Steemit.com has grown at an explosive rate and at the same time we have created a capitalist style equality divide where the rich are “super rich” just get richer and the poor beg for votes at the side of the Slack channel!
For this analogy I refer to “rich”, as being rich in Steem Power (SP) as can be seen on the Steemwhalesrichlist.
The problem lies in the fact that the vast amount of SP wielded by the top echelon is “stockpiled” and of not much use to the Steem economy. There is no way all that Steem Power can be utilized efficiently by one person and using it effectively for the growth of the economy through stimulating content writing and curation jobs.
Even with the aid of bots, it is unlikely that all the “stockpiled” SP will be utilized to its fullest and furthermore the bots do not have human discretion to distribute meaningfully weighted votes to those in need or who can properly vest in others; which in my opinion is a human’s job to discern.
Using a government and corporate spending analogy, one can glean the economic damage caused from recent history during the 2007 financial crisis and the ensuing grim years ahead. Corporates fearful of uncertain markets, began stockpiling cash reserves and in some cases government spending also dwindled.
An ABC News article entitled “Hoarding, Not Hiring – Corporations Stockpile Mountain of Cash” By RICH BLAKE and DALIA FAHMY, highlights the need for corporate spending to stimulate jobs and the economy as a whole.
The below quote excerpt from the article is not dissimilar to the situation the Steem Power whales find themselves in, with their stockpiled SP:
Cash is piling up faster than companies can figure out what to do with it.
David Bianco, head of U.S. equity strategy at Bank of America.
When an out-of-work Salesman, Sean Byrnes, who lost his job at a Manhattan-based financial research firm was asked about the mountain of corporate money sitting on the sidelines, Byrnes offered his own suggestion for what to do with it:
Companies should absolutely spend some of that money to put people back to work.
Similarly, in an article entitled: The Impact of Government Spending on Economic Growth by Daniel J. Mitchell, Ph.D.
It is explained that when a:~
government is too big [...] [it] undermines economic growth by transferring additional resources from the productive sector of the economy to government, which uses them less efficiently.
The article goes on to describe the inefficiency cost and stagnation cost, among others, which stem from reduced government spending or bloated government growth as opposed to investing in the more efficient public sector.
What is the Solution?
The solution comrades, is simple, “Voting Power Delegation (VPD)”!
There is simply too much rapidly growing content for whales to review and as told in confidence by a whale, in an informal interview, loosely quoted as:
there is no way enough fair votes can be made by a single whale to promote all of the good stuff.
The solution starts by being able to delegate voting, which could kick-off with something as simple as a voting private key, distinct from a private posting key in that it will only allow voting and not posting by the trusted recipient(s) of the key, to vote on behalf of the SP “stockpile” holder.
This idea can be developed even further, where multiple unique voting private keys can be issued through the wallet interface and disabled or revoked if a particular recipient “goes rouge”, without having to re-issue all private keys again to all recipients. (This multi-key concept should also be implemented for other keys as well)
From the recipients’ viewpoint, the received key would be loaded into the recipient’s wallet and multiple voting keys can be loaded if the recipient represents more than one large SP holder to efficiently pool the recipient’s own and represented voting power into a single vote, thus bestowing an enhanced distribution to the authors worthy of such votes. The wallet “key loading” feature, further adds convenience to the trusted key recipient in the sense that it is no longer required to logout and log back in to make use of other entrusted keys, as all will be automatically pooled.
It would be important to have limits, where the SP holder can set what percentage of Steem Power to delegate, so that there at all times remains enough for the holders’ own ad-hoc use.
One could also move away from the private keys, and simply allow the SP holder to add the usernames of the parties he would like to have representing his voting power to a specific list in the wallet, with limits of percentage of total SP each representative could wield.
The community could also monitor via the blockchain which Whales are delegating their power for the betterment of the community as a sort of peer pressure to encourage them to act.
I also offer up for discussion the issue of interest earned on the delegated voting power and the related curation rewards. Who should benefit from the interest and curation rewards of the delegated votes, the “holder” or the “representative”? Or should there be some sort of split, or furthermore will the split ratio be hard-coded into the blockchain or will the SP holder be able to set the split ratio as desired? I look forward to your comments on this discussion point below.
Vote delegation is in summary, an innovative way of efficiently allocating Steem Power to the community. “Stockpiled” Steem Power will not benefit the growth of Steemit, whereas pooled delegation to trusted parties will assist them in enhancing the community in a surgically precise manner that whales simply cannot do efficiently at a macro level.
In closing, I leave you with the South African term, Amandla, which comes from the Xhosa/Zulu tradition of call-and-response.
Traditionally, a crowd member declares "Amandla!" meaning "power" and the crowd responds "Ngawethu!" adding that the power "is ours."