Steem pyramid scheme revealed

[chryspano]

Voters can't change the mayor when he controls more than 50% of the vote. And forking is illegal for Steem. Checkmate.

In the rare case that govs go really nuts, voters could vote for other mayors and not themselves, and afaik this 50% you are talking about is going to drop rapidly, so your "arguments" (or should I say FUDs) are not valid.

I already explained to everyone (especially smooth) upthread why I think it will not drop. Don't forget the 80% attrition rate and the 59 million tokens held by Steemit Inc. I will not repeat those points again. It is getting redundant.

What you think is irrelevant of what will really happen, improvement and adaptation are always on the table, too bad you can't see this.

As for the 19 witnennes(number can increase in the future) you perhaps think that the 3 bitcoin mining pools is a better alternative, lol!

Let's stay on fact. Upthread smooth and I (and r0ach) discussed the technical reasons why it can't increase. As as for the game theory, you can have the same number of owners (of stake) implementing 1000 servers, it is still three guys in control.

Yes, you discussed it and that's your opinion today

Dan has had years to develop his blockchain solution. We've got a pretty good idea of what he has come up with and where his design instincts go. Can they invent something better? Can someone else who competes with them? Will the sky fall down tomorrow? Questions. Not answers.

Yes, questions, "answers" and FUD, three completly different things.

[iamnotback]

https://steemit.com/steemit/@dantheman/notice-to-bot-spammers

Seems like we'll be having a reputation system to fight of spam/bots.

I was wondering what the hell his solution for that would be.  The obvious answer is being required to burn a fee to post.  His solution is far too complex and can have innocent users gamed or their speech suppressed imo...

The answer might not be as obvious as you think:

https://steemit.com/steemit/@dantheman/notice-to-bot-spammers#@r0achtheunsavory/re-dantheman-notice-to-bot-spammers-20160729t230052764z

[criptix]

https://steemit.com/steemit/@dantheman/notice-to-bot-spammers

Seems like we'll be having a reputation system to fight of spam/bots.

I was wondering what the hell his solution for that would be.  The obvious answer is being required to burn a fee to post.  His solution is far too complex and can have innocent users gamed or their speech suppressed imo...

The answer might not be as obvious as you think:

https://steemit.com/steemit/@dantheman/notice-to-bot-spammers#@r0achtheunsavory/re-dantheman-notice-to-bot-spammers-20160729t230052764z

Just prune the blockchain from comments/blogpost with less then x upvotes or something similar.
Imo you want to only keep the things of interest anyway.

[r0ach]

Yea, as I had already stated on my reply in that thread, someone has to bear the cost of all these actions, so posting a main topic should likely require a fee, while comments don't, but comments get culled/pruned off the chain eventually.  I think Anonymint has painted himself into a corner here with the whole "you can never fork the chain" mentality.  If he actually attempts to create some social network coin like this, he's going to forget to cover numerous variables like the example I just stated.  He'll then end up forking probably dozens of times to fix them.  Or you'd just have to sit back and observe Steem for something like a year to see what works, but by that time, Larimer might have already forked Steem 9000 times into something that works good.

[criptix]

Yea, as I had already stated on my reply in that thread, someone has to bear the cost of all these actions, so posting a main topic should likely require a fee, while comments don't, but comments get culled/pruned off the chain eventually.

The only problem i see in a fee to post is that it might be a too great hurdle for newcomers except you give out free money on signup - but that again would help and not fight spammers (atleast initialy).

[r0ach]

Yea, as I had already stated on my reply in that thread, someone has to bear the cost of all these actions, so posting a main topic should likely require a fee, while comments don't, but comments get culled/pruned off the chain eventually.

The only problem i see in a fee to post is that it might be a too great hurdle for newcomers except you give out free money on signup - but that again would help and not fight spammers (atleast initialy).

Never underestimate the Larimer.  He probably already knows this and will just do it after he already on-boards all the users.  He probably knew it was a hard sell to do it in the beginning.  This is not a problem you solve resource free.

[DecentralizeEconomics]

Yea, as I had already stated on my reply in that thread, someone has to bear the cost of all these actions, so posting a main topic should likely require a fee, while comments don't, but comments get culled/pruned off the chain eventually.

The only problem i see in a fee to post is that it might be a too great hurdle for newcomers except you give out free money on signup - but that again would help and not fight spammers (atleast initialy).

Never underestimate the Larimer.  He probably already knows this and will just do it after he already on-boards all the users.  He probably knew it was a hard sell to do it in the beginning.  This is not a problem you solve resource free.

You know as well as I do that the Larimer Gang and their associates don't care about long-term sustainability.  They only care about creating a short-term cash cow to enrich themselves at the expense of the naive who fall for their schemes.

[generalizethis]

Yea, as I had already stated on my reply in that thread, someone has to bear the cost of all these actions, so posting a main topic should likely require a fee, while comments don't, but comments get culled/pruned off the chain eventually.

The only problem i see in a fee to post is that it might be a too great hurdle for newcomers except you give out free money on signup - but that again would help and not fight spammers (atleast initialy).

Never underestimate the Larimer.  He probably already knows this and will just do it after he already on-boards all the users.  He probably knew it was a hard sell to do it in the beginning.  This is not a problem you solve resource free.

You know as well as I do that the Larimer Gang and their associates don't care about long-term sustainability.  They only care about creating a short-term cash cow to enrich themselves at the expense of the naive who fall for their schemes.

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=naive&allowed_in_frame=0

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=fool&allowed_in_frame=0

Words have interesting roots.

[iamnotback]

... think Anonymint has painted himself into a corner here with the whole "you can never fork the chain" mentality.  If he actually attempts to create some social network coin like this, he's going to forget to cover numerous variables like the example I just stated.  He'll then end up forking probably dozens of times to fix them.  Or you'd just have to sit back and observe Steem for something like a year to see what works, but by that time, Larimer might have already forked Steem 9000 times into something that works good.

I am confident you have access to a dictionary, so your bolded phrase (emphasis added by myself) is inapplicable.

i·de·al
īˈdē(ə)l/
adjective
adjective: ideal

    1.
    satisfying one's conception of what is perfect; most suitable.
    2.
    existing only in the imagination; desirable or perfect but not likely to become a reality.

noun
noun: ideal; plural noun: ideals

    1.
    a person or thing regarded as perfect.

I was referring to IDEALS to shoot for (not a guarantee those IDEALS can be achieved in every case) and my points there were more focused on not forking w.r.t. to reverting history especially money matters such as the rearranging the balances of a crypto-currency. The ALL CAPS word "IDEALS" is the first word in the subject of that thread.

Complex voting and content publishing on-the-blockchain game theory wasn't even in my mind when I started the above linked thread.

[iamnotback]

https://steemit.com/steemit/@dantheman/notice-to-bot-spammers

Seems like we'll be having a reputation system to fight of spam/bots.

I was wondering what the hell his solution for that would be.  The obvious answer is being required to burn a fee to post.  His solution is far too complex and can have innocent users gamed or their speech suppressed imo...

The answer might not be as obvious as you think:

https://steemit.com/steemit/@dantheman/notice-to-bot-spammers#@r0achtheunsavory/re-dantheman-notice-to-bot-spammers-20160729t230052764z

Just prune the blockchain from comments/blogpost with less then x upvotes or something similar.
Imo you want to only keep the things of interest anyway.

so posting a main topic should likely require a fee, while comments don't, but comments get culled/pruned off the chain eventually.

Why would comments (and votes if you are referring to reducing data bloat) get pruned. Everything that is published is to be retained forever. There is important information in comments as well.

Who will decide which comments are important and which can be deleted. You come full circle back to the censorship problem again.

[iamnotback]

Yea, as I had already stated on my reply in that thread, someone has to bear the cost of all these actions, so posting a main topic should likely require a fee, while comments don't, but comments get culled/pruned off the chain eventually.

The only problem i see in a fee to post is that it might be a too great hurdle for newcomers except you give out free money on signup - but that again would help and not fight spammers (atleast initialy).

Never underestimate the Larimer.  He probably already knows this and will just do it after he already on-boards all the users.  He probably knew it was a hard sell to do it in the beginning.  This is not a problem you solve resource free.

You likely can't squelch the spammers with a fee without also squelching the casual users who will not pay and who will not earn enough on the site to cover the expenses.

Instead the fees should match costs of the blockchain (which should become vanishingly small if the blockchain design is efficient), thus spamming will be economic.

You can't defeat spamming with a resource cost that is charged to everyone proportionally.

The way to defeat spamming is like-minded groupings as I wrote in my first blog post (which was well worth the $4500 I was paid for it even if a different algorithm is required, well $2250 and the rest probably lost as Steem dies). Spammers then disappear from your grouping algorithmically.

[iamnotback]

It's up to the voter to determine if they are sufficiently convinced and if their upvote should be given.

KYC? Video verification? No need for all these.

I'll respond to this in the future. For now I will just say I am confident I can convince you that it is absolutely necessary (but not immediately on signup as that would make a horrific attrition rate).

Without video KYC, there is no way to stop the identity theft and copyright infringement issues, because there is no way to hold anyone responsible for what they post.

Even if we attain a decentralized, permissionless blockchain, if we have no way to identify posters of content, then it can become illegal to host a full blockchain node because those infringed have to deal with Whac-A-Mole against innumerable Sybils and will instead be forced to petition the government for a complete ban of the blockchain protocol. We have to be able to move the enforcement out to the ends where individual posters can be sued. Once we can identify posters with their national identification (666) number then the government can just eventually turn off their number so they can't post to the Internet any more. I don't really like where this is headed, but I don't see any way around it, the Bible appears to be correct. My hope is that with KYC, the community can develop a self-policing system to blacklist certain repeat offenders (after much careful deliberation), so that it doesn't fall into the lap of the government and 666 number.

Additionally with out video KYC, there is no way to prevent whales from splitting their voting power to avoid any attempt to improve the otherwise what appears to be the insolubly broken voting algorithm by for example penalizing whales for colluding (and other reasons I will not mention because it would reveal some design improvements I am contemplating).

I have started to write some of my design ideas for a white paper and here follows an excerpt which better explains Steem's dilemma from the quoted link to "the insolubly broken voting algorithm" above:

Let's consider orthogonally the way votes will be interpreted for rankings from the rewards paid due to voting, although they are as of writing unified in Steem.

The voting algorithm in Steem apportions a constant percentage debasement to the content producers and curators. In order to disincentivize voting for their own content (to pay themselves), my understanding from reading @theoretical and @akareyon, is Steem's algorithm pays more curation rewards to those with less stake who vote earlier on content (which presumes risk cost of not being able to predict which content will receive the most votes, thus encouraging voting for best content) and weighting the value of each normalized vote (on each instance of content) by the total number of normalized votes squared (on that instance), where normalized means an equal amount of voting power. Voting power is some composition of stake and recent voting frequency (refer to @theoretical and @dv8silencersteem for details).

The flaw in Steem's algorithm is whales nearly entirely control the rewards and ranking of content, because for example a whale with 1000 times more stake than an average minnow, will push content 100 (not 10 due to squared weighting) times higher in rewards and ranking than the votes of 100 average minnows. Additionally the higher ranked due to a whale's vote, the more exposure and votes the content will receive. Additionally there is the game theory opportunity for whales to collude in order to award themselves as curators and content benefactors, the maximum squared earnings bypassing the risk cost the earliness and squaring algorithms were intended to create. Also a side-effect of the squared weighting is that only a tiny fraction of the site's content is paid anything meaningful, although this is lauded by the Steem white paper as causing newbies to inaccurately access their earning potential and is intended to create a lottery gambling mentality (but how this can sustain and attract serious content producers isn't clear to me because favoritism non-meritocracies are not anti-fragile thus increase risk and discourage investment of time, effort, and other forms of capital).

Whereas, without a Sybil attack on signups defense, there is no way to alter the algorithm to limit whales since whales could split their stakes amongst many Sybil accounts to accomplish the same effects. Without Steem's earliness and squared weightings, minnows might still vote their conscience if voting to pay themselves is such a small ROI making it a PITA, but whales would surely develop automated bots to vote to pay themselves, because the potential extra income is significant to them (larger capital accepts lower fixed rate of compounded gains). And without a Sybil attack defense, there is no way to prevent whales from spliting their stake to escape any algorithm which attempts to prevent them from doing so.

Our solution is:

1. Prevent Sybil attacks on user accounts by ...
2. Forbid ...
3. Forbid voting with ...
4. Content continues earning rewards forever.

Thus the only way to earn ...

Since whales can't ...

To prevent dolphins (i.e. stake between minnows and whales) from voting for themselves  ...

Thus we can employ linear weighting of voting power ...

Due to the ...

A minimum transaction fee will be charged on transfers which is burned, so it offsets the debasement rate. As transaction demand increases, a greater percentage of the money supply will ... So eventually debasement is entirely offset by transaction fees and transaction fees can be reduced accordingly.

... Ranking is orthogonal to rewards, and each UI client will decide how it interprets votes to provide rankings. For example, like-minded heuristics may be employed.

Tokens may be transferred before they are ...

¹ Which much be less than the cost of buying a Facebook account. Note Facebook
  accounts have different market prices depending on if they are phone verified
  and the age of the account ...

[AlexGR]

Why would comments (and votes if you are referring to reducing data bloat) get pruned. Everything that is published is to be retained forever. There is important information in comments as well.

Who will decide which comments are important and which can be deleted. You come full circle back to the censorship problem again.

https://steemit.com/steemit/@opheliafu/an-alteration-to-my-art-algorithm-and-here-is-the-output

Comments (and nicknames of these comments) immortalized in art... and pruned from the blockchain? Not gonna happen...

In other news I was tired of hearing same old about "fair distribution" and writing the same again and again in comments, so I wrote an article of the "life-isn't fair-variety": https://steemit.com/steem/@alexgr/the-ideal-of-fair-distribution-in-cryptocurrencies-and-steem-can-it-exist-in-real-life

[iamnotback]

In other news I was tired of hearing same old about "fair distribution" and writing the same again and again in comments, so I wrote an article of the "life-isn't fair-variety": https://steemit.com/steem/@alexgr/the-ideal-of-fair-distribution-in-cryptocurrencies-and-steem-can-it-exist-in-real-life

Why do I have to repeat to you again that Steem's 80% to the top 0.1% is not concordant with the power-law distribution of wealth.

...per the power-law distribution of income/wealth it gets 85% concentrated to say the top 20% of content producers and roughly 38% to the top 1%...

[iamnotback]

This is a salient example of how Steem's voting algorithm is preventing it from incentivizing any content which doesn't jive with the existing demographics of Steem:

https://steemit.com/travel/@chhaylin/the-steemit-couple-representing-steemit-in-florence-italy-in-our-travel-blog

There is no way that blog post is worth $6000. He is riding on the appreciation of his prior two blog posts about philosophy and that highly intellectual whales (e.g. @smooth, @complexring, @berniesanders) like him because he writes intellectual blog posts. But this one was not. It was some monkey-see-monkey-do travel story of which there are many copies already on Steem.

It is impossible for new demographics to form on Steem, because they get discouraged and leave due to the fact that only those who jibe with the existing whales will find enough rewards to make it worth continuing.

P.S. @complexring does not explain math very well for laymen:

https://steemit.com/mathematics/@complexring/the-mathematics-of-fractional-reserve-banking

Everything he wrote there will fly right over most everyone's head. I am confident I could do a much better job elucidating that math point. I don't see the point of ranking that so highly when the masses will just get turned off by that content.

Edit: Steem is really scraping the bottom of the barrel now by rewarding $4000 for this piece-of-crap:

https://steemit.com/life/@fairytalelife/it-happened-on-the-road-to-steemit-nirvana

[generalizethis]

This is a salient example of how Steem's voting algorithm is preventing it from incentivizing any content which doesn't jive with the existing demographics of Steem:

https://steemit.com/travel/@chhaylin/the-steemit-couple-representing-steemit-in-florence-italy-in-our-travel-blog

There is no way that blog post is worth $6000. He is riding on the appreciation of his prior two blog posts about philosophy and that highly intellectual whales (e.g. @smooth, @complexring, @berniesanders) like him because he writes intellectual blog posts. But this one was not. It was some monkey-see-monkey-do travel story of which there are many copies already on Steem.

It is impossible for new demographics to form on Steem, because they get discouraged and leave due to the fact that only those who jibe with the existing whales will find enough rewards to make it worth continuing.

P.S. @complexring does not explain math very well for laymen:

https://steemit.com/mathematics/@complexring/the-mathematics-of-fractional-reserve-banking

Everything he wrote there will fly right over most everyone's head. I am confident I could do a much better job elucidating that math point. I don't see the point of ranking that so highly when the masses will just get turned off by that content.

Edit: Steem is really scraping the bottom of the barrel now by rewarding $4000 for this piece-of-crap:

https://steemit.com/life/@fairytalelife/it-happened-on-the-road-to-steemit-nirvana

I think community self moderation fixes this--does it develop? Who knows?

The other thing I'm watching is whether any small retailers use steemit as a store front so they can compete with amazon's ease of use--have yet to see it.

Unless the Medici are making the content decisions via large stake, you'll have poor man's taste layered onto a rich man's toy.

We'll see....

[bones261]

P.S. @complexring does not explain math very well for laymen:

https://steemit.com/mathematics/@complexring/the-mathematics-of-fractional-reserve-banking

Everything he wrote there will fly right over most everyone's head. I am confident I could do a much better job elucidating that math point. I don't see the point of ranking that so highly when the masses will just get turned off by that content.

I'll have to agree with you. I had a hard time following it, and I have a BA in math. Of course, since I don't really use anything that I learned in college, I promptly forgot what I learned over 25 years ago. I can still do algebra though.

[iamnotback]

The other thing I'm watching is whether any small retailers use steemit as a store front so they can compete with amazon's ease of use--have yet to see it.

Can you give me some of what you are smoking?

No chance in hell of what you are fantasizing about.

[generalizethis]

The other thing I'm watching is whether any small retailers use steemit as a store front so they can compete with amazon's ease of use--have yet to see it.

Can you give me some of what you are smoking?

No chance in hell of what you are fantasizing about.

I forget the name, but you can order in on Alpha Bay.

Anyways, I didn't that it would happen only that I was watching for it--and it does make sense for small retailers--though it depends on steemit's growth, which depends on managements ability to groom stable communities within the platform--which doesn't seem to be happening (though it still could).

[iamnotback]

The other thing I'm watching is whether any small retailers use steemit as a store front so they can compete with amazon's ease of use--have yet to see it.

Can you give me some of what you are smoking?

No chance in hell of what you are fantasizing about.

I forget the name, but you can order in on Alpha Bay.

Anyways, I didn't that it would happen only that I was watching for it--and it does make sense for small retailers--though it depends on steemit's growth, which depends on managements ability to groom stable communities within the platform--which doesn't seem to be happening (though it still could).

How does it make sense for small retailers of any significance to target a userbase of less than 100 million users instead of Amazon as you indicated? You know that Amazon allows small retailers to sell on Amazon. I could see some retailers offering products in exchange for Steem tokens when the active userbase reaches a million users, but this won't be lieu of selling every where else also.

As for the vaporware microtransactions ecosystem, we will see if it is ever developed.