My probability estimates on each:
- 15%. A lot of people feel a compulsion to speak their mind... and that is unlikely to change. There will be a lot loss commenting just to get rewards, though. I could live with a little less 'great post brother, please follow back my resteem'... although RC cost of commenting has made most of that disappear after HF20.
- 30% Not one I had put a lot of thought into, but I know quite a few onboarding initiatives that are gearing up and have solid game plans in place. Things could still falter depending on how CLRC plays out, but I suspect their 'losses' will be offset by the reward pool gains from downvote wars.
- 99.99% This is a near certainty, especially as bid-bots either fully monetize their downvote pools or use them for retaliatory strikes to protect their customers from 'bid-bot abuse' downvotes. Another potential racket is protection money. Average customer payout = x; any post payout > x receives randomly distributed downvotes... I guess that's an 8th item for your list, though?
- 5% High probability of bid-bots flourishing make this one a low probability... passive investors will continue to take some risks on the underlying STEEM price so long as passive delegation rewards remain high. Prices have been falling on dlease.io lately, but that's because a lot of active capital is piling into SCOT tokens instead of projects with high lease demands. I expect 50/50 curation to restore demand for delegation leases alongside spurring bid-bot rewards to delegation.
- 95% Another near-certainty (especially in the short-run). I'm told that there is 10MM worth of SP waiting for active downvotes... human nature being what it is, there will be lots of flag-tantrums and retaliatory downvoting happening. Social norms need to shift massively from perceiving downvotes as 'stealing my rewards' to the more accurate 'establishing consensus' and without that shift most downvotes will trigger retaliation.
- 100%. Almost all bad behaviors on Steem are profit-maximizing. If $5 buys you $2.60 of upvotes, but $10 buys you $10.40 of upvotes, which do you pick? (note that this was an intended effect so at least something will work as advertised - their argument is that moving bad-behavior up-curve will make it easier to identify and deal with using downvote curves)
- 0%. In my opinion this one confuses traders with investors. If your holding period is less than 13 weeks, whether inflation is 8.5% of 2.5% doesn't have a material impact. Investors can easily offset inflation with passive income... traders don't actually care. Really... you can't tell me that traders cared about fundamentals like inflation rate when SBD went to $12... (though my 0% is a little irrelevant here... traders have mostly abandoned STEEM/SBD already. Why do you think they keep getting delisted?)
Obviously my probabilities are subjective... if I had a quantitative model that could measure such probabilities accurately I would be making bank in coins with volume, not piddling around on Steem with a $25k passion project.
@josephsavage,
Intelligent commentary.
Proposal:
Appoint a Council comprised of people surnamed "Savage."
Delegate to said council dicatorial powers for 6 months. (I volunteer to handle the "disciplinary aspects" for the Council).
Be astonished at how polite and well-behaved everyone instantly becomes.
The best argument in favor of centralization is watching the members of a decentralized blockchain try to solve even the simplest of problems. Why not just ban bidbots? How?
Make it a Violation of Steemit's Terms of Service to RUN and/or USE bidbots.
Make it a Violation of Steemit's Terms of Service to use any other Front End that does not similarly ban bidbots.
This would collapse bidbot usage instantly. Instead, we have these Rube Goldberg proposals ... trying to discourage bad behavior by incentivizing good behavior.
Enough carrots ... it's time for sticks.
Quill
Bidbots are a symptom of larger problems. Any solution that disempowers them disenfranchises significant parts of the investor base. At this point, killing off bidbots via mandate (instead of structuring the appropriate incentives that people stop delegating to them and using them on their own) would destroy investor trust in the blockchain. I very seriously doubt that the patient would survive the 'cure'.