Post-Hardfork 19 whale vs current whale visualized
I have seen a lot of speculation that seem to vastly underestimate the impact of moving from quadratic to linear. This is a gargantuan difference. Of course, there's nothing quite like a good old visualization. I have taken the blue whale vs man comparison from Wiki and shrunk them down by the square root of area.
As you can imagine, that mighty blue whale is our current whale. So what does the post-HF19 whale look like, in comparison? Look at that tiny speck in the bottom right. Yes, that's what a square root of a large object looks like. I have also shrunk the man (dolphin) accordingly.
Consider in this example that we have a whale with 400,000 SP and a dolphin with 40,000 SP. Assume that the man here is the dolphin.
The whale gets really, really small. The dolphin gets way smaller too, but much less so. I've left the man on top of the whale, had they shrunk a similar amount - it's barely visible. The man under the small whale is what a post-HF19 dolphin will look like. So that's how much dolphins grow with HF19.
Currently, the whale is 50 times bigger than the dolphin. After HF19, the whale will only be 7 times as large.
It gets even more extreme when it comes to minnows. Today, a minnow with 400 SP sees a vote that is a million times smaller than the whale. After HF19, the minnow vote would have 1,000 times greater impact. No, not 2x, not 10x, a full 1,000x relative to a whale.
Of course, in this example, the whole ocean has shrunk quadratically too, but hey - that'd have taken away the impact :) An important point to remember is that historically, few whales have been active curators. So, half a dozen whales or so could dominate 95% of the reward pool with less than 10% total stake before the experiment. Post the experiment, a hundred dolphins could dominate 90% of the reward pool. No longer. Whales, minnows and dolphins now have to play fair and square.
I have no idea what the final result would turn out like, but one can simulate it by looking at the current voting patterns. I'll leave that up to the developers out there, you just need to replace Vshares with Rshares and calculating proportions thereof.
Once again, do not underestimate this change - minnows will gain orders of magnitudes worth influence. One thing is sure, we'll see a very long tail, where the top earning posts earn dramatically less, and thousands of lower paying posts gain value. One challenge is minnows may continue piling on the votes on Trending posts, particularly casual curators*, but once Subcommunities are launched, I'm optimistic the reward pool will be distributed far and wide.
Bring on HF19 - this is the most exciting change in my 11 months on Steem!
*This is the increase in voting power cost by 4x, so those who curate less than 20 posts per day gain a lot more influence.
Bonus: Here's a quick and dirty estimation that compares apples to apples how a dolphin will gain relative to a whale. HF18 top, HF19 bottom.
superb write up!
Holy crap, this could be ground shaking for the community. I love the idea!
That's me without coffee. ;)
That's me with too much coffee.
😂😂😂😂
I love the gif's. Where do you get them @hilarski?
I know, he has a keen eye for gifs!
Indeed! As a minnow I glad to know about this! :)
I was reminded of this when I saw the whale scales.
cute :)
@liberosist
that sounds positively promising!
let's hope they realize this is the perfect timing to vote wisely
curious about the subcommunities
That's me with coffee... and Bailey's
Very intersting only time will tell, I'm sure we'll start seeing patterns forming. Overall if it can empower minnows more I think it's great but as long as they are voting on valued content but then ofcourse that's a whole other topic. Thanks for the visual, did help!
I certainly hope that minnows curate responsibly!
Whales are small enough to take selfies with!
Bringing in the love
a bigger version of the whale vs dolphin / scuba diver AFTER the FH would have helped... In the given image they are both so small that their proportion isn't clear at all!
still, great post! thanks!
Thanks for the suggestion, made an edit to add that in :)
cool! always happy when my 2 cents are appreciated ;)
your 2 cents made way more than 2 cents
what a world we live in
haha, yeah... what a time to be alive ;)
Don't you think that after HF19 people will have more incentive to vote for themselves? Why nobody paying attention to this?
There's nothing wrong with self-voting. Indeed, the default for new posts is to upvote. The problem is when whales collusively vote and take out large amounts of the reward pool. Which, by the way, is much less significant an issue with HF19.
There is one possible attack vector where someone can register thousands of accounts and then vote. But that'll also be easily discovered.
More of an issue is the voting power change. It is indeed true that those who only vote on themselves will stand to gain far more influence. That said, such people are less likely to be voted by other people in the community as they won't be as engaged.
You do have an interesting view on this. I'm just worried that the community jumped to this kind of decision too quickly. I would consider the different curve not the flat one.
Don't you find strange that witnesses is not enough active about this matter? I would vote for witness who opposed to liniar curve to see more thoughtful approach.
Actually, this has been debated for several months. If you recall, nearly 4 months ago, a near-linear curve was added to HF18 but was removed because it needed more deliberation. Finally, witnesses came to a consensus for HF19 on a linear non-curve.
As I understand it if you approach it selfishly like this then your posts are probably not going to be very good, which means your ability to profit from such an approach will be significantly limited. A super massive beast of a whale might profit a lot from upvoting their own posts, and people would flock to them resentfully so they can gain some share in it, but they're actually limiting their own profits by doing so. We don't care if someones rich, we'll happily make them even richer, what we hate is the extent we think someones both rich and selfish. So if a moon-sized whale wants to profit only with selfishness, they're really only hurting their profits. What if being lovable was more profitable?
(Why good leaders make you feel safe | Simon Sinek )
If your posts are good AND you only voted for yourself, well then everyone still wins and it really doesn't all that matter if you only voted for yourself. But obviously it's far more likely that someone who's trying to approach it this way and just "pay themselves" to earn rather than developing an audience and posting good content to earn, is probably not going to be that concerned with the quality of their posts.
If you only vote for yourself then you also miss out on profiting by giving your vote to another and sharing the pot. Even if really big whales were to post this way people would piggyback off them, it would be a rather unsightly relationship of teeny tiny parasites attaching to self-centred blubberous mass, but it would still nevertheless be a symbiotic one. Am I missing something?
It seems to me the best way to design a system like a social network is to model it very much on nature, where even the most ugly and to us the most monstrous, do serve a purpose and play a very important part in the system.
Steemit seems to have done a wonderful job in that regard, I don't know how consciously this was, to kind of build a system where it literally insensitivities selfishness to express itself in the most productive positive forms; selflessness, empathy and helping others, while heavily disincentiving self-centredness money making approaches, impoliteness, trolling. But to my mind the most interesting things is that if someone does play selfish with their votes in spite of the disincentives, they don't cause the system to topple over because it causes a natural counter reaction to even it out. I don't know, I just think that's really clever and particularly special.
(Simon Sinek: Why Leaders Eat Last)
One actually greatly reduces their curation rewards by voting on themself, like massively. In the end self voting typically results in less money earned. Self voters are great, that means more curation rewards for me :)
I have been seeing so much concern over the HF19 and this post right here is what I was looking for. You broke this down brilliant and I am now really confident in the up coming change. Thank you for that. I may do a follow up post on my own understanding level to help encourage others I have brought over who are unsure of this change. big thanks again
The gifs really do make it an easy layman's explanation. I had an understanding of the impact, but not the actual degree of it till seeing this. I will be sharing this post in Discord for sure!
Quadratics are weird!
I didn't know it was as much as 4x.
Wow, can't wait to test it out now.
The main thing I'm waiting to see is the updated reduced amount of votes you can make per day as I upvote quite a bit at the moment.
I see that your voting power is 99%. Don't worry about it - you will gain influence if you vote under 20 times a day. My VP is 50%, I will stand to lose a lot! Happy to cede influence to minnows though :)
Hardfork Robin Hood - style