I hadn't read the papers but just started doing so. Its funny, how everything sounds so well-devised, and then you show up here and its like Mad Max: Beyond the Thunderdome. Clearly, abuse of the system was thought of, but in the completely opposite context to what the masses appear to want.

Regarding the curators, yes, again, its great that they're doing that, but they are not getting anywhere close to what the bots are doing in terms of exponential growth. And I can see their process as enormously confusing to most people.

From p.15 of the whitepaper "Eliminating “abuse” is not possible and shouldn’t be the goal. Even those who are attempting to “abuse”the system are still doing work. Any compensation they get for their successful attempts at abuse or collusion is at least as valuable for the purpose of distributing the currency as the make-work system employed by traditional Bitcoin mining or the collusive mining done via mining pools."

Say what? Crabs in a bucket - that's cute. So it seems it was devised in a similar manner as Bartertown, after all.

But that's good news for the antibots too. Making bots unprofitable isn't enough. They have to become useless. Futile.

And then you have the "whales" that shape this community into whatever crap heaven they want it to be.

Obviously, it is a system that can be taken over, but with what effort? You would need to be able to accumulate power faster than the bots. You would need to be able to squash the efforts of the whales.

The payout system is based on Zipf's law (which is basically logarithmic - and I have built models with it in the past). This is one of the reasons the bots get so powerful, so fast. When you are at the top of that food chain, more people use you, just like common words in the english language.