RE: A simple, radical change to Steem that could fix most of our problems.
You've heard even from the whale's mouth quotes like "why am I manually curating and delegating to groups like a sucker while other whales just vote themselves without a care for others?"
A particular whale who thinks he can use that argument to sway people into enriching him at everyone else's expense.
Anyway, I'm not sure if I can explain this better without going back to to the premise of everyone voting. And I really do mean everyone, not just Steemit. You wake up in the morning to discover that every Steemit account has decided to use its outgoing vote. No self-voting in any form, but also no sitting inactive. Essentially the utopian ideal here.
Does the system work? Your argument suggests that you think it doesn't. What I'm building here is a model Steem, a smaller one where everyone who participates values their outgoing vote over their self-vote, because otherwise they wouldn't be participating, they'd be in the larger basic PoS system on the same coin.
If the scaled-down system doesn't work without pushing money into it from the outside, then neither will the idealized full-scale one.
And if it doesn't then we need to be quietly panicking about that instead of other things.
Gotcha. See, I'm arguing that the idealized system does work, but that it involves the voluntary choice to prefer giving out to keeping to one's self. You say this is unsustainable, but I am saying it is not. The setup forces no alternative.
It could be that this is the reality, to which your response would be: how can a system designer set up something so wrongheaded to rely on an entire group to make individual "sacrifices" to achieve a societal optimum?
This is a fair point. However, I believe this to be the reality, and maybe an either optimistic part of me or an amused part of me thinks that this is why I like this experiment.
The other reason I think this is that your proposed solution isn't that far off from right now. People can opt for staking by having someone provide an auto voting service that does exactly what I described at the beginning of our discussion. Ok, I know, it's not the same because of the stigma. But don't you think people will look at the choice of taking the stake option in the same way?
Now I'm confused, because I'm pretty sure that's also what I'm saying. Or at least hoping.
As I understand it you've been saying that the participatory system needs more money in it than the participants' stake to work, which seems like it's exactly the opposite of that.
Where am I wrong here?
Odd. I've been scratching my head about what happened since we are saying the same thing when it comes to the staked reward pool. I suspect it's my attitude towards the inactive users: I would rather see them go, than into the staking scheme. And that's going to cause the crash you refer to if we were to forcefully remove them. And I'm okay with that.
Let me then go back to the actual proposal. We think the result would be bid bot delegators would switch to stake mode simply because they are chasing rewards and they get more if they use stake mode for the same delegation. So we suspect bid bots would collapse overnight, assuming rational behavior. But it doesn't actually get rid of the "self voting" problem, it just hides it. So this was a previous question of mine, won't people be just as upset?
I believe that staking behavior will affect the steem price. The more that do self staking, the less the value. The synergy you refer to must be about those that view the staking as great and want to jump in to stake themselves. But I argue that this is not a synergy. I argue this is like a dividend that is leeching from the value provided by the core game.
Oh... Dividends attract investors too and there is a precedent in the stock world... But in the form of self voting? What % does that amount to? And is it reasonable? Interesting... But if it's a dividend, shouldn't that be applied across the board regardless of whether you participate or not? Oh... the inflation paid to SP holders that are not part of the rewards pool already functions this way.... Thinking out loud here.
Personally I'd be fine with that too, but you're never going to get the key witness voters to support it.
To be honest, I've never understood why you guys are so upset. Things like the early-voting bonus, sure, but basic self-voting is fundamentally a null behavior.
And now you're where I was right before I wrote the post, I think.
Kind of. But my conclusion of my musing (without having pulled any data yet) was that being paid inflation allocated to SP holders is the dividend and is enough. Inactive users do not deserve more than that even though the game allows it.
The objection to self voting really is about the desire for less inactive participants, or about less activity that is "like inactive behavior". You say self voting is null behavior, which I understand from the amount corresponding to their stake. But I still feel that this isn't true if viewed from valuation in USD, after the market reacts to the current voting behavior.
Let me ask another question which I think might be interesting. How will we be able to evaluate the intrinsic value of our ideal interaction / the core game with active participants in the proposed system? The steem price lumps both together, and I posit that the inactive participants affect the valuation.
The interest that comes from the changing vests:SP conversion? I don't see why anyone would stake here if that was all they were getting. It's much less than the base inflation rate.
Basically the same clumsy way we do now: by counting activity and search engine ranks and so on. If I can come up with a truly good way to value social media networks I'll sell it to Google for a billion dollars and it won't matter if Steem is sustainable cause I can keep it as a retirement toy.
The Steem price doesn't do this and I doubt it ever will.
Well I suppose if that first option would be taken up it would serve as a more direct proxy for value. But yeah, fat chance of that.
It did give me another idea, though. Not, probably, for Steem, because getting from here to there doesn't seem practical. But if one were building another chain like this, it might make sense to tie the inflation rate to activity growth somehow, rather than just setting it at a convenient integer. Then everyone would have motivation to contribute.