Appreciate the thoughtful reply. Yes, I was made aware of @traf/ @Trafalgar as well and his rationale for the action. Seems like it he is trying to justify his actions because others are doing it regardless of consideration to the detrimental effect of such behavior emulated by more whales would have on the platform. Essentially a cop-out consisting of many words.
I don't think anyone really can argue that it is indeed detrimental. I am thankful for the few good and what I call gray whales out there that have at least some semblance of preserving this platform.
I am not very optimistic concerning people so not sure how long this is going to last. I also am an advocate for code level change but think there are forces above my pay grade that would disrupt anything that would cut into the greed's bottom line. When the bad actors control the stake and enough puppet witnesses are in the top ranks, it's game over as far as I see it.
Still yet, as long as I have friends willing to leverage their stake to fight, I will support them using the tools and strategies at my disposal.
As for flagging all abusers, that would be a difficult operation to sustain. We can only work in accordance to our capability. Our coalition which we believe to be fighting for a good cause, the de-incentivizing of behavior that harms the sustainability of the blockchain , obviously lacks the capability to address all the proxy self-vote abusers in parallel; therefore, it is prudent to address them in serial fashion.
I would suspect that @traf's day will eventually come but that decision would not come from me. Sorry it took me so long to get back to you.
Although I'm against @traf's actions I agree with his point. If he stops his self-voting ring and say a bunch of dolphins do the same thing while being mostly under the radar, @traf is basically loosing potential rewards for being a good guy. If @haejin talks to @ranchorelaxo and ask him to spread his votes around, @haejin looses potential rewards. The game theory incentives are actually set to rewards abuse. That is why I'm hell bent on protocol level changes despite being a minnow. Anything else is't going to do well enough. Alternative methods could even look like selective punishing.
Despite being fairly active on Github, the devs are not talking any proper actions regarding setting the incentives right. I'm not a programmer so I don't know how hard it would be to code a VP distribution limit. If there is at least a basic mockup we could put some pressure on witnesses to adopt it. The biggest problem is that the devs have enough funds (almost 20% of the supply) to mess with the witness list.
I still think that if we make enough reasonable noise to the point it seem like negative promotion, devs should take serious action at leas to protect the value of their own stake. We are currently having all sorts of flaggers from @steemcleaners to grumpy/madpuppy self upvoting hypocritical assholes ho are actually powering down at the moment. this shows a lack of community consensus. Devs could just call it free market anarchy and shrug it off. But if the community can agree on few basic principles, devs won't be able to ignore, especially with EOS around the corner.
Some people are just looking for cure all utopian solutions out of the box and poke holes at every solution that could make things at least a little better. Even though I think there can be perfect individuals I don't think here can ever be perfect systems. I'm currently in favor of a system which burn additional rewards based on voting distributions. I specifically prefer reward burning option because nobody can claim to be robinhood of the reward pool and make things political when rewards are not returned to the reward pool.
Burning STEEM/SBD brings the supply down and the price increases will be felt by every holder equally. If the funds were returned to the reward pool, it's just going to get into the hands of people who are already popular on steemit.
No big deal :-)