My growing concerns regarding the short to mid-term sustainability of Steem. Market corrections will likely handle long-term problems.
Voting Collusion While cooperation to distribute funds to the best work is the desired goal, collusion that undermines this objective should be minimized. There are two kinds of collusion , the most straightforward is when one user simply buys a larger stake than others, and the other involves coordinating a large number of smaller stakeholders to work together. Larger stakeholders can have the voting influence of 100 or even 1000 smaller stakeholders which means they have even greater incentive to defect by voting for themselves than they had under a linear distribution. Regardless of how much money any one individual has, there are always many other individuals with similar wealth. Even the wealthiest individual rarely has much more than the next couple wealthiest combined. Furthermore, those who have a large investment in a community also have the most to lose by attempting to game the voting system for themselves.
Source: Original Whitepaper - SteemIt
I am a firm believer in your stake is your stake and you can do what you want with it. I also believe that some of the problems we are having currently were predicted. The idea with stake is it works for both flagging and upvoting.
Yes, everyone can use their stake how they want, but that does not mean we can ignore those who are using their stake to take out as much money as they possibly can. I don't care if you buy or sell votes or help your family and friends, but like with anything there is a limit to what we can afford to drain out of a young platform.
If the large stakeholders will not counter the other large stakeholders, it doesn't work. Well intentioned or not it becomes a sort of ponzi scheme.
My concern is that we are letting some really big accounts take out more than what is good for the future economy of Steem.
One option several people are proposing is community flagging bots, which at first seems like a good idea.
However: No, I do not wish to delegate my stake to a community flagging bot, unless it has major whale support. After all as is often brought up they have the most to lose or gain. If they do not address the problem it will catch up to us in the price.
Non-Linear Rewards:
Can someone please figure out what Haejin and Sweetsssj's friends and family will be taking out if we made that change? Because I think it will be much worse. You can change the math, but if you don't solve the problem you just "move" it.
*spoiled stake attracts flies.
The tools we have at this time are flags, our voices and transparency. The question isn't can we stop abuse, the question is will we?
*Each user, including whales can only allocate their own share using votes, but that does mean we have to strike a balance between supporting those who create an economy and those who are just funneling Steem out of the system.
What are your thoughts?
