I also have some serious consideration of whether we ought to be trying to come up with a way to filter out "curation trains" of followed auto voting, but I haven't come up with a really good way of detecting that sort of event. My gut says that some sort of clustered timeseries would be about the only way to determine or detect a relationship between events like that, but it's hard to say for sure.
The system does not make it very easy to analyze votes by value and aggregate, so this is always a lot of fun.
I've actually been trying to implement a filter that would simply bias presentation in favor of things that I have personally voted up in order to provide an additional form of weighting and presenting the content available on the blockchain, but that's been going slowly at best. I know that any kind of filtering is a big task.
In this case, because up vote bots are nearly impossible to detect if they're not on the big listings, I'm not sure that it's absolutely useful to trying correct for them specifically as opposed to individualizing the experience of a user who is already involved in seeking out content that they like and signaling to the system that they do. After all, it's theoretically possible that someone might like the kind of content that is consistently voted up by a bot. I hate to make that kind of assumption up front. It's theoretically possible that, at some point, someone might create a bot which consistently votes up content that I'm interested in. Theoretically.
(You really have a bunch of friends who like to follow you around and flag everything you do, don't you? I don't think that I've ever seen a comment with a reasonable content like that get so absolutely stepped on as hard as feet could go. It's really quite impressive. No one cares that I'm a thorn in their side so much that they follow me around quite so slavishly. Good job!)
I have been trying a type of market basket analysis in R - but getting it wrong so far.. Im trying something like if A votes for Y all the time, who else also votes for Y all the time.. Im very new to R, this will take me months to master lol
He and Jeff Leek have a dozen or so courses on R, stats and data science on coursera. I don't know how coursera works right now (haven't used it in years), but a few years back I did enjoy two courses by them:
I'm doing a data science thiny with microsoft and EdX....time is my biggest constraint. but that you for the links because extra references are so handy to have, especially that book..nice :-)
I suspect that you are going to really enjoy working on analysis in R once you get your feet wet. Thinking about these problems from a procedural point of view really throws certain aspects into sharp relief. I find that it really tests my assumptions about what I should be seeing and expectation versus what I am seeing and why I'm seeing those things.
Though you have to be careful with the "Alice votes for Bob all the time, who else votes for Bob all the time?" form of inquiry, because it is perfectly reasonable for human beings to act like that. Especially on Steemit, where providers of anything outside of talk about cryptocurrency in general and steem in particular are rare, it is very easy for real communities of people to end up largely voting for each other if they are interested in the same niche subject.
But that's okay, because you would notice that very quickly once you started pulling those clusters out. This is how we learn.
The real problem with doing it that way is trying to actually sort through that much data, because you have to have both all of the transfers and memos and all of the votes in order to possibly have a positive hit.
If these bot designers were smart, they would start requiring that the memo be sent with an encrypted hashtag at the beginning so that casual observation couldn't make out what the targeted URL is from outside the recipient. Some of them may be doing that; that's outside of my personal experience.
That is a lot of data to be slinging around the network, which is the problem I've been running into a lot lately. It might be possible, but it's definitely not a simple trick.
If promoted content is so good that it doesn't matter if it were promoted or not, you would have voted it up anyway – isn't that just good content? If anything, we should be forcing spammers to get that good at the whole process. Then they will actually be producing a useful product, and stop being spam.
Everybody wins!
I've been tinkering with filtering out the big/relevant bots from content searches, and I have some bad news – it doesn't really make any difference. Which probably violates expectation, but it's still true. The problem is that voting across the platform encourages humans to make decisions just like the bots do, because reward is focused on essentially predicting what everyone else is going to do rather than sending a signal of what you like.
Because everyone is trying to make a guess about what everyone else is going to do, there occurs a convergence of intent. It's not collusion because it's not premeditated, but emergently "everyone" has discovered that if they vote for the same kind of content, they get rewarded more. Because you get more of what you reward, you get more votes like that.
Until convergence.
If there is one singular design flaw in the Steemit architecture, and I have pointed out several design flaws from the game design perspective in the last several months, this would be the big one. It takes what should and could have been a signal indicator about the desirability of content at an individual basis and breaks it. Wastes it. And you start getting emergent systems as described above.
You might find some of the tinkering I've done in the last few weeks with discovery and mapping on the system to be interesting. Hopefully you do, anyway. PageRank, the algorithm that Google uses to rank pages, isn't really relevant to the way that people use Steemit, unfortunately. The problem goes back to divining the intent of an up vote. If we knew that the majority of people/entities were voting things up because they like the content, we could do something with it. But because it's rooted in trying to predict what's going to go viral/what other people with higher SP reserves are going to find worth voting up, the whole thing falls apart as a means of quality signaling.
(It's funny. I recently saw you referred to as a Haejin footsoldier, but one of the most interesting links to discussion of discovery algorithms I've had recommended to me this week came from you linking to someone else who is very clearly and aggressively against the whole crypto cult Ellison Waves bullshit, with a very clear intent to specifically be talking about Haejin. Since that would be behavior inconsistent with you as described, I find it amusing.
You'll probably discover that I find anything that is unusual in terms of oddity amusing.
If it's any comfort, my recent poking about suggests that thanks to Haejin and Bernie going at each other hammer and tongs, they effectively have, collectively, almost no impact on the voting pool as a whole. Aside from the poor pastor to get caught in the fall out and the cross fighting.
I have a pretty strong argument that down voting in general is wasted effort because it effectively counts as a micro vote for everything else on the blockchain except the one thing that you flag, including everything else that you don't want. But that's a post for a different time and, honestly, I think I've determined that no one actually cares if Flag Wars make a difference or change things, they have too much fun raising the pitchforks and torches and wasting their time running off to the tower as often as I can.
I agree that Bernie is a menace, but mainly because he's just an asshole and not really because he decides to pick people out and then try to stomp them off the platform. He does that, too, but that's not behavior that we can really do anything meaningfully about given that, collectively, his bot swarm has as much SP as one of the major whales.
I understand why you might be motivated to keep rocking the Flag Wars, but it's wasting whatever SP you have on things you definitely don't want rather than signaling to the system and to creators who make things you do want.
Perhaps, comments might be a better indicator of the post quality (comments with 150+ characters to filter out "nice work"). Then you recursively rank the good posts and you get yourself a potentially usable filter. (A problem here: users adapting..)
We know how that ends – with even more automated spam replies to posts, even more than we have now. And there are already a lot of them. Putting a minimum number of characters just means that the bots end up using a little more Markov chain action to be longer. It's actually kind of shocking that we don't see more of that as it stands, but there's really no heavy pressure to conjure longer comment responses as is, so I suppose they have no advantage in doing so.
Question is: How do you find that kind of user reliably?
I have the worst possible answer for this question:
It's not a mechanical problem.
That is to say, this is not the kind of problem that algorithms can solve in any reasonable sense. What is a good curator to me would be a bad curator for you (or very well could be), even if we have similar tastes in one area, we can widely diverge elsewhere. That weighting is going to be individual.
This is another area where seeing the problem as something that needs to be approached from a bottom-up perspective rather than impositionally top-down is going to work a lot better, but that means that we need methods for self assembling groups of preferences from the ground up.
In theory, that's exactly what Communities are supposed to do, provide a framework for people to self organize into groups who like similar things and can get those similar things from a single source. In practice, I'm not sure that the hardfork 20 design is going to be as effective to that end as I would like. In a real sense, the fragmentation of off-site communities based around singular topics which police a post promotion channel where content tends to be of similar subjects is a much better solution to the real problem.
Communities would have had to be built into the system from the ground up for this to be as useful as we'd like. They weren't. At best we're going to get a bolt on.
Generally, I have the impression that most users are indifferent about the issues of flagging, censoring and "reward pool rape" by whomever.
Of course they are. The population is not so thin that it's trivial to catch up everyone in the process and in the mess. There is still enough room in the population for distance from the maelstrom to be meaningful, which is a good thing. Add to that "reward pool rape" is both ludicrous as rhetoric and so overblown in presentation that it makes the speaker look like an idiot and it's just a terrible structure for call to action.
You make a fine point when it comes to potential investors, but there are a lot larger problems than the Flag Wars for investing in Steemit as a platform. That Bernie and Haejin have the opportunity to make such a mess points at an underlying mechanical flaw in the system, and that is important, but the actual progress of their conflict and personalities involved are incidental.
Any good game designer who had ever dealt with MMO's or large online game development would have looked at the design of the voting architecture on Steemit for 15 minutes and had a good, long laugh before sketching out the obvious problems. That degenerate cases are so obvious would be a definite reason that I chose to set up my own blockchain, with code that I already possess or that's free, as opposed to using steem SMT's. In fact, if I really liked most of the way that steem functions but hate the voting mechanics, nothing keeps me from going and grabbing the core code off of github, modifying the bits I don't like, and starting up my own straightahead competitor if I think that I can actually win in the social space.
Or, probably more profitably, I build a social media system like Steemit (except with a far better interface and different voting response, along with an actual discovery system and functional communities from the ground up) based on Ethereum, which already has a very established presence and an easy way to create spinoff tokens.
@dan seems to have already thrown his lot in with Eos, which has a lot of production value but absolutely nothing useful to show off, and still has a ridiculous amount of venture funding. @ned has his own crazy shenanigans going on. I'm not actually sure that we can count on either to be useful agents in this context.
So far, nobody looks at the real bottom-line of users, meaning transfers in minus transfers out per day/week.
I've started following it more out of a sense of morbid fascination than actual interest. A couple of weeks ago I did some graphs of the actual transfer patterns that occur at the top of the blockchain between whales, trying to determine whether more funds were flowing in or out of the network of whales.
But this daily view of pure tables and numbers is interesting in and of itself.
For instance, looking at the report from 13 hours ago, without question, hesitation, or even a blink, I can tell you that the top 10 transfers of SBD sent are all bots. I think all but one of them are vote bots, and the remaining one is a dice game. So, in the greater, broader sense – they're all about gambling. Likewise for the top SBD transfers received, except for blocktrades which is an exchange. It's interesting that one of the big exchanges shows up on SBD received but not SBD sent, which suggests that the system is hemorrhaging SBD in a big way. Even so, blocktrades on the day only accounted for 0.82% of the total transfers for the day. Even the biggest is responsible for less than 7% of the total transfers.
Looking at volume, there's obviously a few exchanges involved, reasonably enough, and the rest are all bots. The top participant in SBD volume sent and received was responsible for just south of 14% of all of the SBD volume on the day.
So people are looking at it. I'm looking at it, anyway.
Judging from the data we have, it doesn't look like we are currently in an economic contraction – though I want to be clear, I am no finance tech guy.
From the numbers I've run, it doesn't look like the exchanges are actually burning value like a traditional holding account. Instead, a lot of it seems to be getting turned into SP and then delegated in exchange for more resources. Possibly to more bots, who then sell access to that SP in exchange for votes. Where that puts SP pooling is an entirely different question. There are some vast reservoirs of SP sitting untapped and unused in the blockchain, and it's probably good that's the case. The increasing amount of SP being used as delegated exchange, however, does have the weird side effect of putting control of what would otherwise be pooled SP in the hands of people who at least want to have it active in the economy. They may (and do) disagree with me about what purpose it should be put to, but at least it's liquid and active.
I have seen zero debate about this so far. Steemit (and blockchains in general) really need some economic knowledge about the inner workings of such a system. That's why I think @paulag and others who shed light on the fundamentals is so important. Without relevant and reliable information, you can't do any further analysis to see whether there might be a problem, how to adjust or if things are just fine as they are.
We could also use a little more knowledge about how people actually engage with the system and how we intend them to engage with the system, which are obviously very different things. Beyond the economic fundamentals which we can directly perceive, we need to be able to talk about how we imagine the standard use case, the user experience, for the platform both should be (which we can differ about) and is (which we can observe and there should be no argument regarding).
I have gone through way more of the Steemit white paper, blue paper, and brown paper (don't lick it, the acid is bad) than I even want to think about – and I don't think in any of those documents have I ever seen a specification of what the intended use case and user experience for a given user should be like. And I'm not talking about UI design or anything like that, I'm deliberately and directly referring to "the user comes to the site when they have a few minutes of downtime, spends some time flipping through content which is available on their feed, votes up some things that they believe will be viral soon, and leaves." Nothing even that vague and unformed.
That's a problem from my perspective because it suggests that there is no consideration of how a human user would actually use the platform. Consider all of the limitations which are endemic to the system. To maximize value, votes must be dropped within a 30 minute window with betting pressure to drop in around the 20 minute mark precisely, but you want to come in before larger voters. No content can be rewarded after seven days. The feed provides a fire hose without any filtering or significant channeling as communities provide. The only on platform means of organization are tags, and the system provides no way to explore tasks or to differentiate tags, including any means of following the ones that you might be interested in.
Every indicator is that the system is designed for a user who doesn't sleep, doesn't eat, doesn't do anything else, doesn't have any particular interests, and isn't looking to satisfy them if they did. It's a platform designed for robots and people who want to bet on whether things are going to go viral or not.
Which, as we have observed, doesn't make for a really great social networking experience a lot of the time.
That's fundamental. The economic fundamentals are just as important, but we can't lose sight of the fact that the exponential fundamentals don't get a whole lot of talk, either.
That is another fundamental criticism of bernie and markymark and some other whales and witnesses who really make a ton of money, but seemingly are completely oblivious about the implications of a blockchain and their behaviour as whales. They could fund bachelor/master thesis (or even more) to really dig into this and develop a monetary and capital exchange theory, but they rather take the club and go after one anothers throat...
I can't really blame them for that.
Honestly. Nobody knows the implications of a blockchain at this point. Whenever it comes up, it turns into a religious debate, with the true believers who assert that it's going to change the world leading the way, drowning out any other opposing point of view that's more moderate, and generally looking like the kooks they are. If you were one of the people that providing part of the service that actually works, you'd probably work very hard at avoiding being seen in their company.
Simultaneously, because they are such an activist community and you can depend on them to vote on whatever the hot topic of the day is, because witnesses are beholden to votes for position, they can't exactly come out and point out that the whole thing is rather ridiculous. It may be seen as noble in some circles to cut your own throat in public, but most people sensibly see it as stupid.
The witnesses are in the Catch-22 between a rock and hard place because they simultaneously need to play up their importance and how much they affect the world while trying to maintain a more reasonable, grounded worldview in order to make good decisions about how much to invest, how much the nodes are costing, how much redundancy is going on, the small handful of things about the blockchain that witnesses get to decide… And all of that stuff becomes a bit of a trap.
For all that I don't agree with Mark on a regular basis, I have to give it to him that he manages to walk that line about as well as I can expect from anyone. I don't expect much, and he meets at least that standard. That puts them ahead of some other folks.
Bernie, on the other hand – I don't think that Bernie is oblivious to the implications of what he's doing on the blockchain at all. I don't think Haejin is, for all that he's a religious nut job. I think both of them see it as essentially unimportant to what they are really in the pursuit of, what really rewards them, and if they can get people riled up and shaking their torches and pitchforks at each other, that's just one more way they can profit off of it.
In my heart, I know that's expecting way too much of both of them, but a man needs at least one or two self-aware delusions.
There's no benefit in funding anyone's PhD thesis on monetary and capital exchange theory within the context of blockchains. Not the least reason being that any such research will be completely outdated in five years, both for technical and regulatory reasons. It would be a bad money sink. In the absence of something useful to do with their money, they might as well go after each other. If we could safely isolate them in a lovely arena where the rest of us didn't have to get blood on us but could watch if we really wanted, I would encourage it.
In the meantime, we remain in the Age of Warlords where strongmen attempt to establish domains via the only avenues of aggression they have, gather armies and send them out to beat up one another to no real avail, and everyone else just days as far as they can out of the fray and gets on with the tedious work of grubbing a small living out of the soil.
I also have some serious consideration of whether we ought to be trying to come up with a way to filter out "curation trains" of followed auto voting, but I haven't come up with a really good way of detecting that sort of event. My gut says that some sort of clustered timeseries would be about the only way to determine or detect a relationship between events like that, but it's hard to say for sure.
The system does not make it very easy to analyze votes by value and aggregate, so this is always a lot of fun.
I've actually been trying to implement a filter that would simply bias presentation in favor of things that I have personally voted up in order to provide an additional form of weighting and presenting the content available on the blockchain, but that's been going slowly at best. I know that any kind of filtering is a big task.
In this case, because up vote bots are nearly impossible to detect if they're not on the big listings, I'm not sure that it's absolutely useful to trying correct for them specifically as opposed to individualizing the experience of a user who is already involved in seeking out content that they like and signaling to the system that they do. After all, it's theoretically possible that someone might like the kind of content that is consistently voted up by a bot. I hate to make that kind of assumption up front. It's theoretically possible that, at some point, someone might create a bot which consistently votes up content that I'm interested in. Theoretically.
(You really have a bunch of friends who like to follow you around and flag everything you do, don't you? I don't think that I've ever seen a comment with a reasonable content like that get so absolutely stepped on as hard as feet could go. It's really quite impressive. No one cares that I'm a thorn in their side so much that they follow me around quite so slavishly. Good job!)
I have been trying a type of market basket analysis in R - but getting it wrong so far.. Im trying something like if A votes for Y all the time, who else also votes for Y all the time.. Im very new to R, this will take me months to master lol
R Programming for Data Science by Roger D. Peng might be handy :-)
He and Jeff Leek have a dozen or so courses on R, stats and data science on coursera. I don't know how coursera works right now (haven't used it in years), but a few years back I did enjoy two courses by them:
I'm doing a data science thiny with microsoft and EdX....time is my biggest constraint. but that you for the links because extra references are so handy to have, especially that book..nice :-)
I suspect that you are going to really enjoy working on analysis in R once you get your feet wet. Thinking about these problems from a procedural point of view really throws certain aspects into sharp relief. I find that it really tests my assumptions about what I should be seeing and expectation versus what I am seeing and why I'm seeing those things.
Though you have to be careful with the "Alice votes for Bob all the time, who else votes for Bob all the time?" form of inquiry, because it is perfectly reasonable for human beings to act like that. Especially on Steemit, where providers of anything outside of talk about cryptocurrency in general and steem in particular are rare, it is very easy for real communities of people to end up largely voting for each other if they are interested in the same niche subject.
But that's okay, because you would notice that very quickly once you started pulling those clusters out. This is how we learn.
The real problem with doing it that way is trying to actually sort through that much data, because you have to have both all of the transfers and memos and all of the votes in order to possibly have a positive hit.
If these bot designers were smart, they would start requiring that the memo be sent with an encrypted hashtag at the beginning so that casual observation couldn't make out what the targeted URL is from outside the recipient. Some of them may be doing that; that's outside of my personal experience.
That is a lot of data to be slinging around the network, which is the problem I've been running into a lot lately. It might be possible, but it's definitely not a simple trick.
If promoted content is so good that it doesn't matter if it were promoted or not, you would have voted it up anyway – isn't that just good content? If anything, we should be forcing spammers to get that good at the whole process. Then they will actually be producing a useful product, and stop being spam.
Everybody wins!
I've been tinkering with filtering out the big/relevant bots from content searches, and I have some bad news – it doesn't really make any difference. Which probably violates expectation, but it's still true. The problem is that voting across the platform encourages humans to make decisions just like the bots do, because reward is focused on essentially predicting what everyone else is going to do rather than sending a signal of what you like.
Because everyone is trying to make a guess about what everyone else is going to do, there occurs a convergence of intent. It's not collusion because it's not premeditated, but emergently "everyone" has discovered that if they vote for the same kind of content, they get rewarded more. Because you get more of what you reward, you get more votes like that.
Until convergence.
If there is one singular design flaw in the Steemit architecture, and I have pointed out several design flaws from the game design perspective in the last several months, this would be the big one. It takes what should and could have been a signal indicator about the desirability of content at an individual basis and breaks it. Wastes it. And you start getting emergent systems as described above.
You might find some of the tinkering I've done in the last few weeks with discovery and mapping on the system to be interesting. Hopefully you do, anyway. PageRank, the algorithm that Google uses to rank pages, isn't really relevant to the way that people use Steemit, unfortunately. The problem goes back to divining the intent of an up vote. If we knew that the majority of people/entities were voting things up because they like the content, we could do something with it. But because it's rooted in trying to predict what's going to go viral/what other people with higher SP reserves are going to find worth voting up, the whole thing falls apart as a means of quality signaling.
(It's funny. I recently saw you referred to as a Haejin footsoldier, but one of the most interesting links to discussion of discovery algorithms I've had recommended to me this week came from you linking to someone else who is very clearly and aggressively against the whole crypto cult Ellison Waves bullshit, with a very clear intent to specifically be talking about Haejin. Since that would be behavior inconsistent with you as described, I find it amusing.
You'll probably discover that I find anything that is unusual in terms of oddity amusing.
If it's any comfort, my recent poking about suggests that thanks to Haejin and Bernie going at each other hammer and tongs, they effectively have, collectively, almost no impact on the voting pool as a whole. Aside from the poor pastor to get caught in the fall out and the cross fighting.
I have a pretty strong argument that down voting in general is wasted effort because it effectively counts as a micro vote for everything else on the blockchain except the one thing that you flag, including everything else that you don't want. But that's a post for a different time and, honestly, I think I've determined that no one actually cares if Flag Wars make a difference or change things, they have too much fun raising the pitchforks and torches and wasting their time running off to the tower as often as I can.
I agree that Bernie is a menace, but mainly because he's just an asshole and not really because he decides to pick people out and then try to stomp them off the platform. He does that, too, but that's not behavior that we can really do anything meaningfully about given that, collectively, his bot swarm has as much SP as one of the major whales.
I understand why you might be motivated to keep rocking the Flag Wars, but it's wasting whatever SP you have on things you definitely don't want rather than signaling to the system and to creators who make things you do want.
But that's just me. You do you.)
We know how that ends – with even more automated spam replies to posts, even more than we have now. And there are already a lot of them. Putting a minimum number of characters just means that the bots end up using a little more Markov chain action to be longer. It's actually kind of shocking that we don't see more of that as it stands, but there's really no heavy pressure to conjure longer comment responses as is, so I suppose they have no advantage in doing so.
I have the worst possible answer for this question:
It's not a mechanical problem.
That is to say, this is not the kind of problem that algorithms can solve in any reasonable sense. What is a good curator to me would be a bad curator for you (or very well could be), even if we have similar tastes in one area, we can widely diverge elsewhere. That weighting is going to be individual.
This is another area where seeing the problem as something that needs to be approached from a bottom-up perspective rather than impositionally top-down is going to work a lot better, but that means that we need methods for self assembling groups of preferences from the ground up.
In theory, that's exactly what Communities are supposed to do, provide a framework for people to self organize into groups who like similar things and can get those similar things from a single source. In practice, I'm not sure that the hardfork 20 design is going to be as effective to that end as I would like. In a real sense, the fragmentation of off-site communities based around singular topics which police a post promotion channel where content tends to be of similar subjects is a much better solution to the real problem.
Communities would have had to be built into the system from the ground up for this to be as useful as we'd like. They weren't. At best we're going to get a bolt on.
Of course they are. The population is not so thin that it's trivial to catch up everyone in the process and in the mess. There is still enough room in the population for distance from the maelstrom to be meaningful, which is a good thing. Add to that "reward pool rape" is both ludicrous as rhetoric and so overblown in presentation that it makes the speaker look like an idiot and it's just a terrible structure for call to action.
You make a fine point when it comes to potential investors, but there are a lot larger problems than the Flag Wars for investing in Steemit as a platform. That Bernie and Haejin have the opportunity to make such a mess points at an underlying mechanical flaw in the system, and that is important, but the actual progress of their conflict and personalities involved are incidental.
Any good game designer who had ever dealt with MMO's or large online game development would have looked at the design of the voting architecture on Steemit for 15 minutes and had a good, long laugh before sketching out the obvious problems. That degenerate cases are so obvious would be a definite reason that I chose to set up my own blockchain, with code that I already possess or that's free, as opposed to using steem SMT's. In fact, if I really liked most of the way that steem functions but hate the voting mechanics, nothing keeps me from going and grabbing the core code off of github, modifying the bits I don't like, and starting up my own straightahead competitor if I think that I can actually win in the social space.
Or, probably more profitably, I build a social media system like Steemit (except with a far better interface and different voting response, along with an actual discovery system and functional communities from the ground up) based on Ethereum, which already has a very established presence and an easy way to create spinoff tokens.
@dan seems to have already thrown his lot in with Eos, which has a lot of production value but absolutely nothing useful to show off, and still has a ridiculous amount of venture funding. @ned has his own crazy shenanigans going on. I'm not actually sure that we can count on either to be useful agents in this context.
Not strictly true. I have at least one person/machine that pops up in my feeds on a regular basis which does exactly that, a breakdown of the transfers of steem and SBD in and out of the system on a daily basis.
I've started following it more out of a sense of morbid fascination than actual interest. A couple of weeks ago I did some graphs of the actual transfer patterns that occur at the top of the blockchain between whales, trying to determine whether more funds were flowing in or out of the network of whales.
But this daily view of pure tables and numbers is interesting in and of itself.
For instance, looking at the report from 13 hours ago, without question, hesitation, or even a blink, I can tell you that the top 10 transfers of SBD sent are all bots. I think all but one of them are vote bots, and the remaining one is a dice game. So, in the greater, broader sense – they're all about gambling. Likewise for the top SBD transfers received, except for blocktrades which is an exchange. It's interesting that one of the big exchanges shows up on SBD received but not SBD sent, which suggests that the system is hemorrhaging SBD in a big way. Even so, blocktrades on the day only accounted for 0.82% of the total transfers for the day. Even the biggest is responsible for less than 7% of the total transfers.
Looking at volume, there's obviously a few exchanges involved, reasonably enough, and the rest are all bots. The top participant in SBD volume sent and received was responsible for just south of 14% of all of the SBD volume on the day.
So people are looking at it. I'm looking at it, anyway.
Judging from the data we have, it doesn't look like we are currently in an economic contraction – though I want to be clear, I am no finance tech guy.
From the numbers I've run, it doesn't look like the exchanges are actually burning value like a traditional holding account. Instead, a lot of it seems to be getting turned into SP and then delegated in exchange for more resources. Possibly to more bots, who then sell access to that SP in exchange for votes. Where that puts SP pooling is an entirely different question. There are some vast reservoirs of SP sitting untapped and unused in the blockchain, and it's probably good that's the case. The increasing amount of SP being used as delegated exchange, however, does have the weird side effect of putting control of what would otherwise be pooled SP in the hands of people who at least want to have it active in the economy. They may (and do) disagree with me about what purpose it should be put to, but at least it's liquid and active.
We could also use a little more knowledge about how people actually engage with the system and how we intend them to engage with the system, which are obviously very different things. Beyond the economic fundamentals which we can directly perceive, we need to be able to talk about how we imagine the standard use case, the user experience, for the platform both should be (which we can differ about) and is (which we can observe and there should be no argument regarding).
I have gone through way more of the Steemit white paper, blue paper, and brown paper (don't lick it, the acid is bad) than I even want to think about – and I don't think in any of those documents have I ever seen a specification of what the intended use case and user experience for a given user should be like. And I'm not talking about UI design or anything like that, I'm deliberately and directly referring to "the user comes to the site when they have a few minutes of downtime, spends some time flipping through content which is available on their feed, votes up some things that they believe will be viral soon, and leaves." Nothing even that vague and unformed.
That's a problem from my perspective because it suggests that there is no consideration of how a human user would actually use the platform. Consider all of the limitations which are endemic to the system. To maximize value, votes must be dropped within a 30 minute window with betting pressure to drop in around the 20 minute mark precisely, but you want to come in before larger voters. No content can be rewarded after seven days. The feed provides a fire hose without any filtering or significant channeling as communities provide. The only on platform means of organization are tags, and the system provides no way to explore tasks or to differentiate tags, including any means of following the ones that you might be interested in.
Every indicator is that the system is designed for a user who doesn't sleep, doesn't eat, doesn't do anything else, doesn't have any particular interests, and isn't looking to satisfy them if they did. It's a platform designed for robots and people who want to bet on whether things are going to go viral or not.
Which, as we have observed, doesn't make for a really great social networking experience a lot of the time.
That's fundamental. The economic fundamentals are just as important, but we can't lose sight of the fact that the exponential fundamentals don't get a whole lot of talk, either.
I can't really blame them for that.
Honestly. Nobody knows the implications of a blockchain at this point. Whenever it comes up, it turns into a religious debate, with the true believers who assert that it's going to change the world leading the way, drowning out any other opposing point of view that's more moderate, and generally looking like the kooks they are. If you were one of the people that providing part of the service that actually works, you'd probably work very hard at avoiding being seen in their company.
Simultaneously, because they are such an activist community and you can depend on them to vote on whatever the hot topic of the day is, because witnesses are beholden to votes for position, they can't exactly come out and point out that the whole thing is rather ridiculous. It may be seen as noble in some circles to cut your own throat in public, but most people sensibly see it as stupid.
The witnesses are in the Catch-22 between a rock and hard place because they simultaneously need to play up their importance and how much they affect the world while trying to maintain a more reasonable, grounded worldview in order to make good decisions about how much to invest, how much the nodes are costing, how much redundancy is going on, the small handful of things about the blockchain that witnesses get to decide… And all of that stuff becomes a bit of a trap.
For all that I don't agree with Mark on a regular basis, I have to give it to him that he manages to walk that line about as well as I can expect from anyone. I don't expect much, and he meets at least that standard. That puts them ahead of some other folks.
Bernie, on the other hand – I don't think that Bernie is oblivious to the implications of what he's doing on the blockchain at all. I don't think Haejin is, for all that he's a religious nut job. I think both of them see it as essentially unimportant to what they are really in the pursuit of, what really rewards them, and if they can get people riled up and shaking their torches and pitchforks at each other, that's just one more way they can profit off of it.
In my heart, I know that's expecting way too much of both of them, but a man needs at least one or two self-aware delusions.
There's no benefit in funding anyone's PhD thesis on monetary and capital exchange theory within the context of blockchains. Not the least reason being that any such research will be completely outdated in five years, both for technical and regulatory reasons. It would be a bad money sink. In the absence of something useful to do with their money, they might as well go after each other. If we could safely isolate them in a lovely arena where the rest of us didn't have to get blood on us but could watch if we really wanted, I would encourage it.
In the meantime, we remain in the Age of Warlords where strongmen attempt to establish domains via the only avenues of aggression they have, gather armies and send them out to beat up one another to no real avail, and everyone else just days as far as they can out of the fray and gets on with the tedious work of grubbing a small living out of the soil.