RE: Call for crabs / Where have all the minnows gone by thoughts-in-time

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Viewing a response to: @pharesim/pyyhqv

· @thoughts-in-time ·
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The blockchain rewards large stakeholders with the ability to draw extra rewards from the pool because when they bought in it either boosted or secured Steem's overall market value, not only that, by HODLing Steem (or keeping it powered-up) it creates a sort of artificial scarcity and thus prevents steem from easily flowing to the market which keeps prices stable and prevents market manipulation.

Investing in Steem vs. letting the money sit in a bank and collecting and APY is a risk as the market is very volatile. You're not going to get an equivalent APY on Steem. Based on Steem's rate-limited voting, it allows for stakeholders to draw only so much before the rate-limited abuse mechanism prevents overdrawing from the pool.

But, if you're going to disregard the merit of a stakeholder's stake by attacking the way they choose to draw rewards from the pool, your attacking the very foundation of why they may have invested in the first place. This action of downvoting has great potential to cause them to reconsider not only the HODL but also their investment. 

You might think what they're doing is greedy, but the blockchain sets the stage for this behavior by giving larger stakeholders bigger votes. Truth is, even the "greedy folks" provided a service when they bought into Steem, and they continue to provide a service by staying powered-up.

Downvote these folks into oblivion, and they may oblige by selling to the market. Other investors looking from the outside in will take notice, and then you'll run into a real problem; Whose left willing to buy, and why? Show me an investor who wants to pay to be a crab in a bucket, and I'll show you 1000 more who want to be the crab who gets out of the bucket. Steem is already very niche as is, and we're lucky we have the investors that we do. Make it less accommodating to stakeholders, and fewer will invest.

P.S. Proof of brain cannot exist in a realm with unequal stake. What you have in reality is proof of wallet.

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@pharesim ·
The blockchain also gives stakeholders the ability to redistribute rewards using downvotes. If someone acts only in their own interest, and not that of the other stakeholders, we can use our stake to redistribute the rewards. 
Everything they take out isn't available for others, who could become the hodlers of tomorrow.
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@thoughts-in-time ·
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What you say is true from a technical perspective. What disturbs me is that STINC added reward disputes to the GUI after they realized they couldn’t do anything about the misuse of the flag tool. It was kind of a catch-all reason which allowed them to wash their hands of abuse of the tool. Then, recently, there is this push to normalize the use of flags by changing the GUI again, calling them downvotes and encouraging a culture of negative curation.

This type of negative curation doesn’t exist anywhere in the real world outside of socialist/communist hellholes, and it’s extremely odd behavior to attach to something financial. The more I think about it, the nebulous language in the whitepaper which encourages crabs in a bucket mentality but also discourages it in the same breath; This entire machination seems like a pretty twisted and sick social psychology experiment, and we’re the rats in the cage or the crabs in a bucket if you will.

If you want real proof of brain, you’re going to have to equalize everyone’s vote by socializing the voting power, and I don’t think you’d want that because then you’d be screwed out of the value of your fairly large stake. I mean, you can’t have it both ways; you can’t have proof of brain and wallet disparity at the same time. Let’s say, for example, you hadn’t delegated most of your stake, and you have a 100% VP at 7.71. As far as I’m concerned, this is fine. I don’t know how you came about your SP, and to be quite frank, its none of my business. I have to respect your large stake and what you do with it, but when you do something harmful to me or someone else, that’s where things start to get murky.

The machine of the blockchain is amoral, and it pits people against each other. It didn’t start that way on the GUI level, and I think when investors realize what it’s become, they’re not going to want to invest anymore. There’s a reason why socialism and communism fail every time, and it’s because people start cannibalizing each other, this is both figurative and literal in the real world. How this is represented on the blockchain is with downvoting.

I like how Steem draws creativity out of people, this aspect is very cool. **The NewSteem Cult**ure, however, is drawing negativity and envy out of people. The shift which is promoted and pushed from the top down is disgusting. It doesn’t work in the real world, and it will not work in the cyber world. People should have the opportunity to be generous with their stake, but it shouldn’t be some kind of mandate. When you try to coerce investors to behave in a certain way, nobody will want to invest. Then, all you have left is a worthless token that fails to re-launch.

I think what you'll end up learning is that the blockchain is a safe place to prove yet again that [**socialism fails every single time.**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZz2HF5KtrY) Imagine if we had these nebulous rules which seemingly contradict each other in real life. Sure, you can go out to start a business and do business things, become successful, yadda, yadda, yadda. But if somebody doesn't like what you're doing or becomes envious of you, they can steal your shit.

The reason this doesn't work in the real world is that people end up killing each other. Fortunately, none of this will happen in the blockchain world, but I think you will see this business model fail, and how much proof do people need that this communist utopia can and will never exist. Encouraging a culture of sharing, value exchange, content curation, and appreciation is one thing. But this klepto culture of downvoting and the like, that'll be the end of Steem.

Content curators and investors alike will read the writing on the wall, and they'll get out while the getting is good. Then all you'll have left is a bunch of ne'er-do-well **reward pool**ice officers/witnesses that'll continue to run the blockchain at a net loss as they bicker endlessly about the inflation pool as they fight over Steem that's only worth a fraction of a cent. That's your HF21 future in a nutshell.

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@pharesim · (edited)
Negative curation is part of the whitepaper, and it's even quoted in this post. Steemit didn't have to add anything later, and it surely doesn't need to be justified.
Downvotes were called downvotes before they were flags, that was renamed because they were used for disagreement  with opinions. Turned out flags was a bit too harsh, thus it was reverted again. If you tell history, make sure you know all of it. 

Constant self upvoting is harmful to everyone else, as the pool is shared between all users. Downvotes are not harmful, as they don't take anything away, they just give it back to the pool to be distributed differently. 

By what you write, you seem to be in favour of a pure PoS model. Why would we need content then? There's hundreds of coins where you get your share of the inflation based on your stake. 
Proof of brain can work to a certain degree. If the community makes it so. If not, we can save a lot of overhead and just ditch the content and rewards. 
That'd surely help with attracting more people, look how all the PoS coins are thriving, especially those with a high inflation! /s

(ps screw autocorrect)
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