Great post

Important information, it would be good for everyone to read especially the whales, thank you.

Very nice images, I likes 
I love to join steemit and to help earh other 
#vote and follow you
Do not forget to follow me

A circlejerk is just a little fun between consenting adults, let's not be prudish.

Oh, you meant something else, sorry...

I haven't checked the white paper as I'm not very techy. But was thinking the other day to ask....How many witnesses control the show? the fewer the easier for a hostile take over. everyone has their price. And if some big money folks decide to takeover steemit, how hard would that be with Billions to offer? to simply buy the witnesses off?
Same goes for huge BTC mining operations, they got in for the money, not to support the platform, and are in fact making it more centralized ever day with thier greed.
Just my 2 cents worth
Thanks for reading

Does a whale witness vote have any more power than someone with less steempower or are all witness votes equal?

As long as there is no clown involved it should be fine. Unless your name is Falcone or Maroni, in that case I'd have to kick you in the nodes...

I upvoted you, please lock up my post too and dont forget to upvote me @iqbalmaulana

Question: is it important to a user to vote for all 30 quotas that they have, or voting 1-2 is enough?

I hear you @chitty

Appreciate your discussion and Bravery on this sensitive topic!

Keep STEEM N ON,
Frank

P.S. BTW That's Gangsta! ( your pic ) LOL

Politics has nothing to do with politics, we need to follow this rule and with this understanding democracy can be better. That picture beneath got me laughing though

I don't think you should blame the whales for not voting.  Perhaps they are not voting because the witnesses are not worthy.  As you know with politics, there is always an agenda.  A true anarchist goes their own way, and steers clear of the political agendas being bandied about.  The whales are lucky people to be able to stay out of it.  In their position, I would do the same.  I think that should be the goal of everyone on Steemit who just wants to provide good content.

Good old Tommy gun Ganstas 😄

Look at youtube. Most of the more popular youtubers all know eachother and hang out with eachother when they get the chance. I don't think it's a cirlce jerk as much as if the witness's are working together to make something better you're going to naturally grow tighter as a team.

I think most if not all the information for steemit is stored on a block chain it's going to be hard for people to collude together for control.  New steemians come in everyday and start poking around the block chain to see what they can find and what's going on. 

I'm excited to see as witness's rise and fall how that effects that path forward and the swings of power for years to come.

Great post, i will follow you, resteem and upvote everyday  while you do same to me. a deal?
https://steemitimages.com/0x0/https://media.giphy.com/media/3WY8qMF9l3ldK/giphy.gif

I'd love to a see a downvote option.

I'd love to see 1x Stake rather than 30X stake.  Meaning, instead of getting 30 votes each at full stake weight.  I get 100% of my stake I can split however I would like.  

I have 40M Vests.  Under 30x 1.2B Vests.  Some of the top Stake holders have 1B vests.  Under 30X that's 30B vests.  The impact of the 30X is huge.  

Lastly, you failed to mention how some of the witnesses have a private witness chat going.

Those are my concerns.  Thanks for talking about it openly and nice to meet you.

<3

Aggroed

good post^^  

Article aside... that is an epic pic!!! 😎

I do feel that Bitcoin is a more decentralized system because of that, which I think is essential for value storage. DPOS may be the best system for the steemit blockchain, but I dont think it would be best for Bitcoin. Thanks for elaborating on the topic

@chitty, it's rather a tricky area, isn't it? As you hinted at, connecting and communicating is a fundamental part of human systems that seek to "organize" something. And I think an important point to keep in mind here is that "cooperation" isn't necessarily the same thing as "collusion," and cooperation doesn't necessarily *lead to* collusion. 

As far as I can tell (and granted, I am NOT an expert!) the Achilles heel of decentralization is the risk of "fragmentation." When we put *too* much effort into making sure nobody (or group of nobodys) holds too much power we also run the risk of squelching positives *like* cooperation and "economies of scale." 

In a sense, it's a bit like a farmer's market... both the growers AND the public benefit from everything being in one place. But that also means we have to have a set of (dread!) common "rules" or "guidelines" and includes the risk of "factions" aligning under common interests. But we put up with it, because it really SUCKS (as a user) to waste all day going to 17 individual farms ("fragmentation") to shop for dinner.

Again, this is overly simplistic.

Thank you for the article and for encouraging us to comment freely.  Here is how I feel about our top 19 witnesses.  They are complete saints in my book.  These folks are very bright and I am sure they could be using their servers and know how to make more money elsewhere in the field of cryptocurrency.  Luckily for the rest of us they are committed to Steemit and the idea of a censorship-free social media platform.  :-)

In this paragraph you clearly identify that there is a n-person Prisoner's Dilemma (let's start calling it nPD, for short?)

> ### Is there anything we can do to make the system fairer?
> The only real way to stop the so call "circle-jerk" is to **get everyone to vote**, there are plenty of big whales that do not vote on any witness and this is actually prejudicial to the system. If big whales do not vote, then they contribute to making the "circle-jerk" stronger as witnesses just vote for each other and decide who gets to be on the top 19.

In bold I have highlighted the factor that precisely maps to this:

> * each player has two options: cooperate or defect
> * defecting is the dominant strategy for each player (i.e. each player is better off choosing to defect than to cooperate no matter how many other players choose to cooperate)
> * the dominant strategies (to defect) intersect at a deficient equilibrium point (if all players choose to defect, the outcome is worse than if each player had chosen non-dominant strategies (to cooperate))

It is also known in another form as "The Tragedy of the Commons", as the issue is the same. If only we could make people conserve a resource that does not cost them anything to exploit. Except the other way around, how to get them to exploit  the resource that costs them nothing to conserve. A perfect mirror, with the same dynamic, regardless.

I think this is why the witness account should simply not be able to vote at all. Neither should it be able to power down until it is inactive for long enough for a power down payment. This enables others to shuffle up until the witness has powered down enough to fund a project.

In the Prisoner's Dilemma, in general, defecting means ratting out the others. In the Witness prisoner's dilemma, it is participating in a voting pattern that is about buying the votes of others, like you say. Thus, if witnesses votes on witnesses, were not counted, while the witness is active, then they have no dilemma to deal with. 

This is a starting point for how I would address the problem. There is too many people saying 'it's my stake blah blah' This does not extend to abusing privilege as a witness. Either you can decide with your stake who is a witness, or you can be a witness. 

The only real influence a witness has, compared to, say, someone like me, who is not a witness (and note, this also effectively includes the backup witnesses, because their veto does not count in a hardfork quorum) is that they can block a hardfork. Anyone can propose a hardfork change, and anyone can wage a campaign of persuasion upon the general population of users to get a shrieking cry for something to rise up and bite Steemit and make them do it. 

Of course, the most potent enablers of this, are large stakeholders (rightly) who can raise the profile of those who are supporting what they want to see happen. But there is nothing that also stops a small user starting a campaign, and recruiting whales to support it either.

In the top comment, also @aggroed has pointed out that there should be a witness downvote. I can wholeheartedly agree with that. I might also add, that a slider would be a good thing, but still limit it to 30 votes, for the sake of bandwidth conservation and computation conservation.

Yeah the circle jerk is a reality, I'm not to new to the social game... I have tons of followers in other networks and see it all the time. 

The past 50 days I was on steemit, I tried to get into the circle 😂😂😂... many said I wasn't ready yet lol

That gun is tomphson on crisis action