The post was this: https://steemit.com/steemit/@rodomonte/social-attack-on-steemit
Now I was reading this and it reminds me a lot of the actual situation I was trying to solve here on steemit but then - discovering the incredible dumbness of bytemaster - I stop investigating.
Here I want to talk about 3 things:
1 - The afterward of that post
2 - The KIK approach
3 - The way I was investigating here on steemit to solve the problem
4 - Possible variant of 3 for kin
1 - Actually I choose to take this point first because this make evident a bad approach used here to solve the problem, that is authoritatively giving a weight to people, here is how it was annunced as you can see no reference whatsoever to the algo used. I was taken to -6 and a bit later, (not sure to check when), I was moved where I'm now at -1. Obviously this approach is not even serious and I will not talk about it. Anyway you can check my previous remark on this - if you unhide it - as a comment to the "Brief Update on Reputation Score" article.
2 - "Inspired by previous systems like Bitcoin’s block rewards and Steemit’s posting rewards, the Rewards Engine will create natural incentives for digital service providers to adopt Kin and become partners in the ecosystem" is written in the paper: basically the idea is to have the foundation to incentive and "invest" on good apps/content/vipchats creators not to earn dollars but to earn value for the token that give access to these services, pretty straight forwards, basically this is the first cybernationstate, even if they say they would in the future move all the actual foundation infrastructure to contracts "The Kin Rewards Engine will initially be administered by the Kin Foundation. However, over time, it will be decentralized based on smart contract technology." this is clearly not viable in the near term (at least on ethereum, born for this purpose but actually not even able to offer multisig).
Also I think this is not even useful, and they shouldn't even be transparent about that, since they have interest to give value to their own token, at least in the beginning where they have to bootstrap value, obviously then it's possible that they would stole value from everybody with gift to friends and similia but we should never forget that this would happen in a completely inferior measure since they have a finite amount to spend, and they can't create any new currency, so the effect would be anyway defined on time (70% depleted funds in 5.5 years).
It's subject to the same kind of attack I build for steem. Here I describe briefly the system:
Kin foundation has 6tn kin and every day it spend 0.061% of remaining sum, so kin funds follow this K_f(day)=6*((1-0.00061)^days)tn kin. (Where days is actually counted from inception).
Your service retribution is R = TDR * SSE ∕ TSE: basically your service get the derivative of that day kin funds (K_f(day-1)-K_f(day)) * your "service value" (SSE) generated that day on total "value generated" (TSE), where value generated is counted in kin days destroyed.
They address obvious problems such as people voting for himself but not actual mechanisms that works at the incentive level, for larger amounts of people, like the lottery attack I link at the beginning of the article. EDIT: This is instead addressed in appendix C, I address this solution to problem at the end.
3 - The way I was addressing the problem here was really easy, basically let people decide for other people weight and then use their own algo to get the news they value the most (actual algo would be something really similar to DAG, or in first approximation something like pagerank: every news is valued based on the weighted votes of others people I set a weight for.)
4 - The problem here is slightly more complex and similar only in appearance since here you should set an authoritative algo that decide for everybody. A possible approach would be to give weight to patterns, and so you should decide what patterns of exchanges in a graph actually create value and what others are just self referential, this is an huge problem!
Sure thing is that you have to identify the pattern that would appear in the case of the start of the lottery attack (and similar schemes) and defend against that, would for example a scheme where you create an artificial problem and then solve it be even spottable by the graph transaction? Obviously mafia-like (military) schemes doesn't give any more value to the whole system, but actually they create a huge amount of (apparently looking)legit traffic! This could be also really complex to implement technically, and in short this would be a really complex problem I'm happy a reputable and awesome project like kin is going to surely address in the future.
MEA CULPA: I don't read last appendix before reviewing this, I update the line talking about this and extending now on the solution. Solution is policing content with a jury based on "rich" people that so have interest in having things done right, but this is a problem since I could just policing competition, basically beeing a "capitalis" would be like having a really powerful PAC pressing senate heavily, were you can even stop competition from start existing. Even worst they talk about a constant policing, not only on the initial allow on new "entity build", so this would even enable backmailing, or indirect taxing of new digital entities. Point is, is really easy to solve the problem using old nation state old "solutions", but honestly I expect something more innovative than the old politburo/plutocracy government, having power even on the coming-into-existence process of new entities! But, taking into consideration that this is not a Bitcoin like approach to solving those kind of problems but a private company effort to start a virtuous system of reward - aka new currency - I appreciate this really a lot, even if I should probably reclassify this more near actual nation state than crypto-experiment.