Hello Steemians, yesterday we announced the release of the code for Hardfork 21 so that public testing may commence. This release candidate includes the Steem Proposal System (a/k/a SteemDAO) along with a long-term funding solution, and the Economic Improvement Proposal (EIP). In this post we want to go into more detail about the code we submitted relating to these two features. These changes are quite technical, and we’re sure people will have even more questions. We invite you to include those questions in the comments section below so that we can answer them in future posts.
The SteemDAO/SPS
The SteemDAO was a concept proposed by @blocktrades to allow Steem users to publicly propose work they are willing to do in exchange for pay. Steem users can then vote on these proposals in almost the same way they vote for witnesses It uses stake-weighted votes, but voters can vote for as many proposals as they want.
Steemit paid $50k USD to @blocktrades for the development of the SteemDAO. Once approved, and after enough time has transpired so as to demonstrate the security and stability of the system (about 1-2 weeks of operation), Steemit will provide initial, one-time funding, by converting 200k STEEM to SBD which will allow the market to test this new feature.
Long-Term SteemDAO Funding
At the request of the Witnesses, we have included code in this release that would add a long term funding mechanism for the SteemDAO/SPS. If this hardfork is accepted by the Witnesses, 10% of overall inflation (pulled from the rewards pool) would be used to fund proposals made through the SteemDAO/SPS.
Decentralization & Sustainability
It is important for the long term sustainability and growth of the Steem ecosystem that there be a decentralized mechanism for incentivizing the development of projects that will add long term value to Steem. Those projects can take the form of development efforts, marketing efforts, or anything else. Steem’s Proof-of-Brain algorithm was not designed to incentivize projects with long gestation periods and which require significant upfront capital expenditures. This was why @blocktrades proposed adding the SPS/SteemDAO to Steem and why Steemit agreed to fund that development.
Funding Valuable Initiatives
While we have agreed to provide some funding to the SPS, our resources are inherently finite. That means that the SteemDAO would, by definition, be unsustainable if Steemit were the only funding mechanism. This was essentially the argument that the majority of Steem Witnesses made to us, and we agreed. @blocktrades has used their experience with previous chains and worker proposal systems to design a system that should be very good at allocating resources to projects that Steem stakeholders believe will add tremendous value to the Steem blockchain, thereby benefiting all Steem stakeholders. Think of the SteemDAO as a decentralized tanker of rocket fuel that can be used to pour fuel into high-potential projects so that they can take flight. But if the SteemDAO has no fuel in its tanks, it can’t do its job.
As far as why the funding for the SteemDAO is coming out of the Rewards Pool, that was ultimately a decision that was made by the Witnesses, and we agree that it is an acceptable solution to the problem. The Rewards Pool is not shrinking, it is being updated so that it can reward a wider variety of creators (including developers, marketing firms, influencers, etc.) so that even more value can be added to the ecosystem, which benefits everyone.
Economic Improvement Proposal
At the request of the Witnesses, we have included code in this release that would implement economic changes which alter the incentive mechanisms to be better aligned with rewarding high-quality content. Last month we publicly voiced our support for a proposal that had been presented by multiple members of the community and which aligned with certain suggestions we had made in the past relating to a convergent linear rewards curve.
Shortly after starting the conversation, the Witnesses came to a consensus in support of adding the improvements to the upcoming hardfork. For that reason we have added essentially 3 elements to the hardfork which we are referring to as the “EIP.”
- A convergent linear rewards curve
- A separate downvote mana pool
- Increasing the curation rewards to equal the author rewards
We believe that these three changes, when packaged together, will shift the behavior of Steem Power holders in a positive way. Under these changes self-voting and bidbot usage will become less profitable than curating good content. While on paper author rewards are reduced, and curation rewards increased, we believe these changes will make it easier for good content to be discovered and rewarded, simply because that type of positive curation behavior will become more profitable under the EIP.
The net effect over time will be that more rewards go to good authors. Users should also spend more time curating content rather than voting for themselves or delegating out their power to bidbots because it will be more profitable for them to do so.
Convergent Linear Rewards Curve
While we can’t know for certain how these changes will affect the system, we do know how the system is behaving now and there is consensus that the system is functioning sub-optimally. Our decision to use the constant 2e12 in the new rewards curve is based on the desire to not change the system too much (because we know that the system still functions), while trying to make modifications that reduce undesired behaviors. In other words, the 2e12 is more similar to the existing linear rewards curve than either 2e11 or 2e13. The relevant behaviors are at the ends of the curve. For the majority of the curve, the payouts are nearly identical to a linear rewards curve.
Separate Downvote Mana Pool
Under the EIP, you will be able to render a certain number of downvotes for free (i.e. without reducing your voting mana). The way this works is that the Steem blockchain protocol looks at 25% of your voting mana and calculates how many downvotes that would grant you. Under the current system, the moment you started downvoting your voting mana would go down. Under the proposed system, Steem would basically ignore those downvotes with respect to your voting mana.
Your voting mana won't diminish, which means you can use that mana to reward more content. Once you use up those downvotes, if you continue to render downvotes, those will once again consume voting mana. This is an important mechanism for regulating abusive downvoting, but by making a percentage of user’s downvotes free, this will lead to more users downvoting detrimental content.
Here are two pie charts which illustrate how Steem’s yearly inflation is distributed now, and how it will be distributed after the changes.
Before:
After:
The Witnesses
While we agree that all of the changes requested by the Witnesses represent a positive step for the Steem blockchain, it is ultimately up to them whether this hardfork is approved, and they serve at the discretion of you all: the Steem stakeholders. Steemit, Inc. and its representatives do not, and will not, leverage our stake to influence this decision. Therefore, if you feel that your Witnesses are not representing your interests then we urge you to exercise the rights granted to you by this decentralized platform to elect Witnesses that you believe will represent your interests.
That being said, with respect to Hardfork 21, we found that the Witnesses you have elected acted rationally and responsibly, working together to develop solutions and come to a consensus on changes to make Steem a better place for everyone, while setting the stage for Smart Media Tokens.
Prepare!
Don't forget, if these plans do move forward, you will soon be able to submit proposals to the Steem blockchain. So start getting them ready!
The Steemit Team
Personally, I just can't believe that none of the ten percent of the funding for the SPS is coming from the witness portion of inflation, which remains unchanged.
Even a symbolic 1 or 2 % would have gone a long way to showing that we are all in this together.
Instead, it all comes directly from content creators. When will it be understood that without content creators this platform will wither and die? Why should content creators alone bear the burden?
Note, I think the SPS is a good thing. My issue is the funding. Just in case anyone goes all 'straw man.'
The witnesses would never allow a fork to go through that reduces their precious rewards. Are you out of your mind?
The majority are leeches who contribute the bare minimum to get that big @pumpkin vote. Once they've got it, they're golden.
Shall we talk about how a single person has sole control over our witnesses? Nah...wouldn't want to bring something like that up...
Yeah, that's true. I was having a crazy moment when I suggested it. Even crazier to think that any of them would be game!!
bwahahah, u were smoking weed coin when you type it out, see my even more ludicrous enquiry/suggestion below
I've been hovering around 80 for awhile and wouldn't be bought. The only one I saw publicly against it was @yabapmatt, who, ironically now - is number 1? Not saying your logic doesn't make sense, I've been trying to help the little guy since I got here being a 'little guy' myself. I love your views, really, not just kissing ass. Just wish more people were as perceptive.
Our main issue (by our, I mean the vast majority of @thealliance community) is the 50/50 split. Is there a way the masses can really have the power here or is this place actually centralized? I know no one that is in favor of this with less than 5000 SP.
@drakos has also publically come out against it, and with a whole lot of campaigning, he just went from 21 to 20! The community is against these changes and is doing as much as it can in the face of large stakeholders who are for these changes because they primarily benefit them.
Now, I've asked this question in a dozen different places, and no one has answered.
In EIP, with the promise that "The relevant behaviors are at the ends of the curve. For the majority of the curve, the payouts are nearly identical to a linear rewards curve."
Does that mean that my $0.03 vote on your comment will still be worth $0.03 all by its lonesome there? And you'll get the penny or two which is all I can offer for your comment, but that I think you deserve? Or does it mean you'll get $0.001 cents? How much does this curve punish these teensy votes?
edit: ugh nvm, @drakos got pushed out of top 20 again. Let's see if we can get him back in there and get some more up there! Unvote the current 20 and vote for the folks against EIP! We only need 3 more (since @yabapmatt is against it, too!) We need votes worth about 160k to move him up.
1400 (mvests)500 (approx steem/mvest)0.233 (USD/steem)=$163,100
Hm.
@berniesanders agreed - its a rich-people fork ...
But the worst of all, FREE DOWNVOTES ?
its not bad enough already ? give the haters their hobby for free ?
i shouldn't have read this
Can SteemDAO/SPS be used somehow to change the decision wrt who pays for SteemDAO/SPS? And can we use it to somehow create a different system of ruling decision? Maybe a more democratic way with many more Steemians being able to vote for a change than limiting this to a few witnesses?
"Even a symbolic 1 or 2 % would have gone a long way to showing that we are all in this together."
Great point!
1% would be a 10% reduction, and 2% would be a 20% reduction. Would these be catastrophic? Perhaps not, but when the current level of witness rewards were set (as part of a previous hard fork which already cut them by 80%), that was done with a goal of maintaining a safety margin in case of realistic but pessimistic scenarios on the Steem price and operational costs. 10% or 20% reduction would be a big hit to that safety margin.
Given:
many witnesses and stakeholders, myself included, view the proposed split as the best tradeoff, despite what may seem like "unfairness" when viewed solely from the perspective of this group vs that group. Sometimes perceived "fairness" can and should take a back seat to function and good economics, particularly when you are talking about an arguably failing project which if it continues on its current trajectory is likely going to ultimately result in no one getting anything.
Finally, it may be a hard truth to hear, especially for community members and content creators such as yourself or @meesterboom who absolutely have contributed a lot, but the content reward pool by design is supposed to be an engine which drives Steem's growth, not only with literal "content" but by attracting and retaining a growing community of people who contribute meaningfully to Steem. Sure there are some who do this, but as an overall mechanism, it clearly hasn't worked and on that basis alone is a prime candidate for having a slice of its budget reallocated to better use (or at least different use with the potential for more value add).
Witnesses, by design, are supposed to securely and honestly sign blocks to maintain the integrity of the network, securely and honestly adjust blockchain parameters, and approve hard forks (which in practice includes some consultation with developers on what is included in hard fork proposals). That portion of the system has generally worked, including at low Steem prices, and most if not all of the current witnesses are doing these things well (this hasn't always been the case).
The bottom line is that witnesses are mostly (if not all) doing their job; the content reward pool has not been doing its job. Looking at this from the perspective of what is best for Steem as a whole, the reasons for the proposed adjustment to the budget ought to be pretty clear.
Different adjustments can be made in the future with the benefit of further experience.
Might I suggest we incorporate the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition to our HardFork21 code?
Thanks for taking the time to reply. Your arguments are valid and well expressed.
Honestly my biggger concern is the new voting curve which I think will severely damage my ability to reward commentors on my posts. I've spent most of my 3 years here trying to encourage engagement and incentivising real human activity.
Will changing the reward curve destroy other business models? If the problem is bots aren't there other coding solutions? If the problem is self voting are there not coding solutions to limit that activity?
I've read of others delegating their Steem Power, buying stake in Palnet and moving their activities there.
I'm keeping my eyes open, trying to learn and staying ready to make the needed moves.
The curve is an interesting question for sure. I personally believe there needs to be some curve, but not necessarily this exact one. The Steemit devs have studied things carefully and have their own presumably good reasons for proposing this particular curve. I'm pretty open minded on this particular aspect of it and will be looking to engage with both Steemit devs and the community on the matter going forward.
Not directly, since people can always move stake to different accounts, and generally tiny payouts are a huge burden on people trying to catch milkers/self-voters (who aren't always literally voting for the same account but may be voting for accounts of other friends/collaborators or sock puppets).
I'm sure your own efforts are well-indented and may well contribute a lot of value, but apart from AI (if even then) there is no way for a computer algorithm to tell the difference between your tiny votes and someone working with some friends/sock puppets to milk the pool to death by a thousand cuts, so we need to put some sort of speed bump in there.
Thanks for the raising the issue.
Thanks to you. Seems like a plunge into murky waters. I was wondering if each Dapp couldn't have their own reward algorithms similar to what Palnet.io has done.
That is one way things can work. Individual apps can have their own tokens, algorithms, and eligibility policies. For example they can easily ban anyone they want, which is one way to address some of these problems but is also much harder to do at the core level of a public blockchain.
Well, and that's the big problem. The biggest positives in the communities I'm in is that personal engagement: People reading, responding, and voting on things in comment sections they like. That's the way in which steem most resembles social media. This change is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I'm told there are tremendous abuses of the rewards pool going on. Undoubtedly this is true. But this change has too large of an impact on the best of steem's ecosystem. This change must be struck down. I'm doing everything I can to get the witness votes needed for a different top 20, but it certainly feels like there's a wall of rich people making the decisions for us. I've invested what I can afford into steem. They happen to be richer. That doesn't make it right. They're pulling the rug out from underneath all the target demographic. You want to attract the masses? Make Steem attractive for the masses. Not for the Steem whales. Their incentive to behave well should be that they want the value of steem to go up, because they already have a lot. Changing the system so that they can acquire more steem is not going to make them behave better. They'll just have more power to come out on top while the rest of steem sinks.
Trickle down economics doesn't work. It's been demonstrated time and again that it only leads to greater wealth disparity and an overall lower standard of living. This is that.
Yes yes yes!
interestingly, in case steem price would go up to lets say 10$, all the top witnesses become multi millionaires with high monthly income that should be the incentive for any witness to be ok with some lower $ value monthly income for the work today with the low steem price. as mentioned by some others, it would been the best if everybody would have contributed to pay for SPS.
There were discussions about this. Some were in favour (most noticebly @thecryptodrive), but the majority was against it; including myself.
I can only speak for myself, but the reasoning was quite logical. The SPS is very similar to the reward-pool. It's just more fine-tuned on achieving results, instead of just having a playground for people to co-operate. So taking the cut from the reward-pool makes sense.
In contrast, witnesses are the backbone of Steem and its ecosystem; which includes Steem Engine & co. Taking from that source would possibly mean pulling the rug from underneath.
Witnesses in the TOP 20 are making roughly 9280 STEEM per month; backup-witnesses are making far less (roughly 1/4 or lower). 9280 STEEM at 0.4 USD is ~3712$. (Brutto; tax has to be subtracted) Infrastructure is roughly 400$-1000$ (or more); depending on factors like full-nodes, hivemind-nodes, etc. But this only includes hardware costs, not the costs associated with the individual(s) behind the witness. Besides the obvious requirements as in securing & monitoring nodes and reviewing code, there are many unspoken requirements from witnesses; taking part in discussions, answering questions, helping new/old members, etc etc.
Now imagine BTC would drop to 3000$ and STEEM were to stay at its current level; this would result in a 12 cent STEEM. 9280 STEEM would suddenly only be worth ~1110$ (Brutto). At that point, maintaining a witness would still be possible, but a far bigger risk-factor, as the costs of running Steem nodes are essentially only rising (MIRA is helping, but TOP 20-30 witnesses do have to run high memory nodes in order to keep replay-duration low).
Especially, as infrastructure costs are really just the fundament. And you want to have experienced witnesses that feel their time is valued, which includes adequate payment.
I'm obviously not arguing with you that a 1% cut wouldn't really matter in the great scheme of things, but then why even bother with doing that, when the logical thing to do is to reduce the reward-pool in favour for the SPS pool (as I explained above).
Just because people would have a better feeling, as in we're all in this together? That's just sugar on top. Because what if I told you, that we're already in this together?
I'm a witness and developer for sure, but I'm also a content creator. Over my 2 years here on Steem, I've produced 283 posts. That's probably not as much as really dedicated content creators, but its still something. So yeah, the reward-pool cut also effects me directly.
I appreciate your thorough reply and the work that you do as a witness.
I understand your projections of a stagnant price or a lower price for Steem. On the other hand all of this is being done with the hope of increasing the price.
I also believe that witnesses have the best chance of benefiting financially from SPS since many are building as witnesses they can also make proposals and get paid even more with SPS.
In actual fact my bigger concern is the voting curve. I've invested a lot of money in Steempower and I'm very concerned that my vote for commentors on my blog will be negated.
I don't buy votes but I do give my own posts a 100% upvote. Keep in mind that on most of my posts I give away between 5 and 10 Steem in prizes. I feel that my business model will be destroyed. Maybe I'm wrong and time will tell.
For the first time in 3 years I'm powering down in order to be flexible enough to make drastic moves if necessary.
One last thing. Too many changes all at once. The last time it was an awful hardfork, not smooth at all.
Thanks for mentioning me as a proponent to taking from the witness pool. I have been heavily negotiating for witnesses to shed 1% as you know. I do believe strongly in securing the chain but I also feel that 1% is not that much and the public relations between witnesses and the community benefits would be far greater. If we don’t it just creates an us vs them scenario and breeds witness conspiracy theories.
I don’t understand one thing, you say that if BTC drops to 3000, Steem drops to 12 cents, but when BTС grows by 2-3 times, from 5000 to 14000, Steem does not grow, it remains at the level of 30-40 cents. It looks like a game with only one goal. Why it happens?
Why not take from witness rewards and make the remaining witness rewards a proposal in the SPS system?
Why not do so with the whole rewards pool?
That was exactly my thought in the original SPS discussion.
Another alternative is that SPS proposals, if approved, can be paid directly out the same reward pool that currently pays posts and comments (making the observation that both a "proposal" and a "comment or post" are fundamentally the very same thing: making a transaction to the blockchain that says: "Please vote to pay me").
I think in both cases this is premature if only because the existing implemented, tested and ready-to-deploy code does not work that way, but also because I'm pretty sure people want more confidence in seeing SPS do something useful before more tightly integrating it into Steem. (Those with experience seeing a nearly-identical system work on Bitshares may be more confident, but not all of us have that experience.)
I know, and I hated it 🙂 ... But the more I look at the what seems like failure of the rewards pool to reward valuable contributions while the inflation pulls the price down, I’m wondering if it’s the road we are heading down.
The only way that would ever work though is if we had a front end that was good enough on it’s own to actually attract people, engage them and make them want to stay or perhaps a separate reward mechanism (Content token?).
As a social media platform we are lacking a way to encourage people to enjoy and engage and so it’s now just all about rewards. As silly as it may sound - emojis, “claps” or other “expressions”, ways that make it easy to find content and other users with same interests, resteems with ability to add comment etc would make it actually fun to interact on the platform... and maybe there wouldn’t be as much focus on an upvote.
I also agree that the SPS has to prove itself before additional funding is considered, as we really have no idea what to expect at this point.
Why the do so with the wowl rewards pool?
I am a bot. I turn comments into owl related puns.
Interesting!
Totally, just even 1!!
@meesterboom I’m one of the few to offer to sacrifice from the witness funding to show solidarity, another very few agreed with me, I’m still pushing that agenda as you can see on my forum post https://neosteem.com/topics/thecryptodrive/tokenbb-topic-sps-inflation-funding-split-prop-1560906423422 sadly you unvoted my witness (even though im fighting for creators like you) because I got into some heated discussion with a friend of yours and said one thing to offend him whereas in the rest he was way more abusive to me.
I am glad you are still pushing that agenda, it is a credit to you.
The issue of unvoting you as a witness is a separate issue to this one.
It’s to do with the other guy who swore and slandered me way worse than the misinformed observation I voiced :)
I hold my witnesses to a high standard though.
:0D
For the record:
https://steemit.com/steem/@nonameslefttouse/pth3gv
At the current market price, it would be just under one million a year for funding. If the price raises it even more funds to get things developed with. Yes, content creators and commenters will take a hit. But because of this, our dependence on the development of the chain goes down. So say steemit goes bankrupt we can still find developers to put the changes in that we need.
This is also a very good backup plan for us, without faster forks and development steem was going to die anyway.
Yes, this is true.
My point is not against the creation of the SPS. My point is the direction of the funding being solely from content creators.
The witnesses are stakeholders too, it is only fair that all stakeholders contribute. To leave all contributions coming from just one group is far from ideal.
I will reiterate. I am for the SPS. I am not for all of the funding coming solely from content creators. When you add the other changes into the mix it exacerbates the pain that will be felt from them.
Let us not forget that highly competitive days are coming. To discourage, even slightly those that could potentially draw audience to the platform is counter intuitive.
A la fina el SPS es dinero par los testigos ellos son los creadores de todas las iniciativas d acuulación de steem .
Por eso son testigos. Crean la trampita, acumulan y después compran el voto para estar en la mesa...
Confiemos más Blocktrades que le da igual Stem queEOS. Estas Grades ideas para estabilizar la moneda Steem con un fondo especial creo que es más un pago de soporte finaciero. Las grandes ideas que tiene de ellos deben ser poque les estan pagando como asesores...... era muy bonito el cuento aquel que steem liberaria el mercado a la final hay que someterse a la mano invisible de las Crytos.
No, es no correcto
You got to remember these witnesses are also content creators. So yes they won't be taxed for securing the chain. But they will be taxed for using the stake they own. Which is used to upvote content or sale votes.
Much of the funding will come from things like vote bots and self voting whales will feel this tax, more than most of the content creators or voters. The whales who own a large amount of the stake will feel this tax more than lower users since 10% of their fee's will out shadow the normal users. So whales also being witnesses are voting yes to a tax that doesn't benefit them as much.
There is more to this, that people are overlooking.
Not all of them are content creators. In fact, some of them are conspicuous by their absence on the chain. There is far more to being invested in Steem than running a cloud instance of a witness on Privex.
The many I know of actively curate content or make posts. Yes, some don't post as much but that's because they're developing. Though some are just draining the system and i can fully agree on that.
Most of the funding is going to come from bots and whales. Since they make up a large number of funds paid out. They're taking a hit in some way which many have multiple accounts. So they will be paying their fair share in some way. And at current market cap they don't really make a lot when the price is low.
This really should be seen as an investment in the system.
The SPS is an investment into the system.
Agreed. On that, I have never disagreed.
Funding - I categorically disagree that the funding should come entirely out of the content creator portion of inflation.
Last I checked the median payout was .01 SBD. SPS will lower that reward for producing content. It's retarded to further decrease incentive to become and stay a Steem user. Retention was already at ~7.5% YOY last I checked. Reducing potential rewards will not improve retention, and will shrink the market for Steem. You might note that reducing the market depresses the price.
This tax will create capital losses, not capital gains, making an existential problem worse.
It has been determined that you are trash, therefore, you have received a negative vote.
PLEASE NOTE: If you engage with the trash above you also risk receiving a negative vote on your comment.
It isn't true it comes solely from content creators.
Apart from the fact that literally all rewards come from investors who are paying them (via inflation), not from people who receive them, it comes from the reward pool which pays both authors and curators (stakeholders). The latter will absorb either a 25% share or a 50% share of the SPS budget depending on whether you based it on the existing split or the post-HF21 split.
But, again, all rewards are paid by investors. Shifting around who receives them does not change that.
I think my point is quite clear. I am aware that it comes from both creators and curators.
To mince words semantically like this is merely disingenuous.
Edit, I don't mean that to sound as abrupt as it reads. I am trying to get my kids out to party :0)
Well forgive me but I do think think that it not shifting solely from creators/authors but also from curators is more than a semantic point.
Nevertheless turnabout being fair play, I do think the more important point in my reply is not about curators vs authors, but that in fact all rewards are coming from investors. Before the fork, all rewards come from investors, after the fork all rewards will still come from investors.
For investors to start spending some of that inflation budget via a proposal pool (where by the way, anyone is free to make proposals stating what they intend to do for Steem and how much they request to be paid to do it, even including for that matter, content creators) rather than continuing to spend all of it via the content pool is not changing where it comes from, it changes where (some of) it is going.
I doubt very much that there are too many investors happy with overall performance of Steem over the past few years, and the reward pool is the headline feature of Steem representing by far the largest portion of the inflation budget. If we aren't happy with how things are working, and many are understandably not, questioning whether it is doing its job, and then looking to spend some of that budget on other ways of adding value to Steem should hardly be viewed as radical.
When witness rewards were cut 80% a couple of years ago in order to focus the witness role on core blockchain maintenance and away from general project funding (with the 10% of inflation budget assigned in order to sufficiently fund that essential core blockchain role), that was done with the explanation that:
Well it has taken over two years to get here, but now were are finally at the point of doing #2.
IMO it is a completely reasonable, and even pretty modest, adjustment to make at this point. After some further experience, we can reassess.
All stakeholders will be contributing, because the funding will come from inflating stakeholders existing holdings, just as funding for everything else comes from that.
The question of allocating that inflation budget is not or should not be one of different groups each trying to grab the most they can for themselves at the expense of the others, it is or should be one of looking at how that budget can best be spent to give Steem the best chance of success.
I sincerely believe that the witness reward should not be reallocated here, not because I am a witness and am wanting the higher (or at least not lower) pay, but because witness pay already went through a process which cut it (by 80%) to the lowest possible level reasonably consistent with chain safety and security (and going forward even that assertion of safety is open to question in my view).
I also sincerely believe that the reallocation of a portion the payouts from the main content pool to a proposal pool is in the best interests of Steem. It also doesn't directly translate into a cut for content because some 'project' funding can and should move to the proposal pool, freeing up more of the main pool for content and general social uses. I for one will be looking to use some of my new downvotes against posts/comments which try to extract project-like funding from the main pool when they can and should submit their request to the proposal pool instead.
Have you ever noticed how some around here will say things like, "If these content producers were producing something of value, they could be out in the real world making money."
All that does is prove how disconnected they are from the real world. This is the real world and since so many fail to see that, they can't wrap their heads around how the arts and entertainment industry generates billions annually, in the real world. Since this platform is all the land of make belief to them, they have no problems with stepping on content producers, kicking them to curb, losing out on potentially and eventually billions of dollars, so they can scratch their heads and wonder why they can't even get a few thousand dollars pouring in, while thinking they live in a dream land.
Hopefully it's not a coma though because it would be nice if some folks around here could wake up.
If only they could wake up. If only they could see for a moment what they are creating. Or rather what they are not. As we both know if they carry on deriding content creators then they will only ever see ever diminishing returns. And then nothing. When it is too late they will try to change things up but it will be too late.
Lots of people were panicking when Dan announced Voice which in the end turned out to be a damp squib fraught with problems before it even began. There will come a competitor though, one that understands the basic paradigm and seeks novel ways to solve it.
The content creator bashers here can attempt to make it hard for them or carry on the way they are going and make it easy for them. I am not holding my breath
I don't even see how something marketed as a social media platform like Voice is a direct competitor to a content production platform like we have here. I realize some use this platform as a social media site, which is fine, whatever. What would Facebook be though if people weren't sharing content from content production platforms though? What would Youtube be if people were not sharing links on social media? Many people saw Voice as competition but social media and content production go hand in hand. Each one makes the other one better.
Bashing content here is like visiting Youtube and being angry about videos.
I think maybe because some see their own efforts and see how they run their blogs, they just assume everyone else is the same. Start running the blog like a business and act like you're stepping out on a stage with every post, and you get guys like us, and in the real world, when performed live, the seats fill up, the money pours in.
We've both entertained thousands of people since showing up here, while working under conditions that make that nearly impossible. Imagine what it would be like if the odds weren't stacked against us.
Hehe, I often say similar in that those who cannot produce content worth a damn like to run down those who can by running down everyone who does. Saying that all the content here is crap and that its ALL low quality etc. Its a porr tactic of theirs and yet sometimes it seems to work on some sheep who parrot it back blindly.
I guy walks into a bar. Tells everyone they don't know how to drink.
That made way more sense in my head.
I get it though!!!!
Yes I agree completely. Especially when some of the witness funding was said to be to help them build projects. The rewards from being a top witness far outweigh the costs, especially after MIRA, even with steem at $.40. Why we are not directing some of the inflation from them is ridiculous to me as well.
Exactly, it's ridiculous and will cause a lot of negativity
I cannot see how that will encourage new people to come here.
Witness funding was and is not intended to fund projects after it was cut 80% (I believe in HF12).
Some witnesses do get involved with projects as part of their campaign for votes, and given surplus funds under some conditions, but that's not a core part of witness rewards based on how the budget was designed.
By contrast, witness rewards were intended to support projects prior to being cut 80%. That bundling was not seen as a good approach and was a good part of the motivation for the huge 80% cut. It was always envisioned that: a) existing reward funds could be used to fund projects via voting for posts, and b) something like SPS could be implemented later to more directly fund projects without the somewhat messy process of doing it with posts. It took almost three years to get there, but better late than never.
And you think the current inflation allocation setup is the right way to go for witnesses? Their costs are fixed in USD, which means a tanking steem price could make it un-economical to run a witness node at all... which would put the entire network in jeopardy.
In this system witnesses secure the network, in a POW system the miners secure the network. Miners are not able to mine at a huge profit for long before the system corrects itself. We have no such correcting mechanism with steem...
Instead, network securers continue to get inflation regardless. Fundamentally, that doesn't sound right to me.
With the recent cost reductions to run nodes it also makes some sense for there to be revenue reductions as well and this was the perfect opportunity for that to happen.
There are no cost reductions to run witness nodes as yet. Over time the costs have simply grown, though to some extent this was expected. The MIRA version (with its associated cost reductions) isn't recommended for witnesses.
I don't think the witness reward mechanism is perfect, but if we are looking narrowly at the reward amount, I think the analysis that was done when it was reduced by 80% and set to 10% of total inflation was reasonable and hasn't changed significantly, therefore the split shouldn't change. Proposals to revamp the system in a more fundamental way can be considered. I'm open to looking at it.
Why is it not recommended? That was one of the selling points sold to us by Steemit,Inc... That this new version would help decentralize the platform as it would make running witness nodes cheaper.
I would guess it will eventually get there, but not yet. The main priority was reducing the costs of Steemit's own expensive RPC nodes, and they did that.
MIRA can reduce expenses of running a node (full RPC, seed, witness) but at the cost of a much slower replay. On my witness test node, a replay usually takes 20-22 hours without MIRA but when I enabled MIRA I gave up after 3 days of replay still not completed. For a top witness, it is critical to be able to replay as fast as possible in order to get the node back on track on events such as a HardFork where a replay is required.
MIRA will help with reducing the costs of other nodes but for witnesses nodes it's not recommended for the reason above.
And by the same principle why not a thin slice off the Steem Power interest so that all beneficiaries of inflation system - fund the SPS. After all, I think I'm right in saying that 35 accounts hold over half of the Steem Power. I guess that would have been unpopular with the whales.
"When will it be understood that without content creators this platform will wither and die?"
I agree with you, but I think that it is important to mention that this platform will also wither and die without content curators, and to be honest, this platform currently lacks of real content curators.
I am on Steem since 2017.05.17, and I see that people are selfish and greedy.
Many people are writing blog posts, but only a few people cares about other people's blog posts.
Maybe HF21 (EIP) (Economic Improvement Proposal) will change this by "Increasing the curation rewards to equal the author rewards".
If this will decrease the number of bloggers (and content creators in general), and increase the number of content curators (and maybe the real, human interaction with it), then HF21 will be good for Steem.
We (the users and the community of the whole Steem blockchain) need to find a good balance between content creators and content curators, otherwise this platform will wither and die.
And I agree with you hence in my original comment I said that I agree with the changes proposed. I am all for the change to 50/50.
Something needs done and this is something. Curation is sorely lacking, whether this will truly help remains to be seen but it is something and I think that's important.
Like others have said, why not take from witness rewards and make the remaining witness rewards a proposal in the SPS system?
A fine idea! :0)
Because the system needs a stable core to function at all, and that requires that witnesses not only be paid but paid enough to always maintain stable infrastructure and contribute enough of their time to necessary 'soft' functions, but also enough so that concern of losing a witness slot is a meaningful incentive to remain a good actor (if you are doing it break-even or at a loss, who cares if you get voted out once you have messed with the chain, possibly for personal profit or paid by someone else who profits).
Without a stable functioning and secure chain you can't even conduct an SPS vote. For example, witnesses could tamper with the vote by censoring transactions, or punishing accounts which vote the "wrong" way.
A DPoS chain depends fundamentally on the competence and integrity of its witnesses Putting that at risk puts the entire system at risk.
Yes. Also, why 10%? Where did that number come from? Not just just 5%? Why not 15%? I just don't understand. Also, I agree, Witnesses should be giving up some of their funds. I think 5%, just so that we're both losing half. ;)
I would definitely like to see something coming from them. I find the fact that it all comes from the creators disrespectful of those who put the work in day in and day out.
some witnesses work harder than all the content creators combined lol steem doenst have godo content anyway it mostly sucks, mostly, we have great people but they are lost in a sea of garbage which si NORMAL its NOT ABNORMAl for a social mediasite to be FULL of trash they ALl are LOL :D But we have to actually hit a saturation point to get to the point wher ewe can actually get GOOD content rise to top liek reddit and 240 million users
just give @steemit inc tiem toi realize they MUSt sacrifice or INVEST millions of steem on NEW account creation , THEN we can onbaord millions of reddit users and BOOm we win
jajaja lomismo pense, bueno es lamisria del poder y la miseria de los gobernados d nunca onfiar en los gobernantes...es como una maldicón a voces...aunque sea 0,5 hubiera sido motivante,,,
Yes indeed, anything would have been motivating. There would be no issue if they said 0.5 but the fact they vote for everyone elses haircut is poor!
My thoughts exactly.
Cheers old dog!! As is yours too!
Witness rewards are what controls the security, if you cut witness rewards, you cut funding for a proper server infrastructure. Which means the chain might go down or worse get forked out. Which would be a distaster. I don't think it's worth to reduce chain security to show that "we are in this together"
Yeah. Right.
He is right.
I disagree that a token amount would reduce chain security. I am not talking a huge amount, anything at all would show some solidarity. Just now it smacks of arrogance against those who create content.
The most often referenced number is 1%, and I do not consider that to be a token amount, it is a 10% reduction when the starting total is only 10%. In fact I have long term concerns about the sustainability of witness funding given the declining inflation schedule, so I do think that cutting it even further is dangerous.
But really the main reasons I don't think it should be done are:
I just have to disagree. And not with any of the facts you have eloquently referenced. It is over the sourcing coming entirely from the content part. There are many and perhaps valid points you have outlined above but it just smacks of witnesses looking out for themselves.
It looks arbitrary to me and it also looks as if it was decided amongst a biased group. Of course the witnesses wouldn't vote for any kind of cut to their allocation. Were there many non witnesses in that discussion, relative to the whole I mean?
There are always options. what about the ten percent coming from the rewards pool before it is split between witnesses, content etc?
You speak on behalf of securing the chain and the witnesses themselves. I have very valid fears that anything that further discourages content creators will ultimately see the demise of the platform and not in the long term. The situation is already dire.
And I am genuinely not saying this from a worried I will lose out perspective. We need the SPS. I hope it helps us move forward but I disagree with the sourcing of that ten percent.
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Can you please bring back the charting updates towards reaching the goals of implementing communities and SMTs?
Why has communication slowed down a lot again?
When do you plan to pursue STEEM listing on exchanges?
@socky that the real question brother
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@socky thats the real question brother
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Just wanted to clarify that the downvote pool is probably better referred to as a "downvote mana pool" not really "downvote rewards pool"
There are no rewards for downvoting, it simply draws from a different mana pool, aka voting power.
Otherwise great post @steemitblog
Post updated. Thanks!
Great point. Thanks Net!
Will users be able to see how much downvote mana they have used?
My guess is that it will be added to steemd.com and other sites. Steemit.com doesn't even show how much of your regular vote mana has been used.
Regarding SPS why take away 10% of the reward pool in order to pay for things that are being built anyway? This building is being done organically and the builders are actually creating business models with outside income sources. This will take away incentive! In my worst English "if it ain't broke don't fix it!"
Let's look now at the reward curve and why I hate the proposal. As a disclaimer I must first write that I have purchased about 25,000 SP at between $1 and $3!
Why I Don't Like It:
1.) If Steemit.com wants another reward model for bloggers they can use SMT's to do it. Don't mess with your unpaid builders!
The Steem blockchain is NOT a blogging blockchain so they shouldn't base everything on that! That is NOT visionary!
2.) Those of us that have built using the current reward system are going to get penalized. I reward all commenters on my posts with an upvote of at least 3% if I can't do that my community has less incentive. What about big investors that are trying to build a communtiy and reward them. Will they still invest? Probably not.
Steem's economic model is broken. That's a fact. Otherwise, we wouldn't be losing relative market-valuation constantly. Inflation is being generated and sold on exchanges, but the buy pressure is not big enough to sustain a high market valuation.
And regarding taking from the reward-pool: the majority of it isn't being utilized effectively. The inflation should have been something that is advancing this ecosystem, but only a niche group of people are actually doing something. SPS will hopefully help to have more streamlined goals for people to be rewarded for actual work done.
this a bear market, the low of 40 cents is alot higher than the lows of 2016. For steem to work it needs investors and believers. Authors are the ones who dump steem because they are effectively working and need paying. I believe the Hardfork encourages more of an investment mindset which is crucial for the steem price and ecosystem long term. It is not broken it is a bear market and we ride it out with every other alt coin.
That's not entirely correct. We're at 4400 satoshis right now, which is far lower than when Steem was at its lowest in terms of USD valuation. Which essentially means: Steem lost a lot of value in comparison to BTC and other alt-coins which did much better (EOS for example).
I've written quite a lot of posts over the last 2 years and the only reason I'd power-down those author rewards, would be for tax purposes, but not because it's such hard work. On contrast, creating content on Steem should be fun and I'd argue that the majority creators on Steem aren't professionals in the traditional sense.
Now, while authors are of course part of the dumping problem, I agree with @whatsup that most of it was done by early stakeholders (incl. Steemit Inc.) But that's part of the game. What we need are more incentives for people to hold their Steem and buy more of it. And this is not happening with authors alone. Everyone can read/watch their content without spending a dime.
in all respect your twisting what im saying. Im not talking about satoshi im talking about dollars. The only people who are going to buy steem and hold it and take it off exchanges are curators. They now how more incentive to do so.
You said that the valuation of Steem is higher than at the all-time low. But that’s only because BTC is at 9400$+. Looking at the USD can give the image of Steem price being good, but it’s far cheaper than it has ever been.
That's correct. As long as people actually want to hold Steempower. Which is why 50/50 is so important.
i dont care, its still higher in what matters, money.
Obviously STEEM was not ranked 69th(!) at CoinMarketCap some months ago, so of course you are right, and the problem is not only a general bear market!
But I really wonder why many 'stake holders' care so much about their ROI? What does it help to get a bigger part of a cake which is getting smaller and smaller? I prefer to have a smaller part of a huge cake. :)
If I knew it would let the STEEM price increase significantly, I would accept not to earn one single STEEM from now on. :)
Why do people buy BTC? Because they want to earn as much as possible interest or because they believe the value of BTC should rise?
In my eyes a real curator loves what he is reading and will curate anyway, he doesn't care if curation rewards are 50 or 25 % (and won't just join automated trails without reading what is he upvoting).
When I upvote stuff I upvote it because I like it. I don't care when I upvote (if for example after exactly 15 minutes), and how many other users have already uptoved that post.
I intentionally seek posts from new and/or unknown authors to give them a dollar or two.
With 50 % curation rewards I can't give them the same amount in future, because then I myself will get a big part of my own upvote back (as curation) instead of being able to support the authors! Sounds ironic anyhow: then I want but cannot anymore support people ...
I don't need to earn a lot of STEEM anymore because if the price will rise, I am rich anyway, if not it also doesn't matter to have even more STEEM (then I will enjoy my BTC). :)
Less than ~10% of rewards are received by creators. @arcange publishes daily statistics that reveal the exact numbers, and my last check showed the median payout was .01 SBD (median = what most people receive), yet the average payout was ~15 times that. That is because the vast majority of rewards are paid out to 35 whales, not the rest of us. Their few posts and comments receive ~90% of payouts from the rewards pool, about a third of that from bidbots. The below chart is almost two years old, and despite repeated requests for a current updated chart, I have been unable to get one. The authors have changed, but the curve is practically unchanged.
It is not creators that impact the price of Steem, because they hardly get any of it. It is profiteers, manipulating rewards by their substantial stake weight, that extract almost all the value of the economic activity on Steem, and prevent capital gains from ever impacting the price of Steem - because that value is instead diverted to their wallets as tokens, rather than raising the price of tokens.
Check @arcange's latest post for the most recent relevant statistics.
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He said relative market valuation and he's absolutely right. In the crypto market, which as a whole has indeed been in a bear market, Steem has dropped from top 10 to top 20 to now barely holding on in the top 70 (!). Some of that is due to promising new projects which took their spots in the high ranks, but mostly it is due to being much lower than projects which Steem used to considerably out-rank.
Blaming Steem's relative performance on the bear market is way off base. This is mostly on us.
dude, every single altcoin is in the gutter. Every single one except BNB and litecoin. He is not right, he is twisting my words to suit his own argument. I said steem is higher now and holding on to 40 cents which is way above the 0.03 cents of the lows in 2016. Thats all the matters nothing else, when Bitcoin tops 20k Steem will scream back up to 3 and 4 dollars. People dont understand crypto, fundamentals have got nothing to do with it. Its all relative, when one coin makes a run for it and hits a crazy price everyone says well if that xyzzy coin can be that much then every other worthless coin can be worth more too. That all feeds into itself and the casino and hype becomes alive again. I laugh when people talk about marketing and this and that, its a joke. Nobody uses this stuff yet its not happening like we thought it would its all speculation, all of it, fuelled by hot money coming out of nowhere. Slagging off steem and people saying its doomed does not help though i agree but it makes no real difference, because when it all kicks off again steem will be the best thing since sliced bread until the bear market attacks again.
Yeah and at least 50 of them have STILL managed to outperform Steem.
Stop making excuses.
Most of the Authors can not hurt the price. The dumping comes from above.
Much of the stake is not being allocated to create value at all. It is a difference in opinion on what brings value.
The eyes of the community cannot support all of the dumping, but it is mathmatically impossible for the dumping to come from most authors. The witnesses also sell to pay expenses.
Although I am not a fan of how they are approaching this, I do hope it teaches people why it is important to fight abuse. We can't change SteemIt Inc's selling, but do we have to support self voting, bot abuse etc? If people learn to downvote maybe not.
By the way I agree the funding of the SPS should have come out equally, it does need to be funded.
Agree and disagree. Yes "most authors" purely counting numbers can't hurt the price because their earnings are tiny. But the reward pool in the aggregate is responsible for a large portion of the selling pressure, in that it totals about 17 million STEEM per year, far more than what even Steemit is selling (about 9.6 million per year).
Not 100% of the reward pool is sold immediately but a very significant piece is, and of that which isn't sold immediately, a lot of that ends up being sold somewhat later anyway.
17 million STEEM/y is important, it is a big challenge to find enough investors to float that selling, and we need to be very careful to make sure it is used effectively.
You are under the assumption that the stakeholders and witnesses are better at directing it at places that add value. Based on the distribution and the last 3 years, I disagree.
It is not the tiny users that have run down the price and run end users off. They just don't have the power or the stake.
You and I both remember the original distribution. Any changes in that are a result of large stakeholder selling and small accounts buying or holding.
My view is that the mechanism which has been used for that for the last 3 years has been severely flawed and these new mechanisms are much better, especially the SPS mechanism which apparently (I say because I have no personal experience but I believe those who claim it) has a track record of working well on Bitshares.
IMO with the exception of Steemit nearly all large stakeholders selling from the original distribution has long since occurred. What is left of the original distribution, people have mostly decided to keep long term (there may always be exceptions and people may always change their minds, but it isn't a constant flow of selling). And remember, in the original distribution Steemit had 80% and everyone else shared 20%.
But numerically the inflation paid out to content rewards matters a lot. It is more than the rate at which Steemit is selling, most probably higher than the net rate at which all whales, Steemit included, are selling
To be clear, this does not mean content rewards going to minnows. Most of it goes out at the top. But we also can't micromanage where it goes. Maybe with better mechanisms we can have some chance of managing it at effectively all.
Inflation being sold is irrelevant compared to steemit inc selling rate, isn't it?
Mostly yes. But instead of working to create revenue to solve the problem we seem to be trying to plug a leaky damn by putting our finger in the holes.
Imagine if steemit.com structured things in order to bring in tons of new users which in turn would boost their ad revenue, instead of making it even harder to on board new users, which will ultimately reduce their ad income and likely spell their demise.
Hell no. Author rewards (not all of inflation but the biggest single piece) are currently about 17 million STEEM per year and Steemit sells 9.6 million. Not all of author rewards are sold (nor other components of inflation) but you can be damn sure that a lot of it is. It is very, very wrong to dismiss inflation and rewards as a source of selling pressure.
Okay thanks for putting things into perspective. I had no idea how much STEEM steemit inc were selling.
I guess we still have a few years to get STEEM on the cheap while inflation is high, and then the price won't go down as much.
That is certainly one way to look at it. And in addition to Steemit eventually slowing and/or stopping their selling, the baseline inflation declines by 1/2% per year. So yes, over time, the amount of available new Steem will decline a lot.
You are why Steem's economy is broken, and are the best example of that malfunction. You extract it's value for your personal profit before the economic activity and infrastructure can produce capital gains.
Less than ~10% of the rewards are reaching the intended destination of rewards: content creators. Almost all rewards are being extracted by manipulative financial mechanisms, and end up in the wallets of whales. You are the niche group 'doing something', and the something you are doing is preventing capital gains. The whales are cutting their own throats by concentrating all the value of the economy into their wallets, each to the maximum degree possible. EIP is a set of mechanisms to increase the rate of extraction of value before it creates capital gains. Halving author's share of rewards and instead delivering twice as much to those extracting it with the weight of their stakes, increasing the exponential power of stake with the modified rewards curve, and availing free flags to flaggots censoring creators that returns rewards the community sought to provide them as incentive to the rewards pool, where you can extract it instead, all increase the rate of extraction of rewards by stake weighting, and suppress capital gains.
You and your ilk are doing so because you can simply move on to the next victim once you've drained the host economy of the stake you extract. Steem will be a corpse, drained dry by your parasitization, left to blow away in the winds of avarice, leaving the gems that could have instead have been nurtured by substantial stakeholders to create capital gains for all investors; censorship resistance (in a world more silenced every day); one of the best blockchains ever written; a currency model that made transaction fees obsolete and proved microtransactions not only viable, but scalable both globally and fiscally, and a social media use case that could have leapfrogged every business model extant - had you only been willing to rely on capital gains for your ROI.
Should Steem somehow remain viable after you profiteers have moved on, perhaps the remaining users will be able to implement sound policies that encourage investing for capital gains, and then be able to grow instead of feed parasites.
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Exactly. When did we even have a debate or when was a case even made where agreement has been reached on the need for SPS? What is SPS supposed to do for the ecosystem to make it worth 10% indefinite spending rate?
How do we stop or reverse course if we find SPS is not somehow profitable or growing the ecosystem? If Steem were a company or a government how would we justify this to shareholders or to voters?
@blocktrades is certainly the subject matter expert on this, and I believe he's published a number of posts explaining the careful design of the system. The discussion was had amongst the Witnesses who are the ultimate arbiters of these decisions. Those are the people stakeholders voted for.
What the SPS is supposed to do is fund projects that create sufficient value to justify the expenditure, and that's the analysis people should perform when determining whether to vote on a proposal. If there are no good proposals, then people shouldn't vote on any proposals, and that money will go unspent. That's how you roll back the SPS, if it doesn't generate any value, don't use it or downvote proposals you don't like.
Is 'none of the above' an option?
Yes, there are two ways to vote "none of the above" in SPS. One is a return worker which returns the funding back to the SPS treasury to be used later and another is a burn worker which sends the SPS funds to @null.
Well, at least it has that going for it,...
Not liking the level of the toll gate, either.
How do we get to it?
It get its own tab?
I know that a basic web UI to view proposals and vote for them was completed along with the blockchain code but I do not know where that will be placed on steemit.com
The question is how will we track and measure how much value a funded project is provided? The question of "is it worth the amount of funding it is receiving?" is a question the community is likely to ask. If a project somehow drives some sort of revenue so that the value/price of Steem starts to go up then of course we can all agree this is good.
But I am concerned we could end up with a lot of low value "projects" which developers and insiders like but which does not measurably drive according to any traced metrics. So if we are talking about increasing active users, or increasing investor interest in holding powering up, or something measurable like this then great.
Are there any current ideas that @blocktrades has in mind to be on the initial proposal list?
There are blockchain history elements generated for all payouts, just as there are for content payouts today. UIs like the many we have for existing Steem functions will process this history show the data. We know who are the largest earners on author payouts, curation, who is powering up and powering down, etc. because of the many UIs and reports that have been created by the community to show this kind of data.
The initial version includes a pretty limited web UI that shows proposals and allows for voting on them but I have no doubt that over time many additional UIs will be created to show the data in more and different ways (some may even have their funding provided by SPS, some may not)
What I meant to express but did not word very well is will the UI allow for us to track the metrics of projects so we can determine the success or failure based on how much a certain project is contributing to success measures?
If it's retention stats, or if it's the Steem price, or if it is something else, I think every project which is asking for funding should have a business plan with a profit motive. The project can be a great idea but then how does it increase the price of Steem or bring in more users or make current users more active?
Example, a game in the style of DrugWars for example could bring in new users and increase the value of Steem too if it were designed the right way. The project could be funded via SPS and then every month report their success metrics such as how many users they are gaining each month, how much retention they have, this and we can look at if the price of Steem is going up or if people are powering up more etc.
So yes, we can find a way to measure "profit". We just have to agree on which measures should represent profit.
Long term, I think the most important metric should be increase in the value of Steem tokens, but it's not always going to be easy to match that to work that is done, of course.
So I agree that other metrics will be useful for measuring proposals, and there's not going to be one or even a few metrics that will be useful for the wide variety of potential proposals. Marketing proposals could be the easiest to measure, IF they can show successful adoption by new users (especially if the users are retained over time).
The impact of new infrastructural features gets more difficult to measure, and I doubt any single metric is going to work for such things. Personally, my original vote is going to be based on how useful I think such a feature is (coupled with the price asked/etc) and my continued vote is going to depend on how well the task is being executed over time.
Of course there will be funding for low value projects with the usual source of beneficiaries at the top who say we need to alter rewards to stop the vote bots that many of them profit from. Right now its campaign time promising the moon, then once in place what will be will be.
It seems only you have ever heard of kickbacks. Sadly, they are how government is run, and taxes create governments.
SPS sounds like a perfect mechanism to tax from the smallest stakeholders a flow of funds to a group of cronies with enough stake to ram through their proposals. We will see what happens when we allow a group of 35 rapine profiteers that have already managed to extract ~90% of the inflation from the rewards pool to vote themselves another 10% of the rewards.
I think we both know what we'll see.
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I've certainly had ideas at the past and no doubt in the future for things to propose, but the real idea behind the SPS is to have an open system where many people can suggest ideas and provide a mechanism for stakeholders to vote on those ideas, so it's not so much about my own ideas.
Making sure that we choose wisely what to upvote is of course a key ingredient for the success of the SPS as a work allocation system. I don't know of any way to guarantee such a thing (if I did, I suppose I would be the wealthiest guy on the planet). But I think it is critical that we have such a system to increase the rate at which we grow the Steem ecosystem. From my point of view, progress has been much too slow in the past and we need to expand the available pool of people that can help out. No doubt there will be proposals that fail or don't provide benefit, and voters will just have to learn to make wiser decisions in such cases.
What are some specific examples of proposals that will be introduced through this system?
I have no idea if it would get funded or not but let's say we wanted to hire a professional Marketing firm. I could get a quote, write up what costs and benefits would be involved and see what the response is.
You guys really need to work on your process and outreach.
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Thanks for the feedback!
Those with substantial stakes are inveterate profiteers, and were convincing in their assurances that they wouldn't fund development with that stake. Since the vast majority of stake is in the wallets of 35 whales, and they won't part with any of it, the only funding source left was a tax on creators, whose current share of rewards is less than ~10%.
~90% of the stake in Steem therefore will not be funding SPS, and those costs have been foisted on creators as a regressive tax - a tax on those least able to bear it. Retention last I checked was ~7.5% YOY. The median payout was .01 SBD. This tax is going to fall hardest on folks making about $.01 for their content now, and not staying here very long to be taxed already. Bye bye market for Steem. Without users the value of Steem will plummet.
The current proposal for SPS delivers 10% of inflation - the rewards pool - to fund SPS. It is completely delusional to claim that 10% of stake on Steem will ever vote to exercise control of such a mechanism rationally. There is no example of such coherent voting in Steem's history, and just because it's theoretically possible for such a thing to happen is no reason to expect it to. After all, we could all just quit arguing and fighting and world peace would break out today. It won't, and only fools will expect it to.
I have repeatedly called for prudent preparations to be made to reverse HF21 in the event my dire predictions are fulfilled. Please exercise that prudence by enabling a rapid reversal of the HF should price plummet, users hemmorhage, and market cap decline. Failing to prepare is preparing to fail.
Don't let profiteers suck the last bit of value from Steem before abandoning it's empty husk.
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Just to be clear things are being paid for by steemit. We can't expect them to make every fork and pay for them. This new system would allow us to lower our dependence on any one organization.
This is a backup plan for steem, if steemit goes bankrupt we need a way to fund development not saying they will but we need to have a plan for any eventuality. This will also allow us to come up with better features for these content creators. Development doesn't fund itself, we as a community should take the hit to guarantee the longevity of the chain.
We as a community can voluntarily decide to vote for and fund proposals as we see fit. SPS being funded as a tax on the ~10% of rewards shared by content creators whose median payout is .01 SBD is undeniably regressive.
I cannot imagine a set of proposals better designed to reduce Steem's dismal retention rate of ~7.5% YOY further. Every aspect of EIP and the SPS funding proposal is going to increase the flow of the economic activity on Steem into the wallets of the most substantial stakeholders before it can raise the price of Steem, and decrease the distribution of Steem to that demographic creating all the value of Steem by creating content.
If you want to cause the price of Steem to plummet, market cap to decline further, and to reduce the number of people creating content, I can't think of better ways to do that.
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And for the 'normies' like me: https://steemit.com/normietalk/@justineh/normie-talk-hf21-explained-sps-eip-what-it-is-and-what-happens-next
Very good post, much better than this one here. I think you explained the potential value of SPS. My concern remains though how do you distinguish between an idea which is likely to be profitable for the ecosystem and an idea which merely receives a lot of votes but which is a "bridge to no where".
How are the votes going to be calculated first of all? Do whale accounts get to rig the vote? Can whale accounts somehow be excluded? Do verified accounts get to vote exclusively or do accounts of a certain age get higher weight in the vote? If it's stake weighted alone then I think you can see what can happen here.
It's going to take a lot of discipline, planning, discussion, on how to rank/rate ideas. My suggestion is we need a way to try and determine how much value or profit an idea can generate for the ecosystem. Such as does it have potential to increase the value of the Steem token?
If two ideas accomplish the same thing equally but one of them burns Steem tokens and another does not then do we prefer the one which burns tokens?
If two ideas accomplish the same goal but one of them does so in a way which can bring in lots of revenue or investors then should we favor that one?
What metrics do we track to determine the success or failure?
Well this is @justineh's work, I can't take any credit but thought it was worth linking as they appeared at almost the same time.
Personally, I believe we are already on that bridge to nowhere and so almost anything should be an improvement.
There are a lot of 'ifs' though. If bot-boosted shit content is downvoted, perhaps stake will come out of the bots to curate as there will be less profit there, and a greater % of inflation heads towards curators.
Umm, same as before?
Potentially?
Not in this proposal, and likely never.
Nope.
I see some of these changes as much larger/more radical than what is being proposed - something for palnet-type efforts/SMT's to test?
SMTs could fix this I think if we can distinguish using SMT holding how verified an account is by percentage or points or something like that.
The concern I have is what would stop whales from simply rigging the votes and then voting for their pet projects without regard for the revenue it generates for the ecosystem?
If you look for example at corruption in certain industries historically such as construction for example? We know how a construction project can end up costing way more than it should and take way longer than it needs to take etc. When people start voting directly on how to spend money it also is historically known to create infighting, even civil wars happen over these sorts of disputes.
I wish more thought could go into the on-chain governance aspect so that we can really know it's what the community wants and that all factions of the ecosystem are equally represented. Example, content producers are a faction, witnesses are a faction, developers are a faction, and different politics are emerging right now favoring one or another faction.
Sounds like a job for Oracles
https://steemit.com/ned/@steemitblog/ned-scott-and-theoretical-of-steemit-explore-oracles-on-steem
Ah OK, your previous comments and this one I think relate more to SteemDAO - I didn't catch this initially.
I think the voting here is planned to be stake-weighted, but I could be wrong. I live in hope that those with the largest stakes would wish to grow the value of their holding by voting for the projects they think have the best chance of taking Steem forward in the medium/long term.
See palnet.io for a first glimpse of this. The whales there have been made so on the premise that they wont self-vote and cannot powerdown for a year. And a high stake account 'nopal4u' sits at the top of the rich-list ready to govern.
Pal is interesting. I assume Pal is an SMT right? Doing this with an SMT makes sense but I think the people proposing Steem DAO would have had better success in promoting their plan if they actually showed that there are some good ideas waiting to be funded, some whitepapers, business plans, etc.
You also have hoped that those with substantial stakes would actually curate, instead of extracting ~90% of rewards into their own wallets via manipulating rewards with those stakes. How'd that work out?
Hope springs eternal, and a sucker is born every minute. Human traits are predictable, and every part of EIP is designed to increase the profitability of profiteering, and that is also a feature of this funding mechanism for the SPS.
It isn't particularly hard to design mechanisms that prevent profiteering, and instead enable investors to rely on capital gains for ROI. Capital gains have encouraged investment for thousands of years. Profits have also been possible from hostile takeovers that extract the value of businesses while eliminating capital gains. Selling the means of production of a company whose stock is cheap enough can create profits. It destroys the value of the company stock though, as well as the company.
The means of production of Steem is creators, who cannot be sold. Their product can be profited from by the various mechanisms enabling stake to extract the rewards creators make possible, though, and we see that ~90% of rewards are extracted that way today. Now taxing that last ~10% of rewards can increase the extraction of rewards before they can create capital gains.
Guess what's going to happen? Well, you don't have to guess. You can simply predict that the same people are going to do the same thing for the same reasons that they have been doing, only they're now going to be able to get more rewards for doing it.
There's no point in hoping some words will change human nature. Reasonably preventing extraction of the economic value of content creation before it can increase the value of Steem is easily doable, and investors - not profiteers - have been provably investing for capital gains since prehistory.
HF21 is not going to change human nature, but is intended to enable the profiteers to extract even more profit. There are no experienced investors on Steem today, because capital gains are prevented. All substantial stakeholders have been, are now, and will continue to act as they always have, and parasitically extract every satoshi of value from the rewards pool before their competitors can. They have the voting power to effect what they want to see, and this is what they want.
I won't have hope until they've sucked every bit of value they profitably can out of Steem, and leave to parasitize their next target. Then maybe we can implement rational mechanisms to create capital gains and attract investors.
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Nothing. This is the kickback generator every corrupt bureaucrat dreams of.
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You must be young. I'm pretty old, and experience has taught me that things can always get worse. Indeed, without extreme measures, things going badly are very hard to keep from going worse. EIP and the SPS funding mechanism aren't radical changes to stake weighting manipulations. All they do is increase the profitability of manipulating rewards mechanism via substantial stake to extract rewards before that value can raise the price of Steem and create capital gains.
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And if the security and stability fail what will happen then? Will the SBD be reconverted to Steem, or just thrown away?
And if the Security and stability do not pan out will this be immediately HardForked out or will the funds be diverted to something else?
Steemit agreed, as has been pointed out over and over and over again when ever Steem and Steemit are bought up it is that they are different and not the same entity. Did Busy.org, partiko, eSteem, and the others agree to fund blocktrades? The witnesses protect the Blockchain Steem,that means all users of the blockchain, and all organizations on the blockchain come under their umbrella of protection. That includes busy.org, partiko, eSteem, and other forms and methods of accessing steem blockchain, not just steemit.
This is a lot in one post, so since it is an explanation post can you elaborate on what will happen to SPS if blocktrades is unable to provide the needed security and stability?
Probably there is some misunderstanding about what they were refering to by security/stability here. It's not about any service that we provide. I think they are just referring to the possibility that there is some bug in the SPS code. It's been tested by us (and reviewed by Steemit Inc as well) and I have no expectation that there will be any security bug of significance. But if such a bug was found, it would just be a matter of fixing it. I think all they mean is that they don't want to have it handle too much funds until it's proven safe by usage in the real world.
Yes, that is exactly right. Thanks @blocktrades for clarifying that
It will be rolled back, anytime anything doesn't work it can be rolled back, forked out or a fix will be made as soon as the issue is discovered.
And when has any HF that produced horrible unexpected consequences been rolled back? Not in the two years I've been here, IIRC. Without intentional preparation to do exactly that if things turn out poorly, I don't expect such a rollback to occur.
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Steemit and other substantial stakeholders mined Steem prior to Steemit being public. They remain the holders of the vast majority of Steem today. Busy, Partiko, eSteem, and other front ends did not participate in the ninjamine, and therefore do not have that 'free' stake to invest, as does Steemit.
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Will rewards drop to 0 again immediately after the hard fork? If so, how long is it expected to take to get back to equilibrium? Any other sorts of quirks expected during the transition period?
I hope the top witnesses remember the lessons about code audits, testing, and contingency plans from HF20. We are counting on them to maintain stability for this blockchain.
This will be a good time for the rest of us to compare our witness votes against results.
That should not happen, but I will triple check that and reply back here if I'm wrong.
@steemitblog,
Yeah I think this graphical description of upcoming changes probably work well!
But I still doubt how that Downvote mana thing works, coz this can leads to more issues and people might rage quit by whales who misuse this power!
So I call drama for that content!
!dramatoken
Cheers~
Your chart is very broken. About a third of rewards go to bidbots. A lot of circle jerks and self votes are being cast too. An honest chart would represent those rewards flows. About ~10% of rewards goes to creators.
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We should be able to downvote content anonymously, is it technically possible to hide/mask these transactions on blockchain?
That creates chaos friend. What if you are targeted by a whale and you never knew who downvoting you !? At least now you can raise a issue if some one constantly downvoting as we get to know who doing this.
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I don't agree with this robbing Peter to pay Paul method of "long term funding". It puts one faction of the community against another similar to what we see in typical bureaucracies. In essence for the blogger it's going to be perceived as an immoral tax.
A better way to fund something like this would be to provide a real useful promotion mechanism where bloggers can pay for visibility and use that to fund SteemDAO. In essence instead of BidBots why not use on-chain marketing to fund something like this?
This way actual activity and usage correlates with long term funding. Otherwise you're not likely to get anything which increases activity if the SteemDAO is funded no matter what by default. Also just like with political regimes once you start paying people in this way it's going to become increasingly more and more difficult to remove (lower the tax) in the future.
Once the SPS is in production you can propose whatever changes you like to the Steem stakeholders who can then fund the development of those features. Until then, we have to use our judgement, and the communications we have with the Witnesses, to guide the code we develop. If you don't feel we are making the right decisions, then that's a perfectly good reason to support the SPS. Until there is a decentralized mechanism for funding Steem blockchain development, you're stuck with us :)
That’s a good point even though we have to move forward. We come to the decision where we need to fund this blockchain through SPS. It is a start.
Keep on postin
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~90% of rewards going to 35 whales out of tens of thousands of accounts is not decentralized.
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Well put and I agree!
I just want better alignment of incentives. Who came up with the incentive mechanics/mechanism design here? What are we trying to accomplish with the rewards (and punishments)?
Of course we need more code, but code should be generated to make a profit for everyone combined. What exactly will SPS produce which is so important that it needs 10% of the reward pool indefinitely? Is it going to produce a lot of profit and raise the price of Steem for everyone so that it's measurably beneficial or is it just moving numbers and percentages around to benefit a few who want development contracts?
It was copied from Bitshares where I'm told there is a track record of it working reasonably well.
The issue is no one knows what it will produce. The community will be able to submit these proposals. So its the communities projects we would be funding which people will need to see what value they feel it will bring to the chain.
You're ignoring his point. The funding for the SPS proposals is coming only from content creators, who currently share ~10% of rewards now. ~90% of the benefits of any SPS proposals are then delivered to non-creators - who didn't pay anything to fund them under this proposal.
That's his point. The funding is extracted from content creators whose median payout is .01 SBD now, and a 10% tax on creators is going to reduce that, leaving even less incentive to create content.
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Oops. I think the SP of the majority of stake doesn't agree with you on this. Those 35 whales seem to prefer code that profits them instead of everyone. That's why this is the code being proposed by their chosen witnesses. When you look at things from the perspective of the history of Steem, that's clearly been the impetus behind extant code. Looking forward, it's reasonable to predict that's what this code is intended to do.
Less rewards for creators, and more rewards for whales. It's that simple.
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I can think of one reason to implement a regressive tax on the ~10% of rewards not currently extracted by substantial stakeholders. Only one, and it isn't to fairly distribute the expense of funding development to those that will benefit from it. Whales currently extract ~90% of rewards, despite creating almost none of the content those rewards are supposed to encourage creating. This tax will be extracting yet more rewards from creators and enabling whales to vote to fund SPS proposals that will provide kickbacks, just like governments do today across the world.
That's the only reason for this particular funding mechanism I can grasp.
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Hey guys, I don't know where I should report it and if it could be solved or not. But in Russia and Turkey steemitimages server is blocked by IP because of one travel blog hosted on same IP wrote about Amsterdam coffeeshops. You can check it here. Now I can not see any images on Steem posts, not even any post previews without VPN.
Maybe it is possible to change IP steemitimages IP address somehow to make it work again? I know there are not so many people using Steem in Russia & Turkey since you even don't care about recent bug on steemitwallet.com which is making unable to save changes for locale and other settings (page refresh resets site settings and I have to use steemiwallet in Russian by default). But anyways maybe you will fix at least this issue.
@steemitblog I'm sorry but I have to self upvote this bugs for visibility
There is another proposal.
A serious attempt at repairing the STEEM Economic Improvement Proposal (eip) for HF21
HF21 comes in like a wrecking ball.
All these are okay on their own. However a 10% cut + 25% more for curation + 2e13 = around 2.19 times more sp required for a vote worth around 1sp to an author. In otherwords my vote is now worth ~ 46% unless I only vote on people already getting huge payouts or join a whale pool.
I think we need to talk more about the combined effects and less about the individual changes that make sense in isolation.
What is the formula for the proposed reward curve?
I think that it is this:
result = ( ( rshares + s ) * ( rshares + s ) - s * s ) / ( rshares + 4 * s )
where s is 2,000,000,000,000 (i.e. 2e12).
Thank you!
Yup, that's right
Could you please tell me why you delay SMT once again how long we wait for smt and check steem price in satoshi why you not control his price why steem value dropping continuously ?????????????????????
Hello,
I'm not a tech freak, I'm an ordinary not even middle class user.
You guys forget one thing :
Content creators are everything for Steem and every dapp build on the system.
To tax these users And cut rewards And to help that their content get more punished is the wrongest decision ever.
Especially during a phase where the Steem price is down anyway.
The best way to destroy a platform.
To reward punishment will build a more worse climate on Steem as it is already.
As I mentioned before already, I'm not a Dev, but there are for sure other possibilities to fix the system.
You can build one dapp after the other, if you have no creators they all will be useless.
Have a great day, good luck
Tom
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I suppose the way not to be punished is not to post? Or not to post under the same account? I don't know if this will work but the community is free to try.
This should be seen as an investment to increase the features content creators can make use of. These proposals will be created by community members who will have ideas that will benefit all users. As it is steem provides very little value. This system will allow us to quickly expand our use cases and features. Wallet mobile apps, e-commerce solutions and more will make your investment and what you earn worth more if these can provide enough value.
This also lowers our dependency on any organization. Making sure steem can last a long time and have continued development support. Without the development of the backend and frontend technologies, there is no service for content creators to make money on. Yes, users are important but without good development, there is nothing for users to make use of.
This is an investment in our chains feature and I mean our chain because we all decide by staying power up that we believe in the community. Steem can no longer only be the taking community that it has been, we must invest in our future or we will continue to slip in the ranks of coins. Someone will just fork steem and do what needs to be done if we don't.
Who's to say someone won't come up with a proposal to allow the ease of user registration. There is many benefits that can come from these proposals.
Then tax the holders of the majority of stake, rather than those who have the least of it. You call them investors, even though they are really profiteers preventing capital gains.
The regressive taxation on the sole source of value of Steem will be far worse than you imagine. The whales receive ~90% of the rewards for the content created by those receiving ~10% of those rewards. The funding proposed taxes that ~10% to fund development that will profit 35 whales most of all, and who won't be paying for it. The witnesses are dependent for their income on the votes of those whales, and this funding mechanism is perhaps the most noxious example of corruption I am aware of, since it has been proposed by the pet witnesses of those whales.
The consequences of incessant and rapine profiteering cannot be supported at a higher level than is extant, and HF21 is going to approximately halve the rewards received by content creators. That will be a disaster for Steem. Users will abandon the platform quickly, and angrily. The price of Steem will plummet. Market cap will decrease further.
I predict that three months after adoption of HF21 the price of Steem will be ~10% of today's price. It won't matter if you change your mind then, because it will be too late to try to resuscitate Steem after so much disingenuous rhetoric and blatant profiteering. The world will lose this chance to create what Steem could have been, and you will be one of the architects of that destruction.
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I have launched a survey to know which or the witnesses are in favor and against the HF21... would be very useful for everybody to know it.
https://steemit.com/palnet/@toofasteddie/questionforthetop20witnessesabouthf21-y4bpztx3in
Very pertinent and should be a stickied post so they all respond. These are the important things that the whole of us need to pay attention to and voice our opinion.
I agree...
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With this then all top 20 witnesses should cease all bidbots as they are gaming the system. They are double if not triple dipping through the failings of the Steem ecosystem that has allowed the manipulation. I am seriously concerned that the owners of said bots will just adjust their algorithm to the new cut and a few tweaks to curation algos will net them an equal cut to hf20. There had better be some damned good testing in the testnet this time to determine the efficacy when concerning the bots. Though I have large reservations about that since the top 20 are the testers, voters, and bot owners.
This does sound like a major conflict of interest.
You will likely see bot votes being downvoted with this new system. What is the bot going to do waste their downvotes on you?
Absolutely, and profitably. Downvotes are going to be free. Won't cost them anything to protect their businesses from downvotes by hordes of minnows (if any are so foolish as to try to), and their stakes will enable them to conduct retaliatory flagging campaigns that will soon make examples that others will learn from.
No one rational without massive stake will be flagging whales with their free downvotes. Free downvotes will likely only be used to conduct censorship without cost or retaliatory flags to crush any who dare to oppose profiteering. The downvote pool will not somehow induce tens of thousands of minnows to act in concert, and that's what would be necessary to successfully defend against whale flags.
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Wow, that is a good point I never thought of.
As you can observe, I am familiar with how downvotes are deployed by stakeholders.
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I think the EIP doesn't make sense. the most important now is to attract more new users into steem. This proposal doesn't seems newbies friendly. the author reward is too low, new comers can't benefit from the increase curation reward since they have little steem power. This only benefit the old big whale. And the only purpose of EIP is to discover 'good content'. but only the few large SP holders can do that. It's a paradox. Good content for someone, may means nothing for majority. And most importantly, steem is a currency not a blog platform. the value of a currency is coming from consensus of people. The more people join in the more value a currency have. "good content"obviously not a good thing to make consensus, since different people have different appetite. Wrap up. This proposal simply about how to distribution interest. our Chinese have a saying" make big cake first, then discuss how to divide the cake".Look at the price of steem. is the cake big enough to be divided? Hope this proposal to be rejected.
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If the steem ecosystem would be somehow destroyed, who would lose the most? The whales. Who are most of the whales? The top 20 witnesses.
I think it's safe to say that especially the whales have a huge interest in the steem ecosystem being able to grow BIG over time. And that is only possible if the userbase grows and if the new users are able to make their cut. They know this fact.
Maybe this new proposal benefits them them most in the short term, but they also face the biggest risk of ultimately loosing hundreds of thousands of dollars of their investment.
So assuming they want to screw the average joe for maximizing their profits makes no sense, because this is not possible. If they fuck it up, the price will be 5 cents in just a few weeks without ever recovering. Nobody wants that.
I totally agree with you, the new ones never. It will benefit them and as they will always leave, what they will bring is that they will finish killing what little life is left of the platform.
If the steem ecosystem would be somehow destroyed, who would lose the most? The whales. Who are most of the whales? The top 20 witnesses.
I think it's safe to say that especially the whales have a huge interest in the steem ecosystem being able to grow BIG over time. And that is only possible if the userbase grows and if the new users are able to make their cut. They know this fact.
Maybe this new proposal benefits them them most in the short term, but they also face the biggest risk of ultimately loosing hundreds of thousands of dollars of their investment.
So assuming they want to screw the average joe for maximizing their profits makes no sense, because this is not possible. If they fuck it up, the price will be 5 cents in just a few weeks without ever recovering. Nobody wants that.
I tell you everything will be lost, because the new ones will not benefit. Since it costs them a lot to have good profits, the platform you must devote a lot of time so that they can see and many, they are for the benefits they can get with this I think nobody. You will sacrifice your time for a little profit, look at the boom of 2017 when the steem came to be. At 10 dollars we were many and they entered more and more each time, since you promote the platform and see that they do not have remuneration they leave or get bored. I think you should see other platforms where you have much more remuneration and keep their users.
Despite the logical assumption that the greater profits available via capital gains will incite whales to act to create capital gains, the history of Steem reveals the opposite to be true. Whales compete against each other to extract rewards and increase their stakes relative to the others. The extant code discourages investing, and encourages that profiteering instead, and this incites capital losses rather than capital gains.
Nobody wants Steem to plunge in value, but that's what EIP will cause, and whales have proven unable to agree to limit rewards so that they cannot be extracted by substantial stake. They are each acting in their individual interest, rather than as a community; competing for rewards rather than cooperating platform wide to create capital gains.
Powerdowns of millions of Steem are ongoing presently. Whales are preparing to sell their Steem before it plunges after EIP is deployed. The extant code simply too strongly favors extractive profiteering over inciting capital gains, primarily by enabling unlimited rewards to be gained by the VP of substantial stakeholders.
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Looks like the market really likes these proposed changes... Steem now 70th on Coinmarketcap. It's never been lower.
Lol, don't you know that has been the plan all along.
If we actually fixed the things wrong with this financial system things would be upended.
That is not in the plan of the elites, who control steem like they control everything else.
I actually believe their intentions are good, including the witnesses, but they can't seem to get out of their own way. I mean they would benefit much more from a higher steem price than a low one, even more so than the rest of us would.
It's as clear as the nose on their face.
Their actions are beginning to say this debacle is intentional.
They kicked out the blocks on abuse so they could extract max roi, and dump it, but now they can't figure out why the price is so low?
Nah, this was planned, as is the doubling down.
The sad thing is some of us will still be here when it is all ashes.
I still got golos, post once in a while.
Smdh.
...see my above ^ repy! lol
The actions of steem fit your/my paradigm more accurately than any other explanation...
.......but imagine if they knew it wouldn't sustain itself because the model was fundamentally flawed.....
Then it would be just a case of wealth transfer to 'them', before it imploded...Just sayin'
Even if it's not an outright sham, if it ends like an outright sham, what else would you call it?
There is very little evidence that steem wasn't intentionally kneecapped, and plenty that it was.
The reward curve was worked out before the coin went live, but the power struggle was just getting started.
Now look at us.
The abusers are winning.
So clicking a button or setting an autovoter takes as much skill, sweat, and effort as creating a post?
Ridiculous.
Cg
Nope, it doesn't, and in an ideal world we might just go right ahead and give 100% to authors.
But in the real world we need a system with sound economics in order for authors to be rewarded at all and that requires the curation share to be higher (indeed maybe even higher than 50%, but we are hoping for various reasons that 50% is high enough to work).
Think of it as a necessary evil if you prefer, rather than the straw man of someone making a claim about equal skill, sweat and effort, because no one is making that claim.
Best answer @smooth.
Cg
I have to disagree with your position. Buying the stake that backs up the vote does cost in real life (or at least it should) and keeping your resources staked also has opportunity costs. There must be some balance and right now we have a 3 to 1 ratio in favor of author rewards vs voting. Content creation does not carry the financial risk of losing the value of an investment. A 50/50 split seems fair in my view as long as the right content is rewarded.
What I am not in favor of is reducing the rewards pool to fund the SPS, the funding should come from the portion of the inflation that is allocated to SP "interest". As a stakeholder am willing to forgo that income stream if it goes to projects that end up increasing the value of my holdings. According to some witnesses they are discussing that option (and I hope they give it a serious consideration).
While buying stake would be a useful contribution, the vast majority of stake was simply mined by those that have it now, and they use it to extract rewards from the pool by casting huge votes with that unpurchased stake. I'm not aware that any of the 35 whales on Steem now bought 1 satoshi of that stake. They extract ~90% of the rewards content creators make possible anyway. Content creators receive but ~10% of rewards.
I don't agree that SPS requires any mandatory funding. If proposals can't attract funding due to their virtues, that's a damn good reason not to fund them. The whole idea of the tax is simply to force funding of proposals by making it too complex to prevent bad proposals that no one would pay for otherwise from being not funded. Ancillary is that the tax being based on content creators rewards makes all the funding come from creators and none from the whales, while the whales will receive the vast majority of any increase in value such funding generates. It's a regressive tax on the poor and 90% of the financial benefits of that tax will go to the rich.
That's just an asshole move in my book.
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So earning enough money to have a significant amount of sp (let's say 10-50k) is easier than creating a post ?
Not everyone who clicks on the vote button has invested $10-$50k... However I see your point.
Put it this way, without content, there is nothing to vote on.
Cg
"Not everyone who clicks on the vote button has invested $10-$50k... However I see your point." => Those who matter a tad bit do. Content creators don't care about 1 cent upvotes
And without investors there would be no upvotes and no money for content creator. This is a chicken and the egg problem.
I don't see it as chicken and egg, because the content exists whether the investors are there or not.
For instance, if people feel they'll get a better deal with Voice, or even Facebook, then that's where we will produce our content. Investors will always follow the content.
The reason big investors haven't made money, isn't because of a reward pool share, it's because the price has either tanked since investing, or stayed stagnant.
That is due to the fact that there are no longer enough users to keep things moving along nicely, plus of course the bidbots are hogging the majority of the pool.
So you can up it to 90/10 in favour of the investor, and you still won't make any money.
Cg
@steemitblog why always you busy in decreasing the author reward who surf all their time and struggle here and increasing curation will be enjoy for whales and free powr holder from freedom what a common men will take decreasing reward will decrease user interest why witnesses impose HF21 when no one is happy with it ? This is non sense stop doing this we all leave Steem and power down forever
Content producers need to know that the tax is on them. The SPS is funded by a tax on content producers. This might be fine because the content being produced isn't high quality anymore but then it also risks reducing active users on the site to even lower numbers. Retention is important. Curation is passive rather than active and while I can agree with 50/50, I don't see why SPS should be necessary.
How about create a profit and use that to fund pet projects via SPS? I know SMTs need to be funded, and communities, but I predict this along with the reward curve change could actually reduce the motivation of content producers.
If the price of Steem actually were going in the other direction perhaps I could be more optimistic but these changes don't reflect the downward price movement (EIP). As a result, I don't think it's enough by itself. I think something more needs to be done although I'm not exactly sure what.
Anyone have suggestions?
We would argue that the existing system taxes good content creators, and the proposed system taxes bad content creators because it creates better incentives for quality content curation. But this is all semantics. Calling any of these things taxes is overdramatic hyperbole. Taxes are compulsory fees backed by violence. Steem is an open, decentralized, and voluntary ecosystem that was intended to unearth high quality content. As you agree, it is failing in that regard. The economics behind the proposed changes are sound with respect to better aligning incentives toward curating high quality content. If quality content creators wind up seeing diminished returns, then they should go to a platform that provides them with better returns. But we believe that they will find that these changes increase the odds that they receive rewards, because they are more likely to be found and upvoted while at the same time, thanks to free downvotes, poor content will be more likely to receive downvotes.
Yes, technically it is not a government enforced tax, but the fee is being taken from our rewards and very well might have the same effect. As we know, taxes tend to destroy things and if you "tax" the creators you run a big risk of disincentivzing creation.
I am on this platform all the time, and I don't remember seeing any substantive, high profile forum or discussions on this. I never see any scheduled discussions on Reddit - which is where I personally think these should be - and nor are they regular or centralized. Everything is all over the place.
Also, when you combine it with all the other ideas like the EIC and reduction in Creator rewards, it's just too much change at once @andrarchy!
It's not a fee taken from your rewards either, because the rewards are not yours until you are paid them, and this discussion is all about future rewards which aren't yours yet.
Technically all of the rewards of every kind come from inflating/diluting investor stake. With this fork, that money coming from investors will be spent a bit differently going forward is all. A lot of it will still go to content rewards. As @andrarchy says, ideally more of that will hopefully go to good content rewards. Some of what is currently coming out of the pool to fund projects will ideally shift over to SPS, leaving more of the remainder for content.
Overall it is very difficult to say what the net effect on any particular reward earner will be, but the goal here is not in fact to increase or decrease rewards going to any particular person or group of people, it is to make Steem work better to stop or reverse the slide into obscurity and ultimately failure. Yes I'm sure there will be some net winners and losers but at this point I'm not even sure who they are.
Semantics. I'm talking about the principle of the matter. If I'm promised a certain percentage of the rewards and rewards WILL be forthcoming, that percentage is what I expect. It is mine even if it isn't in my hands yet.
Semantics.
I don't care what he says and I disagree with funding the SPS via non-voluntary means. As far as the EIC, they're just promises of hypothetical gains based on how they think humans behave, in contrast to the objective gains large stakeholders and witnesses get. One is deterministic, one is not.
Why does everyone keep repeating what the goal is to me as though it's an argument? The goal is laudable, it's the means I disagree with.
Then you did not understand the system properly because DPoS has defined governance which explicitly allows for voted hard forks which change the rules. Some rules have a higher to much higher social barrier to being changed such as forks which would take your coins away, or forks which increase inflation (effectively taking them away via a back door). But changes to the allocation of and reductions to the amount of rewards have both happened before. You had no reason to expect or demand that something which already happened before can't happen again (and many things which haven't happened may also happen in the future).
Non-voluntary would be taking coins out of your balance and as I said above, this has a much higher social barrier to ever happening. Future rewards are not that.
It is ultimately a judgment call. You get a vote (via choosing witnesses who share your judgment or conclusions). Please use it.
I have voted, just not for any of the current Top 20, and I wouldn't ever based on this circus some people call a process.
I totally understand why you would feel that this is too much change at once, and I appreciate you sharing those helpful suggestions. Maybe we should leverage reddit more. That being said, ultimately that's a call for the witnesses. They're the ones who wanted us to code up these changes and they were elected by you. It's their thought processes and discussions that you want insights into. If you don't like how they operate, vote them out.
Hardforks are our only opportunities to make improvements to the protocol and they are extremely disruptive, especially to exchanges. If the Witnesses hardfork too frequently, then we will get delisted from exchanges. I understand why people would prefer that we make smaller more frequent changes to the blockchain, but blockchains just weren't made for that. I don't know of any blockchain that hardforks as frequently as Steem, or has some kind of technology that enables more frequent, less disruptive upgrades. We do have some plans in the pipeline for making hardforks less disruptive to exchanges, which should enable us to spread out changes more, but until then we have to deal with the existing realities. We agreed with your Witnesses that these were important changes, and that we wouldn't get another opportunity to integrate these changes into Steem for a long time, unless we delayed the SMT hardfork.
These are really hard decisions because we are trying to solve really hard problems. We're doing the best we can, and when we look back at the decisions we made, well those were the decisions that lead to you being here, still commenting on this post and still using this blockchain we love. Ultimately, that's what matters. Users come and go, and no one notices everything that is working well. Steem is still far more advanced in many ways than any other blockchain. Resource Credits were an awesome innovation and the free accounts they enable stakeholders to create is still a feature that I believe is unique to Steem.
Part of that is probably our fault because all we're ever talking about are the things we think are broken and need to be fixed. But this blockchain is our legacy and what matters to us is that we can look at ourselves in the mirror and know that we made the right decisions, even if they're really hard, as opposed to taking the easy way out.
Good grief.
We need town halls. FORMAL SCIENTIFIC polls. We need a process that is the same every time and is public facing - and in my opinion not on Steem - and is centralized and is scheduled. We need outside voices and economists to lend their expertise. The creators need more of a voice.
I know that forking is hard on the exchanges, but we could have done the SPS and had a process where a scientific poll was created that asked something like whether or not we as creators would be willing to give up X% of our income for SPS. If not why? Then you would need to show us why the number was the one you chose. Then, at the very least, we're included. I'm sorry, but the Witnesses are not qualified to speak for all of us . Staking isn't a good enough metric and neither is being a developer. We have similar but also different interests.
Then we could move onto the more controversial aspects of this fork. All of it at once is asking too much of your creators.
I agree that discussion of these kinds of matters can be improved dramatically, and many other points you make.
but not that one. Steem is a blockchain and provides excellent archival qualities unavailable on other media. We just need better mechanisms to hold discussions, and that is a failure of our front ends, not our blockchain.
This actually was undertaken on Steem, and a poll taken that disavowed any non-voluntary contributions. This was done on a post by @blocktrades some months ago, and I participated vigorously. Since there is no sticky mechanism, and but little use of the memo function to alert folks individual users think to, you apparently missed the post.
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Why not? I don't see any reasonable argument to not leverage a platform with magnitudes more users to have our debates. I know Steem is a blockchain and I understand it's archival qualities. Those aren't things I'm concerned about when it comes to this process. They're quite irrelevant. Steem and the community suffer from being insular. We sit on this platform when we should be having these discussions in a more public forum, in a place that is removed from the mechanics and politics of Steem. I suggest Reddit because I believe being open about the process would allow voices from say /r/cryptocurrency to join in on the debate. The Reddit community is MASSIVE and the Steem community is miniscule. We'd find more voices there of the regular kind of user we need to attract and convince that Steem, and the process by which it operates, is worth being a part of and transparent. Us debating amongst ourselves doesn't seem to have had the desired effect of creating a transparent process with heterodox voices or a system that works. So I think we need to go elsewhere.
That is my whole point. I follow Blocktrades. I also follow Tim Cliff, Agroged and some of the other top witnesses. I never saw said poll and I'm on here allllllll the time. I'm assuming you mean this thread? https://steempeak.com/blocktrades/@blocktrades/stake-weighted-poll-for-two-versions-of-steem-proposal-system
That is not a scientific poll or study. When I was developing my social network - full disclosure: we couldn't get enough seed funding to get it off the ground - we went through a rigorous process to launch a nationwide, scientific poll to determine our market and what our market wanted. It was designed to eliminate bias or leading questions and make respondents anonymous. The company that helped us conduct the poll then broke down everything in clear terms.
What I see in the post above is an indefensible process for deciding something like what we're seeing implemented now. This just reinforces what I'm talking about. This whole discussion is on several different accounts and "polling", if one could even call it that, is relegated to comments sections. It's pathetic. We need to have a public forum, that is centralized, that is scheduled that reinforces or rejects proposals based on evidence gathered by not only the forum but through follow up, scientifically conducted polls with all the data presented to the userbase, who also happen to be stakeholders.
I just cannot agree to this process as it stands.
But the witnesses weren't voted in by "us", they were voted in by a very small group of the largest stake holders representing less than .01% of the entire user base.
I disagree. It only creates, both before and after HF21, incentive to extract rewards made possible by content creators. Nothing I've seen creates any reason to consider the quality of content. Financial manipulation of the rewards mechanism enabling greater ROI for voting on particular content does not provide any financial incentive for valuing the quality of the content. It only creates mechanisms that increase or decrease ROI based on metrics like vote timing, size of VP cast, and etc...
Your definition of taxes is not supported by credible sources I am aware of, and I checked several just now. The absence of physical force does not make a mandatory payment something other than a tax. Fraud violates the NAP and does not involve violence either.
The payments to the witnesses, and the funding for SPS proposed, are taxes. That's not hyperbole, nor dramatic. They're mandatory payments required by the platform, and are taxes. Claiming otherwise is semantics, and disingenuous. I expect better of you, whom I have come to respect as an honest and forthright writer.
Please don't abandon those principles in the fervor of debate.
This statement amounts to an ultimatum, and an invitation for disaffected users to worsen Steem's already poor retention rate instead of seeking to comment reasonably in the hope of improving matters. I can appreciate your passion on this issue. It is something that highly recommends you for your position. It is only commendable in the event that it inspires you to do a great job, and showing users that disagree with you the door does not meet the standards I believe you hold yourself to, nor seems desirable to your employer.
You and I don't always agree, and that is highly acceptable, because it is where we disagree that we can learn each from the other. Telling someone to leave is similar to censoring them, and rather than showing your arguments are more reasonable, reveal you would prefer not to discuss, and implies logical weakness.
I am confident you don't want Steem to be an echo chamber of yes men, unable to learn from the criticism of their peers.
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Missing some great Commentary:
https://steemit.com/community/@dreemsteem/perhaps-we-need-to-speak-as-one
https://steemit.com/hardfork/@dreemsteem/now-you-can-see-the-numbers
Where are the Top Consensus Views?
https://steemit.com/dpoll/@shadowspub/poll-for-the-wtinesses-on-hf21
Because of the new wallet and password changes I think there Is a lot of dapps now that you can't login and use...
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One good idea that keeps going around: Why not take from witness rewards and make the remaining witness rewards a proposal in the SPS system? Then the funding amount does NOT have to be fixed.
That actually makes a lot of sense since their costs are fixed in USD.
I think steem will go 0.05$ after this hard fork. Stop doing hard fork. whenever you do hard fork steem goes down. This hard fork is useless. For the god sake please stop it.
You are absolutely correct. And that is their plan. It is finished. Sorry man. Experiment over.
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Let’s see this I’m action! The anticipation is killing me on both a good and bad way.
You've got
DRAMA!To view or trade
DRAMAgo to steem-engine.com.Congratulations @steemitblog!
Your post was mentioned in the Steem Hit Parade in the following category:
I think there will be a poll section in steem blockchain so that these kind of implementation can we publicly discussed. So that in future if there is any change that we want to implement can we polled in the public.
even if it publically discussed its the top witnesses who decide. The big power holders have given there power to them because they trust the choices the top 20 make.
But after that we know that what public wants and it will make pressure on witnesses to take decisions according to that.
Hoping to new networks come then.
Thanks for nothing. Always thinking how big guys can earn, and what whales call "good content" then just fuck everyone else.
Steemit.inc descentralized corporativism.
Minimal =) I want to make love to the use of shape and typography! Resteem for your post,,,
Is 50:50 not fixed yet? One thing I really don't understand is that steemitblog's posts didn't include the exact ratio twice in a row. Are you also hesitant about this change?
This kind of change should be done at the SMT level. I think the main purpose of this is to keep holders who're trying to leave. Eventually ad-revenue sharing with authors is a must. Currently, Steemit requests holders to pay authors, which has been proven to be not sustainable. That's why many holders are leaving and Steemit is trying to give a myopic incentive to them.
ps. Due to several combined changes, you will not know which result is due to which change.
good
This type of economy is very effectively used by many projects that are focused on development of their platforms. With the stagnation STEEM has experienced I believe this system could very well help re-vitalize the platform. Hoping that the tests go well and there are no major bugs, but otherwise this is very exciting.
As far as content creator cuts, I believe that by focusing on improving the platform and bringing in more users, the content creators will actually end up earning more in the long term anyways.
Really looking forward to this and I am glad that the team as well as witnesses are staying on top of their game. Good luck with the implementation.
Follow me and i will return it
It seems to me that Steemit Inc. should do NOTHING. Leave all development up to individuals.
LOOK: we already HAVE new tokens-- done privately.
We already HAVE communities -- done privately by using the tokens and token tags.
Just leave things alone and someone will do what needs to be done to make Steem great again. It has already begun!
just one more question @steemitblog , i NEVER downvote ... not once since i got here , do i get extra upvotes for free instead ?
i think downvoting is detrimental btw, you'll never get big brands to sign up if they clash in flagwars with opposing brands
... my crazy opinion again ofcourse
Waooooooooo Many changes, it is amazing
I can see that I have a lot to learn here and wouldn't even know where to begin when it comes to discussing this. So, I will lurk. This is an excellent article but I have to admit to only barely understanding some parts of it now -- while other parts of it are within my range of understanding.
All I know is that I still believe in and endorse what you're hoping to achieve here.
@steemitblog did not you learnt from HF 20 destruction to the steem price Why are you decreasing the author reward and if you increase curation reward only bid bot owners who are getting free power from @freedom will enjoy what a normal author will get for hard work in writing long articles if HF 21 Gonna increase steem price then oKay otherwise in my view it will destroy steem more why people will power up when there is almost no reward for power holders
There is a reward, with this the curation cut goes up. So they get more for having more powered up is they vote on content. Though what person is going to pay a bot to come in at a loss. Other than people who really want advertising. The bots will be taking way more of the curation than they did before. You should see people pulling assets out of bots in theory.
Would it be possible to get a monthly, quarterly or yearly breakdown in regards to fund allocation? I know a lot of people are concerned with the SteemIt power down and I think a breakdown of where those funds go could greatly help alleviate people’s worries.
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Well yeah once the system is made, api's will likely be made for this. The data will be public, so anyone will be able to audit the sps system.
It should also be easy to make graphs to show when new features that are developed or are released showing the effect on the market certain changes have as well.
I guess the question is how detailed it will be and how easy an audit will be. If there’s no accountability the system could be gamed by bad actors
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Oh no, it will be fully auditable, since they have to ask for a specific amount I believe. That specific number and whatever data that says yes it was accepted is enough data to figure out the spending.
People in the community keep track over every dime steemit spends and cashouts. You can expect them to do the same with this as well.
Fair enough. From what I’ve heard some people say I thought a lot of SteemIt’s Steem just disappears
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Well once it hits exchange everyone's funds do.
How does the ratio of author and curation compensation change?
It shows in the graphs in the post.
Also with eip it will be a 50/50 split between authors and curators.
This sounds weak to me. Don’t get me wrong, probably everyone knows the economics now is broken, it’s nice to see changes for sure, but I don’t get why to choose this specific curve though.
This specific statement is about the choice of constant, not the choice of curve. The motivation for this family of curves is in @vandeberg EIP curve post https://steemit.com/steem/@vandeberg/reward-curve-deep-dive
Thanks. I’ve read that post. What I didn’t get is the curve will go near linear at 16 steem, then the whole broken thing won’t really change much. But i guess we’ll see how it goes. @remind-me in 3 months
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I hope it turns out well for us. I hope Steem will scale back.