Sort:  

Well the difference between gun regulation and steem delegation is you actually can wait for the offense before retracting the weaponry. With gun control it's hit or miss for the dealer, they can't blame themselves for what their customer did if they believe they did their due diligence. But a steem delegator can just undelegate and say "sorry mate, but this SP is more valuable to me as the owner than it is to you as the renter"

So do you think blocktrades should be allowed to undelegated SP that is paid for when he disagrees with it's use?

What would you say was misuse?

Misuse is any sort of antisocial behaviour that would deter people from using the social network. Self voting is not the worst kind of antisocial behaviour, but it is one. And it depends how much as outlined in your post. Everything in moderation. Too much of anything is bad for you, or at least, that was the case when it was the SP owners self voting. When it is a delegate it isn't bad for you unless there is the potential for the delegation to be removed. It is still bad for the delegators investment though, but perhaps the payment for the delegation makes up for that and the value no longer matters so much.

As far as I'm concerned the people paying for delegation currently have every reason to abuse it, since they are being over charged and not gaining anything by being social with it.

You should be a politician :p I think the answers to my questions were in there somewhere?!

Haha, I think it is in the interest of everyone including @blocktrades to be more responsible about who he delegates to and what behaviours he can expect based on how much they have to pay. However, I can see that even if the network suffers, he still profits from this business. So who am I to judge? The code has been written in a way that does not lead to decentralisation as it was originally intended. For that reason, it's not something I would invest in.

Obviously he is allowed to undelegate after a week if somebody is paying week by week. Whether or not he should depends on what he cares more about. The future or the short term.

Do you think self-voting would reduce if the rates were lowered?

Absolutely convinced that if both rates were lowered and delegators made it clear that you could lose delegation for voting too much on any one account self voting would definitely reduce. I've even seen it myself. I've seen people receive free delegation, and turn to me to say "shit, I better learn to vote for other people now"