This "economy" is not flawed. It works exactly as it was designed to. I think the problem you're having is ideological rather that economic. If you read the white paper closely you'll realize that Steemit is 100% capitalistic. I mean 100%. That's more capitalism than any other so called capitalistic economy known in the world. In the U.S. economy we have a fair amount of socialism. Many services are subsidized by the government in order to equalize the playing field. Ned Scott had no such intentions for Steemit. It's 100% either you have money to invest or you don't. The more money you invest the more money you will make. The only guarantee that a potential investor has that they will get a decent ROI is self upvoting. so long as Ned Scott is driving the ideology behind the development of the Steem blockchain, this will remain the same. Self upvoting is at the heart of how Steemit works and it's not going away.
As an alternative to self upvoting, I created SteemAX via @learnelectronics. I'd recommend taking a quick look at my article in which I propose that disproportional vote exchanges are not only more profitable, they're more ethical. Creating the ability to trade votes is the same as creating an open market, a capitalistic concept, whereby the one and only good in this system, STEEM, can be traded at different ratios. However, what's really being traded isn't STEEM, but faith in each other's quality. A disproprtional exchange of upvotes not only creates better ROI than self upvoting for the one on the good side of the ratio, it creates a much better opportunity for a whale to get a larger share of the curation reward as well as a small return on their upvote value. However, this only works out for both parties if they post quality content others also want to upvote. Just getting into a single exchange requires the two parties interact, which is more than can be said for bid bots, self upvoting, vote farming, etc.
You are wrong if you think self voting gives highest ROI. Invest in trust and relationships gives the highest ROI in the long run.
This is true. But that's not what I said. I said
The operative word here is not "highest", it's "guaranteed".
Also, please read my article, which I linked to above. I think I explain myself well.
Was it designed like that?
Yes.
Is that design flawed?
Yes.
Or you mean to say a design can't be flawed?
I mean to say as far as @ned and Steemit Inc are concerned it's not flawed at all. As far as @kevinwong is concerned it is. It's a matter of perspective taken from one's ideology. This is not @kevinwong's idea of a "good" economy. But would @kevinwong then be sitting with the likes of Karl Marx, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, or perhaps even Wilhelm Weitling?
The Steem ecosystem is very new and unique. At the moment Steem is going through a trial and error stage. We are all in the process of discovering what works well, not so well and not at all. Steem should be considered flawed from everyone's perspective. As a community we should work towards reducing those flaws or the impact of those flaws.
New? How is it new? It's been on beta for almost three years now. I've never heard of a product being new three years later or still in beta lol.
It is in beta this long because it is new and unique. It is expected to take some time to get it right. Let's see what Steem is like a year from now.
No it isn't new. Crypto is new. I.e. the medium of exchange has taken a new format, but capitalism is not new. I hope you do realize that many people have come before you, Ned or Kevin and have spent many hours toiling, writing, debating and attempting to contrive the "perfect" economic system. This is absolutely nothing new. And I find it quite ironic that people on Steemit like to "philosophize" about what type of "economy" Steemit should have and yet have taken little to no time to cite, quote or even remark on all the emmense amount of previous works on such matters.
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There are several elements to the Steem ecosystem that are very unique. One example is the rewards pool. Instead of paying content creators directly with Steem, we allocate the rewards from newly created Steem. It is like a mandatory prepayment of content; it somewhat resembles a tax, which is then redistributed in the ecosystem. We decide where that payment goes, instead of a central authority. Though Steemit Inc could play that role if they wanted to, considering the amount of SP they have.
We can choose to essentially opt out by self-voting. This can be countered with downvotes. We can sell votes but the ROI and middlemen (if we delegate to bots) reduces the return to sellers compared to self-voting. In other words, there is no guaranteed method of preventing some form of redistribution of our stake.
The Steem ecosystem has elements of both capitalism and socialism. If anything, @kevinwong's proposal aligns more closely to capitalism than the existing system. As his proposal enables and supports the operating of the free market. The current system could end up in market failure, 100% self-voting and no incentive to create anything of value.
No, the reward pool is not unique, sorry. It's simply a number representing the GDP, the one and only product being Steem, productivity being measured by the number of transactions processed.
Name one aspect of Steemit's ecosystem that performs like socialism. Socialism requires a central authority to redistribute wealth. There's (technically) no central authority to Steemit. And the rewards are distributed by who has the most capital investment.
And don't confuse philanthropy with socialism.
Finally, I'm not against Kevin's ideas (it seems like your defending him). I just think I have a better solution. ;) Check it out.
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