RE: Who is Best Suited to Manage a Community and Make Decisions?

[benjojo]

No solution can be perfect - what about...

1. Ask all whales to accept a freeze on all their rewards so there is no further accumulation of SP. Instead they will be working to raise the value of Steem and allow others (whose efforts they appreciate) to catch up.

2. Ask witnesses to burn or recycle excess Steem earned as a witness....is there is any....into minnow / new account reward initiatives.

3. Identify all the accounts that are still active and have contributed to the Steemchain (content, comments or curation) and reward all of them with SP from the Steemit account. Again ask really big holders to pass on this bonus. Also, ask the active accounts to freely identify additional accounts and not accounts if they are willing and make a best effort where the are not.

4. Announce a date in the future where new proven individual accounts that join Steemit and actively contribute to a threshold level and receive a threshold level of votes will receive a bonus in Steem from the Steemit account.

5. Do the above for existing accounts and yet again ask the whales to pass on the bonus.

I think you get the idea. I accept this is not perfect and I do not own the Steem in the Steemit account! ;) The objective would be to supercharge the distribution of Steem and create a much larger number of dolphins, incentivise a lot of growth, raise the price of Steem, show everyone that the whales can work in everyone's interests.

(The whales were their front and centre into an experiment. All of them have tried their best...even those who have exploited certain unintended realities of the system.)

If we can work together to pull this off....imperfect though it is....what a remarkable expression of the effectiveness of this community. What a magnanimous act it would be for all the whales to agree. What an incredible example and what a story.

Now because I have faith in the whales, I think Steem can give us all a better future and because I'm putting forward an idea that requires sacrifice, if something like this is implemented and the whales all agree to not accept additional rewards, I'll do the same.

There is no need to fracture this community, it may not seem like it and it's a bit of an effort, but if we stick this out and solve these problems for ourselves, we'll be that much stronger in the end. We can give up any time, that easy.

Comments

[timcliff]

Way to be constructive :)

1. Unfortunately there are too many whales that will not go along with this idea. Many of the whales see themselves as actually using their stake in ways that are beneficial to the platform, so they will not see giving away their power as 'good for the platform'. Some are interested in profit for themselves, so they will not see that as good either.
2. The witnesses themselves do not earn much. Even a "full time" (top 19) witness only earns about 260 SP per day. At current market prices, that is about $26 per day.
3. What Steemit, Inc. plans to do with the @steemit account is still a mystery. There are a lot of fun possibilities. We'll just have to wait and see.
4. Also a cool idea. See response to #3.
5. Same :)

I think continuing to discuss ideas and solutions to the problem is really good. As I said above, I think most people (at least the ones I talk to) all seem to agree that the disproportionate stake is one of the largest things affecting user retention in a negative way.

[sigmajin]

1. Possibly true, but largely irrelevant. Even at current prices, there just aren't going to be many looking to catch up out of their pockets. If you had a quarter million dollars in your sock drawer, would you be using it to become the next abit/blocktrades/smooth? Or you know, hookers and blow. Or bitcoin thats breaking records every day. And just the reward pool isn't going to have a signifiant enough impact to bridge the gap even if the reward pool were going 100% to non-whales.
2. Worth noting that they earned significantly more for quite some time.
3. Awesome. I know when i go out looking for a company to invest in, the first thing I ask is "are 50% of your net assets tied up in a mystery?"... cuz like, who doesn't love a good mystery?

[benjojo]

Isnt it worth asking the question and finding out who is and is not willing and what their reasons are?

I think we are talking about either the top 25 or top 50 accounts and in the main, they are very well connected. The only reason I'm suggesting this is kind of action is because it has the potential to give them more in the end. Why squabble over scraps when if we set an example to everyone looking on and make moves that address the most important reason for steem being held back, they'll have so much in return, they may struggle to know what to do with it (bit like now ;))

We could be on our way to bitcoin's market cap if it were not for the present distribution of Steem. It is the fundamental issue. At the moment we have the edge in tech and community. The time to act is now on this particular issue.

All the whales have to get their heads around is that instead of occupying a pinnacle, sitting on between 50 and 600k relatively alone, they can be occupying a nice plateau sitting on a hundred million with thousands of others.

We need to minimise risk of failure by dealing with the distribution issue asap, even though the present redistribution rate is impressive....it's still too slow given the effects on our core community.

[timcliff]

Agreed. Getting consensus from all the whales and devs is not a simple task though.

A lot of people are waiting to see how the upcoming HF changes play out, since they will be flattening the rewards formula. If it is still an issue in a month or so (which I assume it will be) I'll write a new post on it.

[benjojo]

Not getting all of them makes it much more difficult, but not impossible to implement. Good idea....let's give the HF a chance then when it fails to address the primary issue, which is quite likely, we can try to get (what is seemingly) a great act of sacrifice off the ground! :)

[benjojo]

Of course you are absolutely right about the witnesses!