RE: A simple, radical change to Steem that could fix most of our problems.
Interesting idea.
The people who currently gain value through self-voting, delegating for return, and vote-selling will switch to earning their stake rewards directly, because it's better for them.
Under your proposal, this is not definitely going to be the case. I think that like any economic system, people will do whatever yields them the highest returns, with the social / cultural bounds. People who have a lot of time, good software and who don't care about the social norms (i.e. on the scam / spam / abuse side) will continue to self vote, circle jerk and abuse the Steemit.com faucet delegation on account creation if it's more rewarding than simply taking stake rewards.
So my question is, how is it to be balanced? It seems to me that for the Core Game to be truly voluntary it would have to have less returns that simply electing to extract a stake dividend, at least on average. This however would devalue the Core Game somewhat. Perhaps that's a necessary compromise with what you propose.
I might have missed something obvious so corrections invited.
Since every exploit has a significant cost in the effort it takes to actually do it, as long as the returns from self-voting are kept essentially the same as the returns from pure staking, pure staking should win. Maybe a few people will try to find ways around that but they will be few enough that they can still be controlled by the folks around here who really love the idea of flagging people who don't play by their rules.
People who are choosing rshares should be active voters, since it makes no sense to choose rshares and then not vote them. That keeps the average stake return for the two systems consistent.
That, for instance, will still be a problem. (I categorize it with spam since it's mainly spammers who do it.)
Another thought on consequences. Leaving your VP at 100%, not voting, does not prohibit you from posting, as you pay for that (and any operation) with bandwidth. So you could never vote but still comment and post stuff.
I can imagine a new culture emerging of people who post and comment regularly to try to garner others' upvotes but who very sparingly vote, attempting to maximize the amount of time they spend at 100%. And a counter culture of those calling them out. Maybe I'm too cynical 😅
That's a very useful point.
Right, and those who "really love the idea of flagging people who don't play by their rules" (ahem, of which I am one, though I reject your characterization) attempt to increase this cost, or rather reduce the exploit payouts. It's a large, underfunded, frustrating and mostly thankless job, but removing scam is good for the platform longterm, thus everyones' stake.
I guess your proposal isn't really for the bottom feeder scammers but the mid and top feeder scammers, those making pretty seriously low quality attempts at content to disguise their actual purpose of simple token extraction, and for whom there will always be a gray area and level of plausible deniability.
And it's also not for the top platinum lambo moon scammers, like those who shilled BitConnect and whatnot. They thrive on the personality cult to, but I can imagine them going back and forth between passively collecting and making noise about the latest pump and dump.
Technical details aside (as discussed in other thread) I'm chewing this in my brain to see if it's better, still not sure but intrigued.
It's not targeted at scammers at all. It's targeted at groups of people who all have different legitimate goals. Part of the problem is the casting of people who just want their stake rewards as scammers. That not only leads to inveterate conflict on the platform but cuts back the resources to fight the people who are here to actually defraud others. Those will always have to be prevented the old-fashioned way because they take advantage of people, and people's decision-making. There's nothing we can do technically to prevent someone from voting their stake on someone who wants to sell them gold so they can eat it. That has to be done by humans.
Wanting stake rewards without playing the game does not categorize a scammer. Not at all. But I would argue that acting on that want by cynically playing the game for rewards only (for example, posting random images to up vote with your many alts) is fraudulent by definition. The only reason this fraud is okay is that it is not fraud on a systematic level, all operations are legal, as code is law. The contribution to the game though is clearly just for show as the only way to get rewards for stake. This we know.
Enough has already been written about this I think, but to mention it, this is why we have bit bots. Large stakeholders invented a game on the game to (attempt to) legitimize their desire for passive return on investment. This has been a success for them, but arguably not good in the long run.
Here's the thing that you are attempting to sidestep: your proposal would give people who are expending unnecessary effort by playing dishonestly an avenue to make the actions supporting their aims (rewards only) legitimate. This cannot be overstated and it's why I talk of scammers.
I'm sorry, but I see no logical basis for this argument that doesn't boil down to "my values are the right ones so yours are a fraud." These other people did not agree to your value system, and the fact that the system tries to force them to conform to it is evidence that the system is a fraud, not the users who are circumventing it.
This is why the most important element of this proposal is not who gets what rewards when but converting to a fully-consensual model of participation.
Arguments are not based in logic, but if they are good they proceed in logic. The premise of my argument is that the whitepaper is the founding document of the platform, which outlines the game. If you read the whitepaper you will see that the game is the only supported means of reward. Subverting the game is (currently) subverting the platform, which is fraud. I should note that the larger game outlined in the whitepaper is larger than the blogging platform somewhat, but not by much.
You are really abusing the concept of consent here. "A fully-consensual model of participation" sounds great, but in fact we already have that. No one can stop you doing what you want to do with your own stake, and you can't stop anyone doing what they want with there. In terms of a social network, that is never seen before.
Under the current system people are not entitled to rewards based on their stake, it is up to the free vote of potentially every single account on the platform. You propose to implement a change so that people will be entitled to rewards based on their stake. This has nothing to do with consent and everything to do with giving more options to stakeholders. It is potentially a good thing, but you are muddying the conceptual waters by attempting to frame it in terms of consent. I can see it being a politically useful misdirection, but that's all it is.
They absolutely are; those rewards are rshares. Or the right to vote a certain amount, if you like. It's one of only two types of actual blockchain rewards, along with block producer rewards (which are already paid in SP).
What the system likes to call "rewards" are not in any way rewards. They're an extremely complex multi-user currency exchange.
Nope, I'm just changing what currency they're paid in.
Thinking this through a little more, the system could be set to deliver all rewards when at 100% voting power as Steem. That should enforce the par between rewards types and might be an even easier way to accomplish the whole thing.
Perhaps, I was going to ask how you propose the choice be technically implemented. That makes me think of this:
Votes will probably decrease, but other costs will rise up to replace them, and back of the napkin guesswork tells me it'd be a net increase in cost.
Votes are active actions which nodes respond to on demand. From my understanding (as a former backup witness and active 3rd party developer) the computation strategy is to respond to events as much as possible and have as few "implied events", what are called "virtual operations" (check out the end of information on this block on steemd.com).
The blockchain nodes don't actually keep track of VP regeneration, it is only calculated again when another vote is cast. Blockchain users (by which I mean any front end or app) must manually recalculate this if it's something they're interested in before voting. There is no regeneration operation, not even virtual, and the blockchain doesn't care until another vote is cast, saving on computation.
Adding total system-wide payouts periodically (should be ever X minutes or hours I guess) for all accounts at 100% VP would (a) require VP regeneration to be actively calculated by nodes, and (b) calculate how much to pay them, and then pay them, periodically. Depending on the amount of account which reach or maintain 100% VP the compute cost could be a very significant increase.
As an optimisation, VP calculations could at least stop when VP reaches 100% if there is no further voting operations. However (b) would still cost.
My original thought was there would simply be an account flag that users could set to a number between 0 and 10000 (since we like that number) for how much of their rewards to get in each system. Then there should be less computation because all of the pool payouts come with very complex computations already anyway, and the new ones would be much simpler.
I can see that the 100% cap might be harder to do though.
I'm not sure it saves computation so much as outsourcing it, since we're all looking at our live voting power all the time anyway. But I guess if the witnesses don't have to do it that's something. Still, it should be possible to set a 100% signal somehow even if we aren't doing it granularly.
Not sure how Voting Mana is going to change all that anyway.
That removes cost (a), but increases cost (b). I'll have to dig into the code but I think you're very much understating the burden this would have on nodes, their complex computations not withstanding. You're proposing additional account operations for every account that selects this (not proportional to the sliding scale, of course) or every account at 100%, every X time period. I would like to see an actual reckoning with this fact, or at least a good rebuttal if you think I'm wrong.
Saves computation for witnesses obviously. Not doing it on nodes is likely to increase total universe size work to do because lots of other computers are needlessly calculating it, but that's just being pedantic. When we talk of computational cost, we're of course talking about witnesses, that is a given.
I think I'm going to have to see Voting Mana in action before I can do that for the 100% idea. For the flag, I'll see what I can come up with. Nobody's going to implement this this week anyway.
For real. I'll stay tuned and contribute if I can, at least to thrash it out.