Great post. Thank you for sharing this reality. The funny (sad?) thing is, when it does come back down, I'm sure plenty of people will find a way to blame the "evil" witnesses and whales for doing something to cause it. Heheh.
You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
Thanks for dropping in with some support. I really appreciate that.
A big motivation for writing this post was I was seeing some anti-witness rhetoric being spread around, which was largely ignorant of the real situation. I would prefer our top witnesses to remain good technical people who are trying to do the right thing long term for the platform....rather than playing populist political games for the sake of garnering votes.
It may be inevitable that our witnesses become less technical and more political, but it is a trend I am quite determined to help resist.
Thank you for your efforts. They are greatly appreciated. It's a challenging line to walk to say things which may be unpopular to some but may ultimately bring the greatest value to the most number of people. I don't want to be part of taking away anyone's extra blogging rewards, but I also don't want to make short-term decisions that have an opportunity cost which, in the long run, could potentially decrease what so many could have enjoyed. We should be thinking about the many millions of users who have not yet signed up, as well as the early adopters we have here now.
It's a fine line to walk, but if we focus on facts and keep integrity intact (as I believe we are both doing) then at least people can make informed decisions and hopefully these kinds of disagreements over the peg can be civilised so we don't get personal or end in flag wars.
For better or worse it is the best we can hope for. I am very pleased not to have been flagged for this post by vested interests. It was one of my concerns :)
I decided a while ago not worry about downvotes. I got downvotes for months from a certain controversial whale (often in the last 12 hours before payout so no more upvotes could undo it). I just accepted it and moved on.
I have had to scroll a long way down this post to find a comment from a witness (that I recognise) that worries me because this is an important component of the Steem ecosystem .
I wrote a whole post on this topic with quite a lot of commentary, if you want to check it out.
I agree, it's tricky to educate people on what an ideal witness is. It's not a popularity contest. It should be someone who is adding value to the network and thinking long-term about what's best for everyone involved.
How did I miss that post, great analysis Luke, one thing I would like to add to the discussion is in relation to the split of rewards. It's touched on by lots of commentators but not examined in detail.
Part of the genius of Steem is the fact that some of your stake is locked up for a little while, currently 13 weeks. The broken peg means that authors can now effectively circumvent this feature when getting new payouts. No longer is the post payout 50:50. I think back to some of the big early adopters who got 15k for their first post. They could only cash out half and the remainder became an incentive to keep an interest in Steem. Having stake is a powerful incentive!
This distribution of payouts is broken at moment.
Yes, and it also disincentives curation which can lead to more people using vote bots to get noticed. Some have suggested we change the payout option to have more than 50% SBD, but I'm not a fan because the security of a DPOS blockchain is based on the stake weighted votes in SP. There has to be an incentive to keep a lot of people holding SP to keep the blockchain secure and the governance decentralized.
Sorry if I didn't comment under it. I resteemed it without comment because I think @buggedout said all there has to be said. If you want my opinion on it, ping me :)
No need to apologise. Your support is appreciated and has not gone unnoticed :)
Thanks for the reply, in many ways @dan is a genius but it's hard to put your finger on exactly what it is about the ecosystems he has built that make them so great. In Steems case there are so many little components that add up to much more than the sum of their parts. SBD allows/allowed risk averse people to get involved in crypto , it allows commerce to take place and if nothing else provides an intuitive way to see what a post payout is worth. I would be sorry to see this aspect of Steem being forgotten about and I don't feel there is enough discussion among the witnesses about it (not publicly at least). I mean't no disrespect.