RE: The Dwin fallacy(In defense of the flag part II)
Well, judging by the price of Steem, I think the lottery is working out pretty well so far. Steem has gone from being worth nothing less than nine months ago to being valued at over $36 MILLION today. Not bad for a shoe-string budget startup that's just getting started.
Gambling is a yuge multi-billion dollar industry. Lotteries, a subset of gambling, raise billions and billions each year. So, clearly gambling has appeal to lots of people. They are willing to invest yuge amounts of time and money in pursuit of a big payoff.
To say that gamblers are "stupid" for gambling may or may not be true, but it's irrelevant nonetheles. And to suggest that gamblers are too stupid to produce good content is a non sequitur. The biggest gamblers in Vegas are some of the most successful, creative and brilliant people you'll ever meet.
Why do you think you get all that survey spam in your inbox? Because it doesn't work for the spammer? No, because it DOES.
In theory, I'm not opposed to your option number 2 above. I simply suggest that it won't work in practice. The money will get spread too thin to serve as a continuing incentive to authors. Perhaps I'm wrong, but I don't think so.
In any event, subjective downvoting based purely upon one's opinion that a given post doesn't "deserve" the currently advertised reward simply ensures that no posts will be worth much at all. It will not only discourage authors, but it will actually piss them off to get downvoted. That's not a great way to attract talent.
Imagine a scenario where the salaries of football players was determined by fans using a system like steem rewards. You might think that player "X" deserves $50 million a year, but how many others are gong to think that? And, in particular, how many others who favor players on OTHER TEAMS are going to think that? They will simply downvote your guy hoping that more money then gets reallocated to their favored player. And...you'd do the same. In the end, you'd have a situation where salaries were much more egalitarian but you'd also have a situation where tremendously talented football players might instead choose to play some other sport without such a silly system. Or...another league might be formed where comp was truly determined by market forces or player popularity rather than people trying to game the system with votes.
If youre going to judge the lottery effectiveness by the steem marketcap, you have to use when the lottery first started paying as a starting point.
jul4, when they first started paying out, the market cap was 13 million. It took less than 5 days to get to the mid 30s, where we are at now. For most of the time we have had the "lottery" going, it has been declining.
Im all about being positive, but if youre looking for an unbiased price metric to guage the effectiveness of a particular strategy starting from day one block one can't work. It started out worth nothing. Now, its worth more than nothing. The plan works!
That said, there are other factors that effect price. I think the best way to guage the effectiveness of a lottery system to attract new content is to look at user growth and the change in the daily number of posts. those numbers tell a troubling story.
I didn't say that gamblers are stupid. I said that lottery players are stupid. The lottery is what us gambling types call a sucker bet.
It is a fallacy to compare economic events at two points in time. You must compare what is to what could have been. Unfortunately, it is difficult to measure what could have been.