A response to @ats-david's post on ostracizing on steemit... flaws, loopholes..

I just read a post by Hive account@ats-david. It is called Ostracism on Steemit: Why or Why Not?.

Overall if a person is unwilling to change and they do continue negative behaviors that impact steem members in the form of scams, exploits, etc that undermine the currency, drain the pool, and defraud people then I believe ostracism is something that could be done.

However, there is a problem here. As Hive account@ats-david noted this can be very effective on low power, low reputation accounts. I do not believe it can be particularly effective against the accounts of anyone that has been using the platform very long and has put some thought into it.

So let's say there is a powerful bad actor and we ostracize them. If I were that bad actor here is what I would do.

1. Power down my account.
2. Move my crypto to an exchange
3. Move it from there to a different exchange
4. Create one or more new steem accounts
5. Purchase steem with the crypto on the exchange and power them up
6. Post some simple posts I know are guaranteed up votes for awhile to get my reputation up there
7. Resume my bad habit with one or all of those accounts
8. Keep benefiting from scamming and repeat the steps above as necessary

The thing about reputation is it is a construct for the steemit website and not so much the blockchain itself, or other sites that may view the blockchain. It also increases any time someone with a higher reputation than you up votes you. So it can be fairly easy to raise your reputation at least into the 60s in a short amount of time. The higher you get the slower it becomes as there are fewer and fewer people with a higher reputation than you.

So while I like the idea of ostracizing if that is all we can do, but on the biggest offenders I do not think it will have any effect whatsoever. This is also why I am against setting thresholds where people above a certain power cannot vote (e.g. the whale no voting experiment) as all they need do is power down, create multiple accounts, redistribute their power, and continue voting as though that threshold did not exist.

This is a challenging problem. I don't know of any solution at this time. The best course of action I can think is for people to do very public investigations where they post all of their evidence including where it is routed, what other accounts it involves, etc. When powerful people are the target they don't like this, but I do believe information may be the best way to fight these problems. It won't solve or stop them, but I don't know how to solve or stop them at this time.

At least not if we wish to remain decentralized and not have some controlling body.