Is vote buying an issue with dpos ?
Recently it became public that some EOS whales may be colluding among each other to become block producers.
This has caused a little debate amongst the crypto media.
Vitalik has also stated that he sees this as a security issue and weakness of dpos systems. https://vitalik.ca/general/2018/03/28/plutocracy.html
is this not part of the design?
Truly collusion seems inevitable. In fact we have seen many of auch cases manifest here on the steem blockchain.
In fact we have just released a service on the steem-bounty.com website called „Votinng Exchange Club“ that automates such a thing.
It is obvious that if aomeone can gove someone value via an upvote, a witness vote, re-steem and even a mention that one hopes to get such actions returned in kind.
what right do tokens give us
In a DPOS system our tokens are not just money they also provide utility of value. Holders can spend and use these as they please. If that is an issue than there would be a fundamental design flaw at hand.
I am not convinced that is the case.
it comes down to decentralization
Buying votes is expensive it is much better to get votes for free.
On steem we can buy votes and as a result get large rewards. However there is not really a financial benefit from that as u simoly get what u pay for in financial terms.
What is valuable is holding the token. You won‘t become rich by buying votes here. But if you hold SP you get rewarded. I think that is fair because getting coins requires work or money and is risky.
So I am simply not convinced that exchanging votes is such a big deal. It would be much better to just get the votes withou aving to spend your own. And you could just spend the votes on yourself anyhow. And that too seems fair to me.
What is however important is that the coins are distributed. Just like with anything if few can dominate the ecosystem, this creates bad experiences for all others and as a result reduces value for all.
both EOS and STEEM are too centralized
There are too many whales on both STEEM and EOS, which creates bad dynamics. This is the problem that leads to bad constallations that abuse the systems, not so much that some users decide to vote in each other favors.
wealth distribution is the ultimate economic challenge...
That has not been solved by any economic system including blockchains, such as this one, eos, bitcoin etherum or our current state systems.
I dont know what the solution is, but I don‘t think dpos is that bad.
What do you believe?
What do you think! Is our ecosystem broken? And if so how would you fix it?