you may be right. But most of those players actually have other ways to realize large return on their investment here, many of the biggest funders of vote sellers are top 20 witnesses, and also earn a large chunk of the reward pool just as a payout based on their stake - the short term profit from delegation is MORE than these sources of income, but those sources of income are not trivial. If they have another "thing" to move on to that is more attractive, of course you are right. The thing is though the system was already set up heavily on the side of rewarding stake in the first place. I am not sure it will be so easy for the major players to find "something else" more profitable than Steem even if they are not profiting from delegating SP to vote sellers.
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To be clear, I'm not working from a pure philosophical game-theory perspective here--more a psychology-aware one, where we recognize that humans SUCK at gauging long-term vs. short-term benefit. If your system is set up to subtly favor long-term success but has obvious short-term potential, the short-term strategy is going to win out even if it's "irrational".
You hit the nail on the head with "the system was already set up heavily on the side of rewarding stake". Minnows exist only to feed whales; the imagery there is pretty overt! And if getting people to buy votes is an effective way to consolidate stake, even if it's not the best, just a satisfactory and easy one, that's what we'll see happen.
This outcome should be no surprise, really. Cryptocurrency in general, and Steemit especially, are capitalism in code. And the thing that capitalism does best is pillage labor to make a few people rich, sustainability be damned, even to the scale of the whole planet.
We should probably rename "minnows" to "krill" to be more accurate ;)
Yeah. I wish I could disagree :(