Should Our Steemit Wallet Holdings Be Private?
Currently, anyone with your username can, at any time, view how much your wallet is worth, including how much you hold in liquid steem, steem power, and SBD. I saw a post today that recommended our wallets should not be view-able by everyone. The logic behind it was that this information could motivate someone to extort you, kidnap, etc. to force you to transfer them your hard earned Steem/SBD. With the recent increase in Steem prices, this is definitely becoming a more relevant topic. In the past, @Dan had said that they would be adding confidential transactions as well as privatizing account balances (not Steem Power). While I think this is an idea that could help decrease situations like this from happening to people with high valued wallets, I do not think this is the main issue that needs addressed when it comes to our privacy on Steemit.
Would it make that big of a difference?
Right now my account is worth about $250., I am not very worried that someone would take the time to try and find out who I am or my information in order to try and steal whatever money they could. I do however understand that someone sitting on a wallet of hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars worth could be nervous that anyone can see exactly how much their account is worth at any one time. This being said, viewing an account's wallet holdings is not the only way to be able to find out that an account is worth a lot of money. When we see an account for the first time their reputation score is the second thing we see. It does not take much time on steemit to realize that someone with a reputation score of around 70 or higher most likely has a wallet on Steemit or elsewhere worth tens of thousands if not much, much more. Anyone can also see all an account's posts and more importantly how much they were paid out for every post they have ever made. Also they can calculate how much steem power an account has through how much their up vote is worth. Hiding wallets from the public would make it a little harder for someone to know exactly how valuable an account is but someone could still make a pretty good guess without seeing the actual numbers.
Why Is The Wallet Currently Not Private?
The creators of Steemit wanted the platform to be fully decentralized but also fully transparent. With the ability to view any activity from anyone at any time, we are able to, as a community, watch and decide if someone is being fraudulent or is abusing the reward system. In my opinion, with hidden wallets/transactions, it would be much easier to hide this type of activity that is so harmful to the platform.
Possible Solutions
I do think that knowing how much liquid steem and SBD everyone has is not necessary. However, knowing that this information is currently available to everyone, it might be a good idea to either power up or transfer out any unneeded liquid Steem/SBD. Holding more liquid Steem or SBD may motivate someone to plan out some type of criminal activity than if all your Steem is locked up in Steem Power.
To me, the main solution is to be cautious with what we are including in our posts and pictures. Many people include a lot of information about themselves in their introduction posts. Once this information is on the internet/blockchain, it is very hard to completely remove it. Similarly if someone is posts about where they are traveling to and post many pictures of themselves in these locations, it could open up this opportunity for a crime to occur. If we are all smart about the information we are posting, it should not matter if someone is able to see how much our wallets are worth as they will not be able to identify exactly who we are or where we are.
primary problem I can see is that obscuring liquid Steem amounts and where they are allocated would require a structural change in how the Steem blockchain operated.
Fortunately, for anyone with a good amount vested in Steem Power, your would-be assailants are going to have to set up in your house for a while if they want all of your Steem. This is actually a good argument for recruiting whales :)
Part of the consensus requires an accurate accounting of all parties at all times. I am not a programmer, but this is my strategic understanding of what/why this would be a challenge. Would love to know if I am incorrect and there could be a masking technique. Anonymous voting would be rather interesting, since it would ultimately require that. A side chain could be possible, using SMT (in theory).
Best suggestion: don't hold liquid Steem if you don't have to or setup a number of 'mules', just like in #wow. Exchange liquid Steem/SBD for ZCash or Monero. That's what I'd be doing if I were crypto rich.
Haha that would be quite unfortunate if someone had to be kidnapped for a full 13 weeks till he was fully powered down and then released. I fully agree though, all the more reasons to power up your account!
I do think that you have a good point on posting smart. It should be said for any internet site that you need to be careful with the information that you put online as there will always be people out there willing to take advantage.
You should never share exact details of location or personal info.
I wouldnt be too worried about people seeing my account as even in life you can see where the money is by the house, the car, the clothes. And as steem gains value a lot of people will have large accounts.
Bad idea to make wallets private. A lot of behaviors and results on Steemit are only understood when you know who is a whale and who isn't.
And you think if everyone knows who the whales are, and if those whales also use their real life identity, pictures, video, etc, that these human beings cannot be extorted by others, or coerced into delegating their SP to others, or into upvoting others?
The more the network knows who the whales are the less safe it is for the whales and to be a whale. That means the cost to being a whale with a flesh and blood identity could end up being higher than any potential benefit. If no one wants to be a whale, why would Steem Power gain value?
I suppose pseodo anon entities and corporations can be whales. In fact, the only way I could reasonably think of being a whale is to make my account a company. This is the same problem with Bitcoin mining which also doesn't scale. The case could be made that Steem is better without any whales but the fact is some will have bigger accounts than others, making those accounts bigger targets, with the biggest being the account holders who are most public.
I think you just made a strawman argument, to try to deflect from my point.
No where was I arguing that we need more visibility into who whales are, and I was not arguing they need to expose their real life selves and pictures, etc.
I was arguing that we are probably at about the right point as is. To give more anonymity to whales (or any others) than they have right now, would result in more havoc and chaos than we have right now on Steemit.
If you want to debate that point, fair enough. But no value debating your strawman.
True, the risks you take. SP and follow a trail and have your password with a lawyer after you power up who know the protocol for giving the key out. Or a similar thing that would simply serve as a silent alarm to be triggered by a word or phrase, thee's plenty of imagination that doesn't require the centralization of power and lack of accountability for voting. That scenario is the perfect method for devaluing steem, leave the actors without recourse to their actions because there is the fear that they might be kidnapped or coerced, which manifests because they shared personal information to the public, on a public place, akin to driving a nice car.
You bought into and followed the strawman argument. Which was not my point at all.
I think we agree:
I think there are several reasons to keep holdings private. Certain journalists and / or whistle blowers could be tracked simply by watching accounts. These are people that really need many of the aspects of this platform and I think it should be capable of protecting them.
Some people would like to keep income private to avoid taxes from their governments. I think there is nothing wrong with that. I would like to see platforms like this dissolve governments and I'm pretty confident they will.
There are likely plenty of unforeseen reasons as well. I appreciate transparency, but with blockchain tech, we can have that with privacy. That is its killer feature. We should use that.
That sounds ominousAF, what would that look like, on a hypothetical?
That's called Tax Evasion. If you want to challenge taxes the last thing you want to do is evade taxes, if you don't want to pay taxes there's exemptions and exceptions and procedure to Revoke your Benefits as citizen(a term of servitude) and therefore the burden of Taxes won't apply to your income.
Maybe the people who you follow or follow you would only be able to see your wallet instead of everyone on steemit. But i do agree that it motivates people to post better content on steemit. Good post
That is also a great idea. I think the owner of the account should be able to restrict who can access.
Yeah, except that whole Transparency of the Blockchain and it's transactions, as evident by every other blockchain out there..
It can be done in a way where it's not transparent to all parties. Blockchain wasn't designed for identity. Blockchain was designed for accounts to exchange value. Identity requires privacy. I think sure if Steem wants to only be pseudo anon then this will not matter but if Steem wants real identity and not bots or shill accounts then there has to be some privacy.
Restricting who can access what is the whole point of privacy. A blockchain will not reveal much if you use blind signatures and other techniques. Voting which isn't confidential is coerced. So Steem voters who use their real identity will be open to coercion. It is even possible some Steem Power holders could be forced by threat to upvote certain accounts.
How can you know every upvote is honest, legit, without coercion? It could be happening.
Yes Indeed, one party can hold the key, but then there's the whole "centralization".
Indeed, we are talking about the transparency of accounts on every other blockchain and the transactions that are tied to identities.
You have all the privacy in the world, except you cannot have privacy for transactions or account.
Sorry but there's only identity, not Fake, false, psuedo or faux Identity.
Real Identity is kinda red herring because we cannot move past the fact that transactions are transparent and accounts as well, like on every other blockchain based on Decentralization and Transparency, which is pretty much every other chain.
Except that the only reason to implement such things is to facilitate crime without any detection, which is why you need to centralize it to monitor and be able to "respond" to crime, and the benefits are completely outweigh by introducing the element of Centralization and obscuring accountability, both which are completely against what this platform is for.
That's quite a fantastic claim, do you claim that everyone is coerced into voting now? You've pretty much put a banner that says "Looking for programers for a fork" because no way in hell will a largely, by far, anarchist community ever bow down to a few whales who cannot find a good bank to stash their copious amounts of liquid wealth for safekeeping from their greatest fears.
And that is fine, we cannot stop that from happening without fracturing everything that this platform, that blockchains and that transparency itself stands for. Find somewhere to stash your bank, k, I suggest SP. Fear is a motherfucker.
for people you follow - someone could just not follow anyone or only people they trust to not tell on them for their misconduct
for people who follow you - would only be one small extra click, wouldn't change much
Possibly it will be nice to have our wallet private yea because you cna't be expecting a thief to keep looking at your bank account and it reads a 33,000 USD they gonna try getting you but letting it private they may not need to hunt not saying its the best but that's own way of safety first
Nope just like any blockchain you can lookup and see how much each wallet holds. That's the wonders of blockchains everything is transparent.
this is a democratic community, base on vote. The idea other than what already exist in this community need to be compete before gaining consensus. This is a long journey for both side. choose between security and accountability in the spirit of transparencies!
Well said.. I guess I am a little biased because I don't value security as much with my account only being a few hundred bucks worth.. accountability all the way lol
Me tooo! Thanks
I feel like there are already too many fake accounts on here. I think it is a breath of fresh air when you come across an account that gives enough detail to know that the person is real. If I had to hide all of my personal info, my posts and stories would not have anywhere near the character they currently do. I appreciate the concept of everything being transparent. I also agree there maybe should be a better way to protect yourself if you are lucky enough to be a whale. -@bozz