it was delibrately put down!). Crypto will limp on...may succeed or fail from here in, but it was the first thing to 'challenge' the cash based system, it was the revolution of our era and I was proud to be part of it. Now there is a crack in the mold, future rebellions and revolutions will come (because those still with some individual will left will have noticed...and the world will stand a small chance of breaking chains).
Some really neat ideas and concepts in there.
I do believe that the elite must have a skin in the game in order for it to fulfill its potential. In my opinion it will be one of the critical factors in the transformation from Early Adopter to Early Majority boom. The fact that they have litigated the price down to where it is now (media and draconian tax guidance) means they can just do so to suck it back out of the pockets of the common people who have to cash out to pay bills. They can afford to HODL in down times and have the investment savvy to take profit when the time is right.
Besides, you can't have early majority and decentralize it with the notion that the elite are not allowed to be part of that.
Such a neat study!
Why do we need their blood money? What does it represent? A fiat infusion is not enough to run an economy. The current system proves that.
We do not need the money. We are approaching a turning point where inefficiency buys freedom. Combine crypto with 3D-printing and we may see communities form where 100 different people work together, all with a mini-factory in their garage to build a product in their local area.
Technology is advancing to the point where we'll be able to build everything we need without relying on a corporation that injects artificial scarcity into a monopoly to extract maximum value.
These two system are incompatible. One is scalable and trustworthy and the other is what we have now.
Couldn't agree more. What we really need is to reach the point that the community of 100 can empower the community of 10000 with tools and equipment to create or maintain their shelter who then could create value in innumerable ways which would be invested in land and not on trying to survive.
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Oh I agree with you.
You kicked of a string of thoughts when you mentioned the decentralization concept when relating to not making rules (which centralize things).
Thinking the way I do, I flipped that to apply it to the post and how you can’t rule out the entry of the elite blood money entering. Need it? Perhaps not but the lawlessness of it all means the big guns can come grab their stake too. Which will mean good things for value and those who can afford to hodl during downturns.
Fiat is the only thing that works at the grocery store where I am unfortunately so I have to play that game. Also, there is no blockchain without people, no people without government (these days) and no government without corporations feeding them cash in exchange for control.
So it is all one system and I don’t think we can make them mutually exclusive.
Awesome topic and discussion!
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It's not designed to keep anyone out. It's designed to be a robust ecosystem that anyone can enter with the intent of evening the playing field for all parties concerned. No more monopolies. No more buying the law and bending it to your favor. Math is the new law, and it can't be bargained with or bought out.
Today crypto has no infrastructure, but that's fine. We are building on top of the old infrastructure until we have our own. It doesn't matter that people have to temporarily transfer some crypto into $200 worth of fiat to go to the grocery store. At the end of the day the money has been spent and you won't be holding the bag.
Once crypto has it's own infrastructure it will squeeze out fiat just like the Internet squeezed out the printing press and the phone companies, but all that fiat money is going to buy a lot of crypto before it sinks. Every coin in existence today will be corrupted to an extent. That's fine! We'll just make new coins to decentralize the old coins even further.
The cycle will continue for decades. Crytpo can't survive like a corporation can. A corporation can bend the law and become immortal. Cryptocurrency evolves because they all have a life span. In 30 years young kids aren't going to be impressed that we own Bitcoin. They'll be like, "Okay grandpa, good for you. Watch me headhunt this guy in VR for 1000 HeadHunter coins. Oh, look at that I just paid my rent."
Yes, despite the issues, it's an upgrade. Maybe not the best, but better... ;)
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