Helsing: Governance Ideas (Good/Bad whales needed)
A few weeks ago I made a post about Helsing: The Vampire killer, something I have thought quite a lot about before I created the post as, it is risky. If you haven't read the post, please do but basically:
If you have read it, Skip Ahead to the Governance section.
Synopsis
Helsing is a VERY HIGH STEEM POWER account that only cares about returning value back to the pool for better distribution and could be used in many, many ways, some automated, some manual.
Whale and Orca support only
Target the largest and the smallest scammers, plagiarist and pool rapers on the platform.
Helsing Specs.
The 200 highest staked accounts delegate 0.5-1% of their total value to Helsing.
Steemit delegates 0.5-1% of its total value to Helsing.
The amount is small and barely affect earnings of those accounts but, the power of Helsing becomes immense and will return much more to the pool than what is lost by the delegation.
Why would the whales delegate?
- They are interested in better distribution
- It shows they are truly invested in the community and success
- It demonstrates their willingness to act
- It gives an experimentation tool for development like the ones @smooth runs
- It costs almost nothing to support
- It frees up large amounts of the pool
- It has very little effect on day to day whale activities
- The whales stand to gain the most by Steem's success because of stake
- It protects their investment by protecting the weaker
Governance (The IMPORTANT bit)
Governance is the largest factor but, the idea itself will work with support.
A quorum was mentioned which is a good idea and I guess could be organised easily enough through a slack channel/ poll sent out by questionnaire?
What if for starters a poll was created with a range of topics with yes / no questions and say 50 questions designed by a smaller, qualified group. It would be simple and relatively fast to fill.
Answers could be anonymous and each option would require a 75% majority for it to be approved for trial. This would give an understanding of what may be possible and an understanding of what they are willing to support and to what degree. It would also protect well against personal vendettas.
Questions could also be added ad hoc and a second and third round can be held to include whale/delegator inputs for consideration. This is important so all have a say of potential uses and targets.
For Example I will use a large abusive, high reward account called Trade-ASS as an example:
Do you favour flagging Trade-ASS? yes/ No
If so 100% Yes / No
50% Yes / NoLet's say it passes for flagging but, there is not a clear decision on the percentage. Then the lower (less extreme) % could be used.
Again, that is just an example and I am sure there are already decent methods for voting similarly but having the system set up means that the 200 most invested have a very powerful say in how the platform distributes the pool, the pool they benefit from and where their STEEM is held.
A decision could be made that each approved decision gets reviewed after two weeks and 4 weeks to see if effective or harmful.
Potentially, a new poll could go out each month with a short list of questions and this may also give all a wider view of what is happening on the platform outside of where they normally swim.
Get a trial going
The whales have stake and are the ones who have the most to gain and lose on the platform. Stepping up and taking an active role re-engages them and their stake. This would be good for the platform.
This is all moot if we can't get enough onboard which means some significant and influential whales are needed and some who might not agree with each other, could still agree on this.
- There are already whales interested so if you want more say in the platform and want to join in the preliminary discussions, you can contact me and be added to the group.
steemit.chat : tarazkp
discord: tarazkp#5792
Once green-lighted, it is just a matter of targeting and the polls can organize that. This would work without Steemit Inc but, it would be very interesting to see how they would react to the whales coming together and affecting the platform at such a scale.
- This is a decentralized system and everyone's stake is theirs to use as they see fit so there should be no problem. The whales working together would be a force to really be reckoned with.
The last beauty of Helsing is this. If it doesn't work well, if it is too damaging, too rough, or gets too controlling. It can be dissolved in seconds as it is delegated power only. It will never earn curation, it will never own any stake, it will never care.
To kill Vampires and Cave Trolls, you need a monster killer. Create Helsing, show no fear, show you care.
Taraz
[ a Steemit original ]
It is good that you had fortell the steamers from a disaster like whales so that they might take step to prevent themselves from it's pessimistic impact.......it's too informative post..
I do think this idea is good and any whales involved will deserve a lot of respect since this will prove they really care about this platform.
The biggest question is, who would have the keys to this account?
I see you mentioned a quorum which sounds nice in theory, it would have to be tested in practice though. Either way, I think the biggest whales involved (the one with the most delegated SP) should each have the password for this account.
And they have to be active whales, so in the case there is a need to dissolve the monster killer, it could really be dissolved in 1 or 2 days. If a whale goes on vacation, leaves a big delegation on this account and Van Helsing starts to act irresponsibly, it could be a huge problem.
So only active whales, and if going inactive for a while, they should undelegate until they return.
This is what I want to have happen.
When delegation is cut, it is cut. so even if it goes rampant, with 200 delegators, nearly all will cut the power immediately.
If there were 200 delegators, there would rarely be less than 80 or 90 percent far away from steemit. If Steemit is part of it, it can of course undelegate very fast.
I don't see this as a major issue but it would go to several most probably based on some votes.
Playing devil's advocate on this if it is Rep that causes such an increase how did that TA guy get to 76? Who with the high Rep has been up voting him. I always thought it was that relaxation guy only and his Rep is only 52.
Helsing is a good idea but if it doesn't get delegation how long would it take to remove his rewards and rep if every account north of 65 rep took one self vote per day and gave it as a flag to the TA guy? If everyone did their part and self sacrificed in place of proposing we take more that can be given this would already be a non problem. Is the problem big enough to complain about but not big enough to give up one self vote per day?
The data showed only @papa-pepper doesn't self vote so he would also be excluded from the flagging if being realistic.
The problem is that they attack the smaller accounts like bias narrative. 65 doesn't mean power of vote and it can really smash them.
Yes, the key would be a group working together. Can't hurt an army of flags but it is easy to single out select users.
Everything can work exactly the same without wasting delegation for flags. There are many other up and coming projects that could use it much more if people are willing to give up 1% for the benefit of the community.
Look at the groups that have already been hurt or dismantled in order for select large users to flag. So hundreds are being hurt to combat one user.
Looking at this image from 3 months ago:
And this image from today:
There is more steem in the reward pool, not less. Just the value of steem has been affected.
Yes it is crazy retarded growth but no more than any of the bid bot accounts are growing.
you know what I think about the bidbots too...
I do indeed! And the whole flag war is driving many more people to use them as not as many up votes are being used on accounts.
That is why I wrote the other one today about the cost of good whales fighting alone.
This seems to be a work around to a perceived issue on the platform. Surely we could place limits on how much you can upvote a single user? So for example, you can only upvote a single user once every 24 hours or maybe a max of 10% if your VP can be used against a single user every 24 hours.
These are only ideas but I do t like the use of bots and think that they would be more open to abuse!
This would likely not prevent the kind of abuse that is happening.
People just use alt accounts instead.
Agreed alt accounts could be used but if you could only upvote any given user once per day you would need a fleet of at least ten alt accounts to make it work! I appreciate you could do this but I think it would be less likely to happen and if it did happen, less noticeable so would cause the kind of wars currently ongoing. Just a thought.
Interesting concept, and I like it in theory. My initial concern was that the account would be abused, and could flag things that don't need to be flagged. Your idea of polls intrigues me too, but I would still worry slightly that people could somehow cheat the system to get the end results they wanted?
It would have to be trialled well and have some decent bot creators and the like involved (some are already). The wrongly flagged will be quite difficult to do but, arbitration avenues would likely be in place also. This however is mostly for the clear cut cases and with a 75% majority required, they would be quite clear cut.
You mean like 22,000 SBD a week?
Jeez. Is someone taking that much from the reward pool?! Wow...
I really do think something needs to be done. I like the idea of a democratic vote, a jury if you will, deciding the outcome of any cases brought to light. Perhaps, in that regard, the people on the 'jury' could change regularly so as to not allow for people to push a certain agenda.
Public votes would be great for peer pressure too.
It could actually be a rotating random band of users. A true representative democracy.
Some might blanche at this, giving some spammers the keys to the court room, but a vote would put them on record. The process might influence the best of them to step up and be proper.
Anyway, just thinking that a delegation like that with a rotating, random delegation sitting in judgement would be interesting.
Yes, one is. Crazy right? Been doing it for 3 months straight now with one large whale backing them.
It would change somewhat organically anyway but there are options for that also in the future. Getting it up and running for a trial is the aim.
I believe that monster killer or Helsing might be the very same SMT's and effortless onboarding. It would be meaningful then to develop independent app with meta token and perform a better initial token distribution. While theoretically it is possible that some whales might buy an extremely large stake in secondary market so the problem wouls still persist but we have to wait end see how market economy works in this one.
As for STEEM it's main utility right now is rewards more or less and it will continue to be played. After the SMT's however with the new applications being developed where SMT tokens will have much more utility, Steemit as a platform will start to see much more competition as more sophisticated front end application might start appearing with their meta tokens and majority of the content might suddenly migrate. While Steem reward pool might still be raped in such a case we might see a situation where where a meta SMT token will get more adoption and grow more in value than the original STEEM token. I am not sure about the final STEEM role in SMT's and how it will play out, maybe it's role will switch from being a reward token to being a token that will act as GAS for any kinds of transactions regarding the bandwith on chains with new SMT's but for that i believe we also have to wait and see. other than that your solution if implemented correctly might be a solution to current situation where STEEM is too top heavy for the reward system to work efficiently in perpetuity.
That is the same reason why we see so many quality content creators spending less and less time on the platform as it simply does not justify time input required for an economically effective activity and those quality content creators often rely solely on monetization of that content that they are creating.
Yes, I am unsure how it will all play out either, I don't think anyone truly knows but most hope that Steem will be driven upward.
This is the reason for Helsing predominantly as one person (even with all the flags) is still taking 10,000 in SBD a week. that is support for 100 quality producers at 100 each a week. That is a significant amount for a community to grow upon and an individual to invest themselves with.
I am totally on the same page as you are regarding this matter @tarazkp I am not fond of the heavy top decentralized blockchain that ruins the very essence of self governance and reward system. However, it was probably impossible to distribute the tokens, hence influence evenly at the birth of steem blockchain ans nobody knew about it so even distribution would have been extremely difficult. Whales coming in was probably lesser evil for greater good in the future. They have provided demand for STEEM token which resulted in an increased price, right? So getting 100 SBD a week, at a price of 0.05$ is still less than getting 2 SBD at a price of 4$. But i am in no way advocating this, just trying to maintain a flexible approach on the future.
We at BeScouted are very fond of token EOS distribution model by @dan when ICO goes for an extended period of time giving everybody equal opportunities to get hold of a token in equal shares. We would like to adapt this mechanism when releasing our SMT if the system would allow us to do that, or we might go with issuing ERC-20 token and converting it to an SMT later on as even token distribution is completely crucial for a fair reward distribution. Since once you cross certain level of concentration that whole system is ruined as we see happening on STEEM currently. Ofc we can close our eyes and say that it's all right, nothing bad is happening but i personally know dozens or amazing content creators who after giving a try quit on it simply because it's not viable form an economic point of view.
If the next itteration and SMT's won't be able to change that we will find ourselves in a situation where we will witness a birth of new blockchain that will take all these issues into consideration and come up with a solution, rendering STEEM absolete which will still may be adopted and used to some extent because of FOMO but it will never become a revolutionary solution with mass adoption.
I am heavily invested with my time into STEEM solution, and our product is being built on top of STEEM blockchain as well so i am a believer, active believer who will be constantly looking for solutions to current situation. For now i guess i will repeat myself we have to wait and see how SMT's will change current situation. As creating a governing behemoth in a decentralized solution, might be a temporary measure it will be extremely hard to implement not to speak of governing itself.
But something must be done about current situation definitely. And the faster the better.
Hence i am fully supporting your initiative and idea, your bravery to speak up and address the issue and provided i was a whale i would join it with at least 5% of my STEEM POWER.
P.S. I am also concerned about creating and entity that would punish individuals for using the system the way it was designed to be. While many of us would wish that rewards were more fair, but that is also a question of ethics, which are very hard to judge when big money is involved and god know how it could backfire if all whales start dumping their steem token provided there is no incentive for them to hold it. This is arguably still the first iteration of reward distributing system, i have a hope that it will evolve into self regulating mechanism of governance working perfectly in perpetuity,
I am new and I think people need to remember that when a society starts creating systems that harm others to force them to do what is supposed to be in their best interest well sadly the examples in history just are not enough.
The truth is that a system of anarchy has to have its keystone to stand on. In common law it is the understanding of the none aggression principal. "Harm No One". Common Law uses Grand Jury's to indite and petite jury's to convict. It is all based on natural law. The community reserves the right to defend itself from bad actors through the Grand Jury. In America it is called American Jurisprudence.
How does steemit define a bad actor?
Who represents the community? Would that be witnesses?
Who acts as the Sharif or marshal on steemit and arrest accounts for bad acting?
Who acts as a judge and keeps resolution of the conflict on track?
Why not use oaths asseveration or affidavits as a requirement to flag a persons post?
Is there anyone on steemit that doesn't recognize that flags hurt the author and the steemit pool?
Not having these process to resolve issues prevents the society from becoming cohesive and causes it to resemble a pig pen (democracy).
I would like to help? I have ideas based in natural law I think will help. What I don't know is who to share them with?
Steem was supposed to regulate itself through self governance of upvotes and downvotes. And the community itself was supposed to defend it's interest. Just extremely uneven toked distribution makes this system pointless. As even a 1000 members with 100 steempower is not a match for bigger and misbehaving whales. Also flagging posts does not provide any incentive from economical point of view hence it is being used only by some community initiatives lie @cheetah and @steemcleaners but then again their purpose is different.
The real problem is that you didn't take three facts into account. The first one is that steemit is actually a society. To self rule a society must have fair, moral and just rules that everyone comprehends so they can also understand.
The second one is the fact that human beings sadly are not ruled by logic or reason and often have no logic or reason for the decisions they make. Ask someone for the logical reason to like chocolate over vanilla. Personal preference has no logic or reason.
The third fact is the fact that the agencies of our world are not in favor of decentralization and so they send their agents into steemit to reek havoc from the inside. This is why all societies have to have those rules I mentioned.
The reason why I am writing to you is because I don't believe there will be a second chance at decentralization. I also believe that my lack of programing ability requires those who have that expertise learn what I know about building societies and act accordingly or steemit is done.
Don't think that my username is an accident. The key is as I have said. Fair, moral and just rules that steemians ratify or the death of steemit. Remember please that I am no prophet and could be wrong, but I think that what you have witnessed in the recent past supports my claim.
Your posts are amazing
When I eavesdrop whales' conversations, I feel like a donkey.
Please share, i'd like to read them too :)
I've read quite a few different ideas.
I think this is quite a good one.
Like you mentioned, the governance piece is very important. You wouldn't want something like this to be misused. It's almost like a policing of the platform, and that kind of power brings with it great responsibility.
The only other thing I should add - is that it shouldn't just be about downvoting - it should also be about upvoting to cancel out unjust downvotes.
ie. if @tarazkp gives me a huge downvote, affecting my reputation disproportionately, because I disagreed with one of his posts, I should be able to somehow bring this to the attention of helsing for consideration :D
It's to be expected that helsing will get a lot of retaliation flags, lowering his reputation to a point where he can't influence others' any more.
well account A cannot affect the reputation of account B if account B has a higher reputation than account A.
So if it has the support of enough whales that upvote it high enough, that won't be an issue.
Posting, getting upvotes, and also giving upvotes, is out of the scope of this project. A downvote most always feels unjustified to the one receiving it.
If you really feel mistreated, bring it to the attention of the community. People in steem.chat #general or #steemitabuse are usually very helpful in these rare cases where your reputation got ruined for no real reason.
I'm not talking about personal experience, but I've seen it a lot in the whale wars. People commenting have been indiscriminately downvoted - like a guilt by association kind of thing - and I think it's been happening on both sides.
It has the potential to become a bigger issue as more players come into the game.
Hopefully helsing will help to calm all that down a bit.
If you get involved in a "flag war" as a bystander, it can happen that your reputation goes down. I don't necessarily see that as a bad thing, as long as the account isn't nuked completely. I don't have an overview how often that happens, all cases I saw were solved by the community.
However, helsing is not intended to bring life. That would need an account optimized for reputation, something he won't care about.
If Helsing is only flagging accounts how will he get flagged. Is this account also going to post?
I think the accounts passing judgement should be posting updates for Helsing so there is a record of who has the keys to the Monster Slayer and those flagging can also be flagged. Flagging a nobody account would just be a waste of VP and delegation.
Yep.
It won't be posting so will only remain at 25 which means it has very little REP effect on anyone but, it won't be upvoting either.
The wallet has the effect on Rep and up or down votes or -17 @berniesanders would have a useless flag, Rep is public perception power is in the wallet not the public view
I love the idea by the way, you know that already.
Bernie's downvotes have zero effect on rep (positive or negative), but the bots that go along with him do. He does, however, still have an effect on wallet. I wrote a post explaining it recently.
I see Rep as a self ego meter, wallet is what everyone wants. If that one guy was still making $300+ per post and was Rep 25 do you really think it would cause him to quit posting?
Yet it goes the other way as well if his Rep was 78 and he made zero on every post he made, he would go away quickly.
I think more ego's are hurt by his Rep being 76 than by his being up voted the $300+ every post.
There are a large hand full above 65 who got to their Rep the exact same way except more than one supported them, are we going after all of them?
I don't think rep plays a big factor in that turmoil. When it started, his rep was pretty low. That being said, it is an ego thing and people love it. It's stupid and meaningless, though.
yes, but it hasn't much effect depending. this is why one TA keeps climbing so fast. Yeah, who cares about rep...
Would love to get a trial going but it is hard to get anyone to commit. Ancaps ;)
Start with taking the money, if you have 15 of the top 100 agreeing and delegating to the project just have them follow the account with a 1% flag as well. Helsing takes the money and whales chip at the rep until bad behavior is stopped.
yes, that is an option too but I would rather have them delegate fully as it engages them better.
As @pharesim said plus, everyone uses their stake as they see fit. For this at least, upvotes wouldn't be considered to start with especially since it earns curation. It loses its impartial status.
Yes, and this is why the quorum could be a decent solution as it largely takes away the emotional stake.
the curation could be used to donate to a worthy cause/charity :)
FWIW I don't see much wrong with this idea, as long as it is implemented properly. You seem to have considered most aspects of this..
I am trying, all I need is a bit of support to get a trial up, if it looks like it doesn't work, so be it but for at least the largest of cases, it will be decisive and can lay dormant at other times.
and that's all you can do really - try and come up with a good idea, and try to get the support of enough SP.
FWIW you'd have my support - though I'm not sure my 2-3SP (~1% of my SP) would be much help
You should also consider throwing your hat in the ring as a witness... you seem to care about the direction of the platform, and that seems to be one way to get a louder voice..
That requires me running a witness node... I am not that capable :)
"This is a decentralized system and everyone's stake is theirs to use as they see fit so there should be no problem. The whales working together would be a force to really be reckoned with".
Taraz -this post
Voting Abuse
Regardless of how much money any one individual has, there are always many other individuals with
similar wealth. Even the wealthiest individual rarely has much more than the next couple wealthiest
combined. Furthermore, those who have a large investment in a community also have the most to lose by
attempting to game the voting system for themselves. It would be like the CEO of a company deciding to
stop paying salaries so he could pocket all of the profits. Everyone would leave to work for other
companies and the company would become worthless, leaving the CEO bankrupt rather than wealthy.
Steem White Paper
IMO you are suggesting some effective solutions to change the current distribution of rewards for the betterment of SteemIt long term and the benefit of MOST current users immediately, upon implementation of this plan.
Would love to get a trial going to see.
Is there a way to challenge a down vote by Helsing in a timely manor . In the beginning one wrong down vote could cripple a minnow and the concept . There should be a way to compensate if it happens .
There is a rule when sending out a killer to kill . "never loose oversight on you killer "
How is it going to be monitored ?
I see how to shut it down , If that is required .
Trial is essential !!!!
I Totally agree with Helsing and what needs to be done .
This might be true if you only consider total amount in $ . If you compare a persons wealth compared to % invested in Steemit then I'd bet that there are some minnows that have a greater % of their wealth in Steemit then some whales .
Whales are currently well compensated for their stake
It cannot have much effect on reputation as it has none (25) itself. However in regards to rewards, it culd only ever take as much as a post is worth. So, if wrongly flagged, it would be likely one post max. However to begin with, I don't think it would come close to flagging minnows and the cases it dealt with would be very obvious.
That clears up some of my concerns and makes sense .
The cases it deals with would be the key and the main reason to support it .
I like the idea and concept . It is needed as long as it has checks and balances and not abused .
A fantastic idea and the fact that thought has been out into the governance of it is quite appealing. Here hoping there is enough interest
I hope there is too at least for a decent trial but, I am limited in my reach so any support is appreciated. Hint hint ;)
I had a run in with a scam bot last night.
It took over an account and started spamming comments on posts, with links to steemil.com
I reported to steemcleaners on their webform and got an error message that the account had already been flagged with them.
I didn't see any action from them though.
I wasted a tonne of voting power knocking him down to 10 and commenting a warning on each of its comments until it stopped.
Very convincing operation, which could easily spread like a virus across a less savvy userbase.
Can Helsing include some sort of live bot we can add an account to?
If @x comments; And the comment contains a link; And the link isn't to steemit.com; Reply with "Links in the comment above will take you away from steemit.com. Check the URL carefully"You could require a 1 SBD fee to avoid malicious use, and grateful upvotes on the comments would give Helsing a bigger stake over time.
Not sure but I think at least in the initial phases it would be clear cut cases but again, that would apply here too. But, the idea of Helsing would be never to have its own stake otherwise it loses objectivity and decentralization. It is a decentralized cooperation of 'my stake, I choose'.