I will state categorically that I attempted to set up a second account, taskmaster4451. Actually, I guess technically I did, it just isn't verified since I do not have a second cell phone number to pin to the account. My reasoning was not to be deceptive. Rather, it drives me nuts that the steemit team has Zaps going into the blog section. I wanted a second account to Zap to my heart's content without worrying about it making a mess of my blog.
That said, there seems to be a perception that many whales are out there pulling a fast one on everyone else by having multiple accounts. The rhetoric appears to be that whales profit greatly from doing this. To see if this is true, we should look at the numbers.
Before getting into that, I must say that it only makes sense for many of the people on here to have multiple accounts. In fact, it would not surprise me if it was encouraged in the early days. When steemit was formed, how many accounts do you think there were? What would your interest level be as an outsider coming in seeing 25 accounts? I think most would laugh and turn away. People rarely like to get involved with stuff in the beginning. Anyone who has done something like that on a site like this, or a forum, knows how hard it is to get things going. People are attracted to activity and with only a handful of people, there is not a ton of activity. Hence we get into that double-edged sword.
Today, steemit has enough people involved so that those early adopters do not need to use three accounts. While many still have them, are they really profiting?
Let us start by looking at how steem system operates. Each account has STEEM, Steem Dollars, and Steem Power. Most of the money is held in Steem Power since that enhances one's voting ability. In return for said increase in voting, any STEEM put into SP is held for 13 weeks. The eliminates one's ability to place an upvote and then move the money to another account and vote again using the same power. Ergo, no advantaged gained there.
When one is funding an account, or multiple accounts, I am going to presume that everyone has a fixed amount that are dealing with. It is impossible to have an unlimited supply of STEEM since there are only so many available. That said, most are dealing with a fixed amount of money anyway. Hence, there is a decision to make: how much to put in each account? Putting everything in one account or spreading it over three accounts, as an example, nets out to be the same SP. If one have 30K STEEM and puts it all in SP, whether it is 30K in one account or 10K x 3, the effect is the same. One still only has a total of 30K in voting power.
"Yes but they can upvote their own content."
Let us look at that. If one puts up an article and upvotes it him or herself, 100% of that money goes to the author presuming it was done in the first 10 minutes. Using the scenario where there are three accounts, we still get the same voting power. Again, we see nothing gained in this instance.
Which brings us to curation. Certainly, this is an area where the multi-account person is profiting. In theory, it is possible. However, there have to be a few facts stated. If he or she is upvoting another person, it means nothing. There is no advantage other than the timing. One could vote at 11, 21, and 31 minutes. This would adjust the percentages entitled by each account based upon how the system is set up.
The curation pool enables one to share in the total money for that post, outside what is given to the author. Dividing one's votes up over different accounts could net more income, but it comes with a risk. Each delay means other voters could get in ahead of the second and third vote, thus reducing the payout to the particular whale. The fact that the total VP is split also means that each vote is worth 1/3 what it was otherwise. So while our whale is waiting for the 21 minute mark to hit, another whale could come in at 17 minutes and entitle him or herself to a large chunk of that posts curation.
As I said, it is possible to get ahead but it does come with some risks.
Now looking at being the author of a post. Authors get 100% of the VP the first 10 minutes. So once again, by splitting up the SP, one is only entitled to 1/3 what the author reward otherwise would be. He or she is sacrificing 2/3 of it and rolling the dice in the curation pool. Naturally, that money could be made up if one times the curatoin pool properly but what are the guarantees of that? The time from minute 11-30 is split between curator and author meaning that our whale, at best, ends up with the same as before, 100% reward of his/her vote.
Therefore, out whale is banking on the post generating enough curation to compensate him or her not taking $50 or $60 dollars in authorship rewards. Again, it is possible but there is a fair bit of downside.
So how much of this is practiced in reality? What is ironic is that in looking through most whales blogs, they do not post content regularly. They will often go 3 or 4 days without posting anything. At the same time, many of them do not comment either, hence do not earn authorship rewards there (which they could easily self upvote). At the same time, I do not see whales sitting at the 31 minute mark trying to time the curatoin pool. Ironically, the upvotes I received from the heavy hitters came days later. At that point, since they are basically at the end of the curation line, the reward is only on their vote since they arent going to share much in the total curation pool.
Therefore, in reality, is having three or four accounts really giving an advantage to these individuals. It does not appear to. Sure, there might be a couple who rigged it so that they time everything perfectly. However, even the steem white paper said there is no advantage to multiple accounts since all SP would be divided.
At the end of the day, 3 accounts with 300K SP is only as powerful as 1 account with 900K SP.
This is just another example of people complaining about something that really isn't a big problem. There are some challenges on steemit but whales having multiple accounts to game things is not one of them.
If you found this post helpful and informative, please give it an upvote and re-steem.
Pictures by Google Images.