“Eliminating “abuse” is not possible and shouldn’t be the goal. Even those who are attempting to “abuse” the system are still doing work. Any compensation they get for their successful attempts at abuse or collusion is at least as valuable for the purpose of distributing the currency as the make-work system employed by traditional Bitcoin mining or the collusive mining done via mining pools. All that is necessary is to ensure that abuse isn’t so rampant that it undermines the incentive to do real work in support of the community and its currency.” — Steem Whitepaper 15/32
Please note how they speak to the "issue" or "none-issue" either agnostically or amorally by using the word abuse in quotes an equal number of times as it is used not in quotes. This suggests competing viewpoints in the minds of the various authors. Who knows, had the "it's not abuse" crowd won, maybe there wouldn't be downvotes at all? I have no clue how deep the rabbit hole goes in that regard. Or I could be wrong entirely if this is some kind of sick and twisted social psychology experiment designed to see how people react than that would be another reason to employ the doublespeak they used.
I do appreciate your pointing this out to me. Perhaps the abuse they refer to isn't self voting, but circle jerks and botnets, as I don't think they conidered self voting abuse, since they provided a check box to upvote your own posts on Steemit.
Thanks!
Sure, it's tough to say, the whitepaper is very wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey, stuff. Written intentionally abstract and open to subjective interpretation. It's no wonder why people cannot agree on what is right or wrong behavior. Another reason they may be using this technique is so they don't hoist themselves on their own petard. There is no right or wrong way to explain how to "fairly" divvy (X) the number of rewards to (Y) the number of people. And like you pointed out before, it's not going to be fair because there is no equality in outcome. Any attempt to explain how to do this fairly is open to a very credible debunking. This doesn't stop people from yearning for a semblance of fairness when they invest. It's why I think we can't expect investors to act 100% altruistically. It's why I respect whatever investors do with their stake. For every person out there who capitalizes to the maximum, there are loads of others who are rewarding content. It all comes down to character.
This.
Yeah, all this blockchain think put me into a meta-ethics jag the other day. Well, it was just one video that aptly summarized many of the branches and categories. I found it interesting to realize there is this entire world of ethical foundations strictly defined.
Interesting up until where I heard him say: “Most people don’t identify with just one. Instead, most people identify with principles from several that help them form their moral views.”
Anyway, philosophy, ethics, and meta-ethics are all part of what forms a person’s character, and people might subscribe to one or more of these schools of thought or styles of beliefs without even knowing of their existence as it pertains to the realm of philosophy and or psychology. Similar to how one could be a Pisces or a Libra while knowing nothing about astrology.
The sentence I quoted made the entire branch seem somewhat unimportant, kind of like astrology. I guess it’s interesting, but only in the sense that we’re all living in a world with radically different ideas of right and wrong and what the best way to do things is. What’s concrete and real to some may be less concrete and real to others.
This is how you can have a world where; Flagging for reward disputes is a “wrong” in the eyes of some, while revenge flagging is the “wrong” for others. That reminded me to do some research into Ayn Rand's objectivism because that's a thing, albeit fringe. Before getting too deep into that one, I was thoroughly exhausted.
It would be useful if they had personality tests to find out where people fall on this scale and how that correlated to different religious beliefs, personality types, Myers-Briggs, for example, etc.. etc.. I bet a lot of these different ideas or people made categories interrelate or correlate to one another.
Not only that but where does it say it should be fair? The fairest thing is for people to earn relative to their stake, anything other than that brings subjectivity into the equation and the crab bucket.
Sorry, I got to this late. But I do agree
with you when it comes to self-voting.
Yet, it also pertains to all of the voting.