Let’s see this I’m action! The anticipation is killing me on both a good and bad way.

The road map of sustainability seems now more powerful and with the help of proposal system steem seems more reliable then ever before..

Good work team 💪

Congrats and Best wishes for HF21

How does a proposal system produce sustainability? Why do we need a proposal system in the first place when this could be done off chain or through witnesses?

Because this lowers the dependency on any organization and would allow us to have faster developments. So no more waiting on important features the community wish to have. The sps is an investment in bettering the community through the development of the chain. The more progress we make is just as good for marketing than doing actual marketing.

> At the request of the Witnesses, we have included code in this release that would add a long term funding mechanism for the SteemDAO/SPS. If this hardfork is accepted by the Witnesses, 10% of overall inflation (pulled from the rewards pool) would be used to fund proposals made through the SteemDAO/SPS.

I don't agree with this robbing Peter to pay Paul method of "long term funding". It puts one faction of the community against another similar to what we see in typical bureaucracies. In essence for the blogger it's going to be perceived as an immoral tax.

A better way to fund something like this would be to provide a real useful promotion mechanism where bloggers can pay for visibility and use that to fund SteemDAO. In essence instead of BidBots why not use on-chain marketing to fund something like this?

This way actual activity and usage correlates with long term funding. Otherwise you're not likely to get anything which increases activity if the SteemDAO is funded no matter what by default. Also just like with political regimes once you start paying people in this way it's going to become increasingly more and more difficult to remove (lower the tax) in the future.

Well put and I agree!

I just want better alignment of incentives. Who came up with the incentive mechanics/mechanism design here? What are we trying to accomplish with the rewards (and punishments)?

Of course we need more code, but code should be generated to make a profit for everyone combined. What exactly will SPS produce which is so important that it needs 10% of the reward pool indefinitely? Is it going to produce a lot of profit and raise the price of Steem for everyone so that it's measurably beneficial or is it just moving numbers and percentages around to benefit a few who want development contracts?

The issue is no one knows what it will produce. The community will be able to submit these proposals. So its the communities projects we would be funding which people will need to see what value they feel it will bring to the chain.

>"The issue is no one knows what it will produce. The community will be able to submit these proposals."

You're ignoring his point. The funding for the SPS proposals is coming only from content creators, who currently share ~10% of rewards now. ~90% of the benefits of any SPS proposals are then delivered to non-creators - who didn't pay anything to fund them under this proposal.

That's his point. The funding is extracted from content creators whose median payout is .01 SBD now, and a 10% tax on creators is going to reduce that, leaving even less incentive to create content.

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>"... code should be generated to make a profit for everyone combined."

Oops. I think the SP of the majority of stake doesn't agree with you on this. Those 35 whales seem to prefer code that profits them instead of everyone. That's why this is the code being proposed by their chosen witnesses. When you look at things from the perspective of the history of Steem, that's clearly been the impetus behind extant code. Looking forward, it's reasonable to predict that's what this code is intended to do.

Less rewards for creators, and more rewards for whales. It's that simple.

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> Who came up with the incentive mechanics/mechanism design here? What are we trying to accomplish with the rewards (and punishments)?

It was copied from Bitshares where I'm told there is a track record of it working reasonably well.

Once the SPS is in production you can propose whatever changes you like to the Steem stakeholders who can then fund the development of those features. Until then, we have to use our judgement, and the communications we have with the Witnesses, to guide the code we develop. If you don't feel we are making the right decisions, then that's a perfectly good reason to support the SPS. Until there is a decentralized mechanism for funding Steem blockchain development, you're stuck with us :)

That’s a good point even though we have to move forward. We come to the decision where we need to fund this blockchain through SPS. It is a start.
Keep on postin

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~90% of rewards going to 35 whales out of tens of thousands of accounts is not decentralized.

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>"In essence instead of BidBots why not use on-chain marketing to fund something like this?"

I can think of one reason to implement a regressive tax on the ~10% of rewards not currently extracted by substantial stakeholders. Only one, and it isn't to fairly distribute the expense of funding development to those that will benefit from it. Whales currently extract ~90% of rewards, despite creating almost none of the content those rewards are supposed to encourage creating. This tax will be extracting yet more rewards from creators and enabling whales to vote to fund SPS proposals that will provide kickbacks, just like governments do today across the world.

That's the only reason for this particular funding mechanism I can grasp.

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I hope it turns out well for us. I hope Steem will scale back.

And for the 'normies' like me: https://steemit.com/normietalk/@justineh/normie-talk-hf21-explained-sps-eip-what-it-is-and-what-happens-next

Very good post, much better than this one here. I think you explained the potential value of SPS. My concern remains though how do you distinguish between an idea which is likely to be profitable for the ecosystem and an idea which merely receives a lot of votes but which is a "bridge to no where".

How are the votes going to be calculated first of all? Do whale accounts get to rig the vote? Can whale accounts somehow be excluded? Do verified accounts get to vote exclusively or do accounts of a certain age get higher weight in the vote? If it's stake weighted alone then I think you can see what can happen here.

It's going to take a lot of discipline, planning, discussion, on how to rank/rate ideas. My suggestion is we need a way to try and determine how much value or profit an idea can generate for the ecosystem. Such as does it have potential to increase the value of the Steem token?

• If two ideas accomplish the same thing equally but one of them burns Steem tokens and another does not then do we prefer the one which burns tokens?

• If two ideas accomplish the same goal but one of them does so in a way which can bring in lots of revenue or investors then should we favor that one?

• What metrics do we track to determine the success or failure?

Well this is @justineh's work, I can't take any credit but thought it was worth linking as they appeared at almost the same time.

Personally, I believe we are already on that bridge to nowhere and so almost anything should be an improvement.

There are a lot of 'ifs' though. If bot-boosted shit content is downvoted, perhaps stake will come out of the bots to curate as there will be less profit there, and a greater % of inflation heads towards curators.

> How are the votes going to be calculated first of all?

Umm, same as before?

> Do whale accounts get to rig the vote?

Potentially?

> Can whale accounts somehow be excluded?

Not in this proposal, and likely never.

> Do verified accounts get to vote exclusively or do accounts of a certain age get higher weight in the vote?

Nope.

I see some of these changes as much larger/more radical than what is being proposed - something for palnet-type efforts/SMT's to test?

SMTs could fix this I think if we can distinguish using SMT holding how verified an account is by percentage or points or something like that.

The concern I have is what would stop whales from simply rigging the votes and then voting for their pet projects without regard for the revenue it generates for the ecosystem?

If you look for example at corruption in certain industries historically such as construction for example? We know how a construction project can end up costing way more than it should and take way longer than it needs to take etc. When people start voting directly on how to spend money it also is historically known to create infighting, even civil wars happen over these sorts of disputes.

I wish more thought could go into the on-chain governance aspect so that we can really know it's what the community wants and that all factions of the ecosystem are equally represented. Example, content producers are a faction, witnesses are a faction, developers are a faction, and different politics are emerging right now favoring one or another faction.

> ...if we can distinguish using SMT holding how verified an account is by percentage or points or something like that.

Sounds like a job for Oracles
https://steemit.com/ned/@steemitblog/ned-scott-and-theoretical-of-steemit-explore-oracles-on-steem

> The concern I have is what would stop whales from simply rigging the votes and then voting for their pet projects without regard for the revenue it generates for the ecosystem?

Ah OK, your previous comments and this one I think relate more to SteemDAO - I didn't catch this initially.

I think the voting here is planned to be stake-weighted, but I could be wrong. I live in hope that those with the largest stakes would wish to grow the value of their holding by voting for the projects they think have the best chance of taking Steem forward in the medium/long term.

> I wish more thought could go into the on-chain governance aspect so that we can really know it's what the community wants and that all factions of the ecosystem are equally represented.

See palnet.io for a first glimpse of this. The whales there have been made so on the premise that they wont self-vote and cannot powerdown for a year. And a high stake account 'nopal4u' sits at the top of the rich-list ready to govern.

Pal is interesting. I assume Pal is an SMT right? Doing this with an SMT makes sense but I think the people proposing Steem DAO would have had better success in promoting their plan if they actually showed that there are some good ideas waiting to be funded, some whitepapers, business plans, etc.

>"I live in hope that those with the largest stakes would wish to grow the value of their holding by voting for the projects they think have the best chance of taking Steem forward in the medium/long term."

You also have hoped that those with substantial stakes would actually curate, instead of extracting ~90% of rewards into their own wallets via manipulating rewards with those stakes. How'd that work out?

Hope springs eternal, and a sucker is born every minute. Human traits are predictable, and every part of EIP is designed to increase the profitability of profiteering, and that is also a feature of this funding mechanism for the SPS.

It isn't particularly hard to design mechanisms that prevent profiteering, and instead enable investors to rely on capital gains for ROI. Capital gains have encouraged investment for thousands of years. Profits have also been possible from hostile takeovers that extract the value of businesses while eliminating capital gains. Selling the means of production of a company whose stock is cheap enough can create profits. It destroys the value of the company stock though, as well as the company.

The means of production of Steem is creators, who cannot be sold. Their product can be profited from by the various mechanisms enabling stake to extract the rewards creators make possible, though, and we see that ~90% of rewards are extracted that way today. Now taxing that last ~10% of rewards can increase the extraction of rewards before they can create capital gains.

Guess what's going to happen? Well, you don't have to guess. You can simply predict that the same people are going to do the same thing for the same reasons that they have been doing, only they're now going to be able to get more rewards for doing it.

There's no point in hoping some words will change human nature. Reasonably preventing extraction of the economic value of content creation before it can increase the value of Steem is easily doable, and investors - not profiteers - have been provably investing for capital gains since prehistory.

HF21 is not going to change human nature, but is intended to enable the profiteers to extract even more profit. There are no experienced investors on Steem today, because capital gains are prevented. All substantial stakeholders have been, are now, and will continue to act as they always have, and parasitically extract every satoshi of value from the rewards pool before their competitors can. They have the voting power to effect what they want to see, and this is what they want.

I won't have hope until they've sucked every bit of value they profitably can out of Steem, and leave to parasitize their next target. Then maybe we can implement rational mechanisms to create capital gains and attract investors.

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>"The concern I have is what would stop whales from simply rigging the votes and then voting for their pet projects without regard for the revenue it generates for the ecosystem?"

Nothing. This is the kickback generator every corrupt bureaucrat dreams of.

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>"...almost anything should be an improvement."

You must be young. I'm pretty old, and experience has taught me that things can always get worse. Indeed, without extreme measures, things going badly are very hard to keep from going worse. EIP and the SPS funding mechanism aren't radical changes to stake weighting manipulations. All they do is increase the profitability of manipulating rewards mechanism via substantial stake to extract rewards before that value can raise the price of Steem and create capital gains.

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Regarding SPS why take away 10% of the reward pool in order to pay for things that are being built anyway? This building is being done organically and the builders are actually creating business models with outside income sources. This will take away incentive! In my worst English "if it ain't broke don't fix it!"

Let's look now at the reward curve and why I hate the proposal. As a disclaimer I must first write that I have purchased about 25,000 SP at between $1 and $3!

Why I Don't Like It:

1.) If Steemit.com wants another reward model for bloggers they can use SMT's to do it. Don't mess with your unpaid builders!

The Steem blockchain is NOT a blogging blockchain so they shouldn't base everything on that! That is NOT visionary!

2.) Those of us that have built using the current reward system are going to get penalized. I reward all commenters on my posts with an upvote of at least 3% if I can't do that my community has less incentive. What about big investors that are trying to build a communtiy and reward them. Will they still invest? Probably not.

Exactly. When did we even have a debate or when was a case even made where agreement has been reached on the need for SPS? What is SPS supposed to do for the ecosystem to make it worth 10% indefinite spending rate?

How do we stop or reverse course if we find SPS is not somehow profitable or growing the ecosystem? If Steem were a company or a government how would we justify this to shareholders or to voters?

@blocktrades is certainly the subject matter expert on this, and I believe he's published a number of posts explaining the careful design of the system. The discussion was had amongst the Witnesses who are the ultimate arbiters of these decisions. Those are the people stakeholders voted for.

What the SPS is supposed to do is fund projects that create sufficient value to justify the expenditure, and that's the analysis people should perform when determining whether to vote on a proposal. If there are no good proposals, then people shouldn't vote on any proposals, and that money will go unspent. That's how you roll back the SPS, if it doesn't generate any value, don't use it or downvote proposals you don't like.

The question is how will we track and measure how much value a funded project is provided? The question of "is it worth the amount of funding it is receiving?" is a question the community is likely to ask. If a project somehow drives some sort of revenue so that the value/price of Steem starts to go up then of course we can all agree this is good.

But I am concerned we could end up with a lot of low value "projects" which developers and insiders like but which does not measurably drive according to any traced metrics. So if we are talking about increasing active users, or increasing investor interest in holding powering up, or something measurable like this then great.

Are there any current ideas that @blocktrades has in mind to be on the initial proposal list?

> The question is how will we track and measure how much value a funded project is provided?

There are blockchain history elements generated for all payouts, just as there are for content payouts today. UIs like the many we have for existing Steem functions will process this history show the data. We know who are the largest earners on author payouts, curation, who is powering up and powering down, etc. because of the many UIs and reports that have been created by the community to show this kind of data.

The initial version includes a pretty limited web UI that shows proposals and allows for voting on them but I have no doubt that over time many additional UIs will be created to show the data in more and different ways (some may even have their funding provided by SPS, some may not)

What I meant to express but did not word very well is will the UI allow for us to track the metrics of projects so we can determine the success or failure based on how much a certain project is contributing to success measures?

If it's retention stats, or if it's the Steem price, or if it is something else, I think every project which is asking for funding should have a business plan with a profit motive. The project can be a great idea but then how does it increase the price of Steem or bring in more users or make current users more active?

Example, a game in the style of DrugWars for example could bring in new users and increase the value of Steem too if it were designed the right way. The project could be funded via SPS and then every month report their success metrics such as how many users they are gaining each month, how much retention they have, this and we can look at if the price of Steem is going up or if people are powering up more etc.

So yes, we can find a way to measure "profit". We just have to agree on which measures should represent profit.

Long term, I think the most important metric should be increase in the value of Steem tokens, but it's not always going to be easy to match that to work that is done, of course.

So I agree that other metrics will be useful for measuring proposals, and there's not going to be one or even a few metrics that will be useful for the wide variety of potential proposals. Marketing proposals could be the easiest to measure, IF they can show successful adoption by new users (especially if the users are retained over time).

The impact of new infrastructural features gets more difficult to measure, and I doubt any single metric is going to work for such things. Personally, my original vote is going to be based on how useful I think such a feature is (coupled with the price asked/etc) and my continued vote is going to depend on how well the task is being executed over time.

Can you elaborate on the dynamics of the system a bit? I mostly see it being compared to witness style voting but I know that isn’t quite accurate. How exactly is the threshold set of vests needed to fund a proposal? Can proposals be downvoted or are they an upvote only system like witnesses?

There is a return proposal (which gets votes like any other). Any proposals that get more votes than return get paid (until total funding runs out). Once the funding payout process reaches return, the remaining budget is put back in the pool and proposals below return are not funded.

The first thing I'm going to do immediately after activation is vote for return and I encourage others to do the same, then I will evaluate other proposals.

This is completely backwards. SPS proposals are (if I understand you correctly) funded by default, and only not funded if enough people vote against them.

Instead, only fund those that receive that baseline of votes.

This mechanism is intended to tax the creators of the ~10% share of the rewards pool they split between them, by default, and is the most regressive taxation example I am aware of in the history of the world, not just Steem. The ~90% of rewards that go to substantial stakeholders via stake weighting manipulations, curation rewards, and bidbot profits, aren't touched. Not even the tyrants waging the centuries of war in history left the nobility untaxed in that way.

You should learn from those examples. Kingdoms vanquished because the nobles refused to fund their defense shortly thereafter had no nobility. I once owned Cram's Unrivaled Atlas of the World from 1911. When that edition was published there were 1000 princes of Russia. After 1917 there were 0.

There is not even a mechanism for to 'vote against' a proposal so clearly you do not understand how SPS works.

That @blocktrades whose company developed the SPS code upvoted my comment ought to give you some clue that my answer was correct and you have no idea what you are talking about.

First, I wasn't discussing SPS itself, so don't confuse the issue. Further, as I was commenting exclusively on your explication of how that funding mechanism is controllable, the disparagement you apply to me actually reflects on your own explanation. This is what you said:

>"There is a return proposal (which gets votes like any other). Any proposals that get more votes than return get paid (until total funding runs out)."

If 'return' isn't voting against a proposal, please explain what it actually is?

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It is setting a threshold that any and all proposals need to meet to get funded. It is not voting against any particular proposal.

Okay, I believe I have grasped the idea now, and prefer it to what I thought you meant earlier. Still don't see any point to it. If the threshold to exceed return is less than votes necessary to provide funding, then I suppose that makes proposals more likely to be funded.

I'm not convinced that's a good thing. If a proposal can't be funded through ordinary organic votes, there's probably a good reason, and it shouldn't be funded. Making taxes more likely to be spent is a bad thing generally, and spending them on poor proposals isn't better.

Taxes are bad, always. I'm agin' 'em.

I'm specifically against this one for multiple reasons, the foremost being that it is horribly regressive, and is going to put downward pressure on author rewards in combination with the halving of author rewards included in the EIP. When the poll was taken on @blocktrades post, tax funding was rejected. I am not surprised to see it being proposed for inclusion in the HF even so. Every part of the EIP simply makes profiteering more profitable, and I expect to see you profiteering advocates moving on to your next target soon, as the userbase plummets, Steem price crashes, and market cap decreases substantially.

Maybe then the community remaining can undertake reasonable mechanisms to curtail profiteering and promote capital gains.

We'll see then. Well, you won't. You'll be gone with the rest of the profiteers, on to the next profit center.

Enjoy your journey.

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Return proposal goes to the reward pool?

It goes back to the SPS pool, which is separate from the reward pool that pays posts/comments.

Oh, so it's just saved for later?

Return proposal does that yes. A burn proposal is another alternative which permanently reduces inflation rather than making any payout or accumulating the funds for later.

Is there a proposal to send it to the reward pool (post reward pool) instead? Is there one to send it to witnesses or steem power holders?

That is not implemented (any of them) in the initial version of SPS for various reasons. It could be added later, including via a proposal to pay a developer to implement it.

Some of it could be done offchain, by someone proposing to accept funds from SPS and then forward them as promised. This requires trust, but if the intermediary stopped paying, the funding could easily be cut off by removing SPS votes (proposals can pay out gradually over time).

It's an upvote only system, like witness voting. It is quite similar to witness voting.

I've certainly had ideas at the past and no doubt in the future for things to propose, but the real idea behind the SPS is to have an open system where many people can suggest ideas and provide a mechanism for stakeholders to vote on those ideas, so it's not so much about my own ideas.

Making sure that we choose wisely what to upvote is of course a key ingredient for the success of the SPS as a work allocation system. I don't know of any way to guarantee such a thing (if I did, I suppose I would be the wealthiest guy on the planet). But I think it is critical that we have such a system to increase the rate at which we grow the Steem ecosystem. From my point of view, progress has been much too slow in the past and we need to expand the available pool of people that can help out. No doubt there will be proposals that fail or don't provide benefit, and voters will just have to learn to make wiser decisions in such cases.

What are some specific examples of proposals that will be introduced through this system?

I have no idea if it would get funded or not but let's say we wanted to hire a professional Marketing firm. I could get a quote, write up what costs and benefits would be involved and see what the response is.

Thanks for the reply. I assume some of the parties advocating this system have already considered certain proposals, otherwise there wouldn't be impetus to move forward with this, so I was wondering what some of those specific plans are floating around in the private communication channels that are used to determine the fate of the rest of us.

> But I am concerned we could end up with a lot of low value "projects" which developers and insiders like but which does not measurably drive according to any traced metrics.

Of course there will be funding for low value projects with the usual source of beneficiaries at the top who say we need to alter rewards to stop the vote bots that many of them profit from. Right now its campaign time promising the moon, then once in place what will be will be.

It seems only you have ever heard of kickbacks. Sadly, they are how government is run, and taxes create governments.

SPS sounds like a perfect mechanism to tax from the smallest stakeholders a flow of funds to a group of cronies with enough stake to ram through their proposals. We will see what happens when we allow a group of 35 rapine profiteers that have already managed to extract ~90% of the inflation from the rewards pool to vote themselves another 10% of the rewards.

I think we both know what we'll see.

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You guys really need to work on your process and outreach.

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Thanks for the feedback!

Is 'none of the above' an option?

Yes, there are two ways to vote "none of the above" in SPS. One is a return worker which returns the funding back to the SPS treasury to be used later and another is a burn worker which sends the SPS funds to @null.

Well, at least it has that going for it,...
Not liking the level of the toll gate, either.

How do we get to it?
It get its own tab?

I know that a basic web UI to view proposals and vote for them was completed along with the blockchain code but I do not know where that will be placed on steemit.com

Those with substantial stakes are inveterate profiteers, and were convincing in their assurances that they wouldn't fund development with that stake. Since the vast majority of stake is in the wallets of 35 whales, and they won't part with any of it, the only funding source left was a tax on creators, whose current share of rewards is less than ~10%.

~90% of the stake in Steem therefore will not be funding SPS, and those costs have been foisted on creators as a regressive tax - a tax on those least able to bear it. Retention last I checked was ~7.5% YOY. The median payout was .01 SBD. This tax is going to fall hardest on folks making about $.01 for their content now, and not staying here very long to be taxed already. Bye bye market for Steem. Without users the value of Steem will plummet.

The current proposal for SPS delivers 10% of inflation - the rewards pool - to fund SPS. It is completely delusional to claim that 10% of stake on Steem will ever vote to exercise control of such a mechanism rationally. There is no example of such coherent voting in Steem's history, and just because it's theoretically possible for such a thing to happen is no reason to expect it to. After all, we could all just quit arguing and fighting and world peace would break out today. It won't, and only fools will expect it to.

I have repeatedly called for prudent preparations to be made to reverse HF21 in the event my dire predictions are fulfilled. Please exercise that prudence by enabling a rapid reversal of the HF should price plummet, users hemmorhage, and market cap decline. Failing to prepare is preparing to fail.

Don't let profiteers suck the last bit of value from Steem before abandoning it's empty husk.

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> Regarding SPS why take away 10% of the reward pool in order to pay for things that are being built anyway? This building is being done organically and the builders are actually creating business models with outside income sources. This will take away incentive! In my worst English "if it ain't broke don't fix it!"

Steem's economic model is broken. That's a fact. Otherwise, we wouldn't be losing relative market-valuation constantly. Inflation is being generated and sold on exchanges, but the buy pressure is not big enough to sustain a high market valuation.

And regarding taking from the reward-pool: the majority of it isn't being utilized effectively. The inflation should have been something that is advancing this ecosystem, but only a niche group of people are actually doing something. SPS will hopefully help to have more streamlined goals for people to be rewarded for actual work done.

Inflation being sold is irrelevant compared to steemit inc selling rate, isn't it?

Mostly yes. But instead of working to create revenue to solve the problem we seem to be trying to plug a leaky damn by putting our finger in the holes.

Imagine if steemit.com structured things in order to bring in tons of new users which in turn would boost their ad revenue, instead of making it even harder to on board new users, which will ultimately reduce their ad income and likely spell their demise.

Hell no. Author rewards (not all of inflation but the biggest single piece) are currently about 17 million STEEM per year and Steemit sells 9.6 million. Not all of author rewards are sold (nor other components of inflation) but you can be damn sure that a lot of it is. It is very, very wrong to dismiss inflation and rewards as a source of selling pressure.

Okay thanks for putting things into perspective. I had no idea how much STEEM steemit inc were selling.

I guess we still have a few years to get STEEM on the cheap while inflation is high, and then the price won't go down as much.

That is certainly one way to look at it. And in addition to Steemit eventually slowing and/or stopping their selling, the baseline inflation declines by 1/2% per year. So yes, over time, the amount of available new Steem will decline a lot.

this a bear market, the low of 40 cents is alot higher than the lows of 2016. For steem to work it needs investors and believers. Authors are the ones who dump steem because they are effectively working and need paying. I believe the Hardfork encourages more of an investment mindset which is crucial for the steem price and ecosystem long term. It is not broken it is a bear market and we ride it out with every other alt coin.

Most of the Authors can not hurt the price. The dumping comes from above.

Much of the stake is not being allocated to create value at all. It is a difference in opinion on what brings value.

The eyes of the community cannot support all of the dumping, but it is mathmatically impossible for the dumping to come from most authors. The witnesses also sell to pay expenses.

Although I am not a fan of how they are approaching this, I do hope it teaches people why it is important to fight abuse. We can't change SteemIt Inc's selling, but do we have to support self voting, bot abuse etc? If people learn to downvote maybe not.

By the way I agree the funding of the SPS should have come out equally, it does need to be funded.

Agree and disagree. Yes "most authors" purely counting numbers can't hurt the price because their earnings are tiny. But the reward pool in the aggregate is responsible for a large portion of the selling pressure, in that it totals about 17 million STEEM per year, far more than what even Steemit is selling (about 9.6 million per year).

Not 100% of the reward pool is sold immediately but a very significant piece is, and of that which isn't sold immediately, a lot of that ends up being sold somewhat later anyway.

17 million STEEM/y is important, it is a big challenge to find enough investors to float that selling, and we need to be very careful to make sure it is used effectively.

You are under the assumption that the stakeholders and witnesses are better at directing it at places that add value. Based on the distribution and the last 3 years, I disagree.

It is not the tiny users that have run down the price and run end users off. They just don't have the power or the stake.

You and I both remember the original distribution. Any changes in that are a result of large stakeholder selling and small accounts buying or holding.

> You are under the assumption that the stakeholders and witnesses are better at directing it at places that add value. Based on the distribution and the last 3 years, I disagree.

My view is that the mechanism which has been used for that for the last 3 years has been severely flawed and these new mechanisms are much better, especially the SPS mechanism which apparently (I say because I have no personal experience but I believe those who claim it) has a track record of working well on Bitshares.

> You and I both remember the original distribution. Any changes in that are a result of large stakeholder selling and small accounts buying or holding.

IMO with the exception of Steemit nearly all large stakeholders selling from the original distribution has long since occurred. What is left of the original distribution, people have mostly decided to keep long term (there may always be exceptions and people may always change their minds, but it isn't a constant flow of selling). And remember, in the original distribution Steemit had 80% and everyone else shared 20%.

But numerically the inflation paid out to content rewards matters a lot. It is more than the rate at which Steemit is selling, most probably higher than the net rate at which all whales, Steemit included, are selling

To be clear, this does not mean content rewards going to minnows. Most of it goes out at the top. But we also can't micromanage where it goes. Maybe with better mechanisms we can have some chance of managing it at effectively all.

> this a bear market, the low of 40 cents is a lot higher than the lows of 2016

That's not entirely correct. We're at 4400 satoshis right now, which is far lower than when Steem was at its lowest in terms of USD valuation. Which essentially means: Steem lost a lot of value in comparison to BTC and other alt-coins which did much better (EOS for example).

> Authors are the ones who dump steem because they are effectively working and need paying

I've written quite a lot of posts over the last 2 years and the only reason I'd power-down those author rewards, would be for tax purposes, but not because it's such hard work. On contrast, creating content on Steem should be fun and I'd argue that the majority creators on Steem aren't professionals in the traditional sense.

Now, while authors are of course part of the dumping problem, I agree with @whatsup that most of it was done by early stakeholders (incl. Steemit Inc.) But that's part of the game. What we need are more incentives for people to hold their Steem and buy more of it. And this is not happening with authors alone. Everyone can read/watch their content without spending a dime.

in all respect your twisting what im saying. Im not talking about satoshi im talking about dollars. The only people who are going to buy steem and hold it and take it off exchanges are curators. They now how more incentive to do so.

You said that the valuation of Steem is higher than at the all-time low. But that’s only because BTC is at 9400$+. Looking at the USD can give the image of Steem price being good, but it’s far cheaper than it has ever been.

> The only people who are going to buy steem and hold it and take it off exchanges are curators. They now have more incentive to do so.

That's correct. As long as people actually want to hold Steempower. Which is why 50/50 is so important.

i dont care, its still higher in what matters, money.

Obviously STEEM was not ranked 69th(!) at CoinMarketCap some months ago, so of course you are right, and the problem is not only a general bear market!

But I really wonder why many 'stake holders' care so much about their ROI? What does it help to get a bigger part of a cake which is getting smaller and smaller? I prefer to have a smaller part of a huge cake. :)
If I knew it would let the STEEM price increase significantly, I would accept not to earn one single STEEM from now on. :)

Why do people buy BTC? Because they want to earn as much as possible interest or because they believe the value of BTC should rise?

In my eyes a real curator loves what he is reading and will curate anyway, he doesn't care if curation rewards are 50 or 25 % (and won't just join automated trails without reading what is he upvoting).
When I upvote stuff I upvote it because I like it. I don't care when I upvote (if for example after exactly 15 minutes), and how many other users have already uptoved that post.
I intentionally seek posts from new and/or unknown authors to give them a dollar or two.
With 50 % curation rewards I can't give them the same amount in future, because then I myself will get a big part of my own upvote back (as curation) instead of being able to support the authors! Sounds ironic anyhow: then I want but cannot anymore support people ...

I don't need to earn a lot of STEEM anymore because if the price will rise, I am rich anyway, if not it also doesn't matter to have even more STEEM (then I will enjoy my BTC). :)

Less than ~10% of rewards are received by creators. @arcange publishes daily statistics that reveal the exact numbers, and my last check showed the median payout was .01 SBD (median = what most people receive), yet the average payout was ~15 times that. That is because the vast majority of rewards are paid out to 35 whales, not the rest of us. Their few posts and comments receive ~90% of payouts from the rewards pool, about a third of that from bidbots. The below chart is almost two years old, and despite repeated requests for a current updated chart, I have been unable to get one. The authors have changed, but the curve is practically unchanged.

[IMAGE: https://files.steempeak.com/file/steempeak/valued-customer/G5OCRgAV-authorrewardchart.png]

It is not creators that impact the price of Steem, because they hardly get any of it. It is profiteers, manipulating rewards by their substantial stake weight, that extract almost all the value of the economic activity on Steem, and prevent capital gains from ever impacting the price of Steem - because that value is instead diverted to their wallets as tokens, rather than raising the price of tokens.

Check @arcange's latest post for the most recent relevant statistics.

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He said relative market valuation and he's absolutely right. In the crypto market, which as a whole has indeed been in a bear market, Steem has dropped from top 10 to top 20 to now barely holding on in the top 70 (!). Some of that is due to promising new projects which took their spots in the high ranks, but mostly it is due to being much lower than projects which Steem used to considerably out-rank.

Blaming Steem's relative performance on the bear market is way off base. This is mostly on us.

dude, every single altcoin is in the gutter. Every single one except BNB and litecoin. He is not right, he is twisting my words to suit his own argument. I said steem is higher now and holding on to 40 cents which is way above the 0.03 cents of the lows in 2016. Thats all the matters nothing else, when Bitcoin tops 20k Steem will scream back up to 3 and 4 dollars. People dont understand crypto, fundamentals have got nothing to do with it. Its all relative, when one coin makes a run for it and hits a crazy price everyone says well if that xyzzy coin can be that much then every other worthless coin can be worth more too. That all feeds into itself and the casino and hype becomes alive again. I laugh when people talk about marketing and this and that, its a joke. Nobody uses this stuff yet its not happening like we thought it would its all speculation, all of it, fuelled by hot money coming out of nowhere. Slagging off steem and people saying its doomed does not help though i agree but it makes no real difference, because when it all kicks off again steem will be the best thing since sliced bread until the bear market attacks again.

> every single altcoin is in the gutter

Yeah and at least 50 of them have STILL managed to outperform Steem.

Stop making excuses.

>"Steem's economic model is broken."

You are why Steem's economy is broken, and are the best example of that malfunction. You extract it's value for your personal profit before the economic activity and infrastructure can produce capital gains.

>"And regarding taking from the reward-pool: the majority of it isn't being utilized effectively."

Less than ~10% of the rewards are reaching the intended destination of rewards: content creators. Almost all rewards are being extracted by manipulative financial mechanisms, and end up in the wallets of whales. You are the niche group 'doing something', and the something you are doing is preventing capital gains. The whales are cutting their own throats by concentrating all the value of the economy into their wallets, each to the maximum degree possible. EIP is a set of mechanisms to increase the rate of extraction of value before it creates capital gains. Halving author's share of rewards and instead delivering twice as much to those extracting it with the weight of their stakes, increasing the exponential power of stake with the modified rewards curve, and availing free flags to flaggots censoring creators that returns rewards the community sought to provide them as incentive to the rewards pool, where you can extract it instead, all increase the rate of extraction of rewards by stake weighting, and suppress capital gains.

You and your ilk are doing so because you can simply move on to the next victim once you've drained the host economy of the stake you extract. Steem will be a corpse, drained dry by your parasitization, left to blow away in the winds of avarice, leaving the gems that could have instead have been nurtured by substantial stakeholders to create capital gains for all investors; censorship resistance (in a world more silenced every day); one of the best blockchains ever written; a currency model that made transaction fees obsolete and proved microtransactions not only viable, but scalable both globally and fiscally, and a social media use case that could have leapfrogged every business model extant - had you only been willing to rely on capital gains for your ROI.

Should Steem somehow remain viable after you profiteers have moved on, perhaps the remaining users will be able to implement sound policies that encourage investing for capital gains, and then be able to grow instead of feed parasites.

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Just to be clear things are being paid for by steemit. We can't expect them to make every fork and pay for them. This new system would allow us to lower our dependence on any one organization.

This is a backup plan for steem, if steemit goes bankrupt we need a way to fund development not saying they will but we need to have a plan for any eventuality. This will also allow us to come up with better features for these content creators. Development doesn't fund itself, we as a community should take the hit to guarantee the longevity of the chain.

We as a community can voluntarily decide to vote for and fund proposals as we see fit. SPS being funded as a tax on the ~10% of rewards shared by content creators whose median payout is .01 SBD is undeniably regressive.

I cannot imagine a set of proposals better designed to reduce Steem's dismal retention rate of ~7.5% YOY further. Every aspect of EIP and the SPS funding proposal is going to increase the flow of the economic activity on Steem into the wallets of the most substantial stakeholders before it can raise the price of Steem, and decrease the distribution of Steem to that demographic creating all the value of Steem by creating content.

If you want to cause the price of Steem to plummet, market cap to decline further, and to reduce the number of people creating content, I can't think of better ways to do that.

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Content producers need to know that the tax is on them. The SPS is funded by a tax on content producers. This might be fine because the content being produced isn't high quality anymore but then it also risks reducing active users on the site to even lower numbers. Retention is important. Curation is passive rather than active and while I can agree with 50/50, I don't see why SPS should be necessary.

How about create a profit and use that to fund pet projects via SPS? I know SMTs need to be funded, and communities, but I predict this along with the reward curve change could actually reduce the motivation of content producers.

If the price of Steem actually were going in the other direction perhaps I could be more optimistic but these changes don't reflect the downward price movement (EIP). As a result, I don't think it's enough by itself. I think something more needs to be done although I'm not exactly sure what.

Anyone have suggestions?

We would argue that the existing system taxes good content creators, and the proposed system taxes bad content creators because it creates better incentives for quality content curation. But this is all semantics. Calling any of these things taxes is overdramatic hyperbole. Taxes are compulsory fees backed by violence. Steem is an open, decentralized, and voluntary ecosystem that was intended to unearth high quality content. As you agree, it is failing in that regard. The economics behind the proposed changes are sound with respect to better aligning incentives toward curating high quality content. If quality content creators wind up seeing diminished returns, then they should go to a platform that provides them with better returns. But we believe that they will find that these changes increase the odds that they receive rewards, because they are more likely to be found and upvoted while at the same time, thanks to free downvotes, poor content will be more likely to receive downvotes.

Yes, technically it is not a government enforced tax, but the fee is being taken from our rewards and very well might have the same effect. As we know, taxes tend to destroy things and if you "tax" the creators you run a big risk of disincentivzing creation.

I am on this platform all the time, and I don't remember seeing any substantive, high profile forum or discussions on this. I never see any scheduled discussions on Reddit - which is where I personally think these should be - and nor are they regular or centralized. Everything is all over the place.

Also, when you combine it with all the other ideas like the EIC and reduction in Creator rewards, it's just too much change at once @andrarchy!

I totally understand why you would feel that this is too much change at once, and I appreciate you sharing those helpful suggestions. Maybe we should leverage reddit more. That being said, ultimately that's a call for the witnesses. They're the ones who wanted us to code up these changes and they were elected by you. It's their thought processes and discussions that you want insights into. If you don't like how they operate, vote them out.

Hardforks are our only opportunities to make improvements to the protocol and they are extremely disruptive, especially to exchanges. If the Witnesses hardfork too frequently, then we will get delisted from exchanges. I understand why people would prefer that we make smaller more frequent changes to the blockchain, but blockchains just weren't made for that. I don't know of any blockchain that hardforks as frequently as Steem, or has some kind of technology that enables more frequent, less disruptive upgrades. We do have some plans in the pipeline for making hardforks less disruptive to exchanges, which should enable us to spread out changes more, but until then we have to deal with the existing realities. We agreed with your Witnesses that these were important changes, and that we wouldn't get another opportunity to integrate these changes into Steem for a long time, unless we delayed the SMT hardfork.

These are really hard decisions because we are trying to solve really hard problems. We're doing the best we can, and when we look back at the decisions we made, well those were the decisions that lead to you being here, still commenting on this post and still using this blockchain we love. Ultimately, that's what matters. Users come and go, and no one notices everything that is working well. Steem is still far more advanced in many ways than any other blockchain. Resource Credits were an awesome innovation and the free accounts they enable stakeholders to create is still a feature that I believe is unique to Steem.

Part of that is probably our fault because all we're ever talking about are the things we think are broken and need to be fixed. But this blockchain is our legacy and what matters to us is that we can look at ourselves in the mirror and know that we made the right decisions, even if they're really hard, as opposed to taking the easy way out.

Good grief.

We need town halls. FORMAL SCIENTIFIC polls. We need a process that is the same every time and is public facing - and in my opinion not on Steem - and is centralized and is scheduled. We need outside voices and economists to lend their expertise. The creators need more of a voice.

I know that forking is hard on the exchanges, but we could have done the SPS and had a process where a scientific poll was created that asked something like whether or not we as creators would be willing to give up X% of our income for SPS. If not why? Then you would need to show us why the number was the one you chose. Then, at the very least, we're included. I'm sorry, but the Witnesses are not qualified to speak for all of us . Staking isn't a good enough metric and neither is being a developer. We have similar but also different interests.

Then we could move onto the more controversial aspects of this fork. All of it at once is asking too much of your creators.

I agree that discussion of these kinds of matters can be improved dramatically, and many other points you make.

>"... in my opinion not on Steem"

but not that one. Steem is a blockchain and provides excellent archival qualities unavailable on other media. We just need better mechanisms to hold discussions, and that is a failure of our front ends, not our blockchain.

>"...we could have done the SPS and had a process where a scientific poll was created that asked something like whether or not we as creators would be willing to give up X% of our income for SPS."

This actually was undertaken on Steem, and a poll taken that disavowed any non-voluntary contributions. This was done on a post by @blocktrades some months ago, and I participated vigorously. Since there is no sticky mechanism, and but little use of the memo function to alert folks individual users think to, you apparently missed the post.

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>"but not that one. Steem is a blockchain and provides excellent archival qualities unavailable on other media. We just need better mechanisms to hold discussions, and that is a failure of our front ends, not our blockchain."

Why not? I don't see any reasonable argument to not leverage a platform with magnitudes more users to have our debates. I know Steem is a blockchain and I understand it's archival qualities. Those aren't things I'm concerned about when it comes to this process. They're quite irrelevant. Steem and the community suffer from being insular. We sit on this platform when we should be having these discussions in a more public forum, in a place that is removed from the mechanics and politics of Steem. I suggest Reddit because I believe being open about the process would allow voices from say /r/cryptocurrency to join in on the debate. The Reddit community is MASSIVE and the Steem community is miniscule. We'd find more voices there of the regular kind of user we need to attract and convince that Steem, and the process by which it operates, is worth being a part of and transparent. Us debating amongst ourselves doesn't seem to have had the desired effect of creating a transparent process with heterodox voices or a system that works. So I think we need to go elsewhere.

> "This actually was undertaken on Steem, and a poll taken that disavowed any non-voluntary contributions. This was done on a post by @blocktrades some months ago, and I participated vigorously. Since there is no sticky mechanism, and but little use of the memo function to alert folks individual users think to, you apparently missed the post."

That is my whole point. I follow Blocktrades. I also follow Tim Cliff, Agroged and some of the other top witnesses. I never saw said poll and I'm on here allllllll the time. I'm assuming you mean this thread? https://steempeak.com/blocktrades/@blocktrades/stake-weighted-poll-for-two-versions-of-steem-proposal-system

That is not a scientific poll or study. When I was developing my social network - full disclosure: we couldn't get enough seed funding to get it off the ground - we went through a rigorous process to launch a nationwide, scientific poll to determine our market and what our market wanted. It was designed to eliminate bias or leading questions and make respondents anonymous. The company that helped us conduct the poll then broke down everything in clear terms.

What I see in the post above is an indefensible process for deciding something like what we're seeing implemented now. This just reinforces what I'm talking about. This whole discussion is on several different accounts and "polling", if one could even call it that, is relegated to comments sections. It's pathetic. We need to have a public forum, that is centralized, that is scheduled that reinforces or rejects proposals based on evidence gathered by not only the forum but through follow up, scientifically conducted polls with all the data presented to the userbase, who also happen to be stakeholders.

I just cannot agree to this process as it stands.

I agree with you completely that these discussions are broken, but have to point out that Reddit has no financial interest in Steem, and while it may be a great marketing mechanism to discuss things there, the absence of stake from disputants would not forward the interests of stakeholders. Indeed, Reddit competes with Steem, and I am confident that subversive efforts would pollute the discussion. Basically, it is discussions between Steemers that are capable of making decisions for Steem, and Reddit neither has stake nor interest in growing Steem.

>"Us debating amongst ourselves doesn't seem to have had the desired effect of creating a transparent process with heterodox voices or a system that works."

Why is that the case? People are capable of debating and arriving at sound conclusions that enable successful organization as a rule. There is a reason that on Steem these discussions do not do so. It isn't that Steemers are less competent than ordinary people. IMHO, it is because those with substantial stake are actively sabotaging any proposal that might reduce their ROI from profiteering. Disingenuous rhetoric and other means are employed by profiteers to prevent profiteering from being restricted so that the value they are extracting isn't restricted. Any value that is allowed to raise the price of Steem reflects their failure to extract it into their wallets. They use every trick in the book to prevent rational discussions and consensus from ending their profiteering.

As you point out from your personal experience, extremely rigorously scientific polls aren't particulary critical to success, and informal polling is often nominal. Despite the results of the poll there, whether rigorous or not, the results were ignored, and the profiteers used their stake to ensure that SPS funding wasn't voluntary. This is the problem Steem has, and that won't be solved with scientific rigor. The substantial stakeholders on Steem are all profiteers. This is because profiteering is in the code, allowing stake to extract rewards into the wallets of the stakeholders prevents capital gains, because it extracts the value of economic activity into the wallets of stakeholders before it increases the price of the investment vehicle.

For investors who depend on capital gains for their ROI, development is critical to increasing the value of the investment vehicle, and this is what differentiates investment from speculation. Profiteers extract the value of the business activity, and in manufacturing businesses for example, sell the industrial equipment to generate ROI, and this utterly destroys the value of the investment vehicle as well as the business. They don't care, because they've taken their profit and can just move on to the next business opportunity.

The industrial equipment of Steem is content creators, and they can't be sold. This creates a durable system where the production is extracted by stake manipulation of the rewards mechanism, and this has persisted for a longer time than simply selling the content creators would have enabled. However the price pressure on the token and disruption of the network have still dramatically harmed the business of Steem, and amongst the disruptive affects is the inability to successfully discuss the business, because any changes would diminish the ROI of the profiteers.

It is trivially easy to improve means of discussion and polling, and it is undertaken all the time. The active prevention of such discussion is why it isn't possible on Steem. I don't think this will matter for long, as EIP is going to halve the rewards paid out to creators (or worse), and the business of Steem is very likely to end, with profiteers moving on as they always do.

The problem is centralization, not decentralization, because stake is concentrated in 35 accounts that act disingenuously to maximize their ability to extract value from Steem. They do this via every means available to them, including rhetoric devoid of substance, and prevention of rational discussions. That's why my comments and posts are all flagged by one of the most substantial stakeholders on the platform, who participated in the original ninjamine and is amongst the most extractive profiteers.

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I have essentially pointed this out to Tim Cliff as well. They get an objective benefit of higher profits AND development funds extracted without voluntarism while promising a hypothetical benefit into the future without demonstrating how in actuality this is supposed to take place.

It’s basically The Hamburgler.

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Also, this iflagtrash bot is super annoying.

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It's easy to be annoyed by repetition, particularly when all it repeats is extortion threats. Le sigh.

Nonetheless, almost every comment and post I make is better proved by the flags and censorship than anything I say. I've come to appreciate his affirming with every flag and comment that I am factually correct. I'm not here for rewards, but engagement and criticism. So, I oppose censorship, and every time I discuss that, Bernie backs me up by censoring me =D

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But the witnesses weren't voted in by "us", they were voted in by a very small group of the largest stake holders representing less than .01% of the entire user base.

It's not a fee taken from your rewards either, because the rewards are not yours until you are paid them, and this discussion is all about future rewards which aren't yours yet.

Technically all of the rewards of every kind come from inflating/diluting investor stake. With this fork, that money coming from investors will be spent a bit differently going forward is all. A lot of it will still go to content rewards. As @andrarchy says, ideally more of that will hopefully go to good content rewards. Some of what is currently coming out of the pool to fund projects will ideally shift over to SPS, leaving more of the remainder for content.

Overall it is very difficult to say what the net effect on any particular reward earner will be, but the goal here is not in fact to increase or decrease rewards going to any particular person or group of people, it is to make Steem work better to stop or reverse the slide into obscurity and ultimately failure. Yes I'm sure there will be some net winners and losers but at this point I'm not even sure who they are.

> It's not a fee taken from your rewards either, because the rewards are not yours until you are paid them, and this discussion is all about future rewards which aren't yours yet.

Semantics. I'm talking about the principle of the matter. If I'm promised a certain percentage of the rewards and rewards WILL be forthcoming, that percentage is what I expect. It is mine even if it isn't in my hands yet.

> With this fork, that money coming from investors will be spent a bit differently going forward is all. A lot of it will still go to content rewards.

Semantics.

> As @andrarchy says, ideally more of that will hopefully go to good content rewards. Some of what is currently coming out of the pool to fund projects will ideally shift over to SPS, leaving more of the remainder for content.

I don't care what he says and I disagree with funding the SPS via non-voluntary means. As far as the EIC, they're just promises of hypothetical gains based on how they think humans behave, in contrast to the objective gains large stakeholders and witnesses get. One is deterministic, one is not.

> Overall it is very difficult to say what the net effect on any particular reward earner will be, but the goal here is not in fact to increase or decrease rewards going to any particular person or group of people, it is to make Steem work better to stop or reverse the slide into obscurity and ultimately failure. Yes I'm sure there will be some net winners and losers but at this point I'm not even sure who they are.

Why does everyone keep repeating what the goal is to me as though it's an argument? The goal is laudable, it's the means I disagree with.

> If I'm promised a certain percentage of the rewards and rewards WILL be forthcoming, that percentage is what I expect

Then you did not understand the system properly because DPoS has defined governance which explicitly allows for voted hard forks which change the rules. Some rules have a higher to much higher social barrier to being changed such as forks which would take your coins away, or forks which increase inflation (effectively taking them away via a back door). But changes to the allocation of and reductions to the amount of rewards have both happened before. You had no reason to expect or demand that something which already happened before can't happen again (and many things which haven't happened may also happen in the future).

> I don't care what he says and I disagree with funding the SPS via non-voluntary means

Non-voluntary would be taking coins out of your balance and as I said above, this has a much higher social barrier to ever happening. Future rewards are not that.

> it's the means I disagree with

It is ultimately a judgment call. You get a vote (via choosing witnesses who share your judgment or conclusions). Please use it.

I have voted, just not for any of the current Top 20, and I wouldn't ever based on this circus some people call a process.

Good, that is the system working as intended.

I'm not so sure if that's a good thing considering my - and many other's - level of discontent.

I'm not saying I'm happy about discontent, but frankly a degree of discontent is inevitable when things generally aren't going all that well for the platform as a whole. In an ideal world, everything about Steem would have been done perfectly from the start and it be well on its way to taking over the world by now. We don't live in that world. Beyond that, it becomes a series of tradeoffs. If you act decisively, then people who want a more conservative and methodical approach will be pissed off, and vice versa. But as I said, you get to express your views through voting and have some influence along with others who are like minded to potentially make a change. I still don't think that will please everyone, but it's how things are supposed to work.

I didn't say you were happy about the discontent, but it does look like you're throwing your hands up and levelling platitudes at genuine critiques of the system and proposed solutions. I have voted and I find those in control unworthy of their position and I think the proposed solutions and the methods by which they were conceived to be half-baked and shoddy.

I'm not really sure what you expect. Do you really think that people who have put various forms of effort into Steem for 3+ years, people with million of dollars (in some cases perhaps tens of millions), and a community of probably tens of thousands of regular users and a larger number of occasional users are suddenly going to change their whole approach because @distantsignal has shown up and has 'better' ideas how it should all be done?

Your ideas and input are absolutely valid as well as your votes, and I'm sure they will be considered in the mix along with many, many other ideas and views on the best approaches to use.

I expect better.

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>"... it creates better incentives for quality content curation."

I disagree. It only creates, both before and after HF21, incentive to extract rewards made possible by content creators. Nothing I've seen creates any reason to consider the quality of content. Financial manipulation of the rewards mechanism enabling greater ROI for voting on particular content does not provide any financial incentive for valuing the quality of the content. It only creates mechanisms that increase or decrease ROI based on metrics like vote timing, size of VP cast, and etc...

>"tax[ taks ]
noun
a sum of money demanded by a government for its support or for specific facilities or services, levied upon incomes, property, sales, etc.
a burdensome charge, obligation, duty, or demand."

Your definition of taxes is not supported by credible sources I am aware of, and I checked several just now. The absence of physical force does not make a mandatory payment something other than a tax. Fraud violates the NAP and does not involve violence either.

The payments to the witnesses, and the funding for SPS proposed, are taxes. That's not hyperbole, nor dramatic. They're mandatory payments required by the platform, and are taxes. Claiming otherwise is semantics, and disingenuous. I expect better of you, whom I have come to respect as an honest and forthright writer.

Please don't abandon those principles in the fervor of debate.

>"If quality content creators wind up seeing diminished returns, then they should go to a platform that provides them with better returns.

This statement amounts to an ultimatum, and an invitation for disaffected users to worsen Steem's already poor retention rate instead of seeking to comment reasonably in the hope of improving matters. I can appreciate your passion on this issue. It is something that highly recommends you for your position. It is only commendable in the event that it inspires you to do a great job, and showing users that disagree with you the door does not meet the standards I believe you hold yourself to, nor seems desirable to your employer.

You and I don't always agree, and that is highly acceptable, because it is where we disagree that we can learn each from the other. Telling someone to leave is similar to censoring them, and rather than showing your arguments are more reasonable, reveal you would prefer not to discuss, and implies logical weakness.

I am confident you don't want Steem to be an echo chamber of yes men, unable to learn from the criticism of their peers.

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What is the formula for the proposed reward curve?

I think that it is this:

result = ( ( rshares + s ) * ( rshares + s ) - s * s ) / ( rshares + 4 * s )

where s is 2,000,000,000,000 (i.e. 2e12).

Yup, that's right

Thank you!

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I have launched a survey to know which or the witnesses are in favor and against the HF21... would be very useful for everybody to know it.
https://steemit.com/palnet/@toofasteddie/questionforthetop20witnessesabouthf21-y4bpztx3in

Very pertinent and should be a stickied post so they all respond. These are the important things that the whole of us need to pay attention to and voice our opinion.

I agree...

Posted using Partiko iOS

Will rewards drop to 0 again immediately after the hard fork? If so, how long is it expected to take to get back to equilibrium? Any other sorts of quirks expected during the transition period?

I hope the top witnesses remember the lessons about code audits, testing, and contingency plans from HF20. We are counting on them to maintain stability for this blockchain.

This will be a good time for the rest of us to compare our witness votes against results.

That should not happen, but I will triple check that and reply back here if I'm wrong.

> Steemit paid $50k USD to @blocktrades for the development of the SteemDAO. Once approved, and after enough time has transpired so as to demonstrate the security and stability of the system (about 1-2 weeks of operation), Steemit will provide initial, one-time funding, by converting 200k STEEM to SBD which will allow the market to test this new feature.

And if the security and stability fail what will happen then? Will the SBD be reconverted to Steem, or just thrown away?

> At the request of the Witnesses, we have included code in this release that would add a long term funding mechanism for the SteemDAO/SPS. If this hardfork is accepted by the Witnesses, 10% of overall inflation (pulled from the rewards pool) would be used to fund proposals made through the SteemDAO/SPS.

And if the Security and stability do not pan out will this be immediately HardForked out or will the funds be diverted to something else?

> This was why @blocktrades proposed adding the SPS/SteemDAO to Steem and why Steemit agreed to fund that development.

Steemit agreed, as has been pointed out over and over and over again when ever Steem and Steemit are bought up it is that they are different and not the same entity. Did Busy.org, partiko, eSteem, and the others agree to fund blocktrades? The witnesses protect the Blockchain Steem,that means all users of the blockchain, and all organizations on the blockchain come under their umbrella of protection. That includes busy.org, partiko, eSteem, and other forms and methods of accessing steem blockchain, not just steemit.

This is a lot in one post, so since it is an explanation post can you elaborate on what will happen to SPS if blocktrades is unable to provide the needed security and stability?

Probably there is some misunderstanding about what they were refering to by security/stability here. It's not about any service that we provide. I think they are just referring to the possibility that there is some bug in the SPS code. It's been tested by us (and reviewed by Steemit Inc as well) and I have no expectation that there will be any security bug of significance. But if such a bug was found, it would just be a matter of fixing it. I think all they mean is that they don't want to have it handle too much funds until it's proven safe by usage in the real world.

Yes, that is exactly right. Thanks @blocktrades for clarifying that

It will be rolled back, anytime anything doesn't work it can be rolled back, forked out or a fix will be made as soon as the issue is discovered.

And when has any HF that produced horrible unexpected consequences been rolled back? Not in the two years I've been here, IIRC. Without intentional preparation to do exactly that if things turn out poorly, I don't expect such a rollback to occur.

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Steemit and other substantial stakeholders mined Steem prior to Steemit being public. They remain the holders of the vast majority of Steem today. Busy, Partiko, eSteem, and other front ends did not participate in the ninjamine, and therefore do not have that 'free' stake to invest, as does Steemit.

It has been determined that you are trash, therefore, you have received a negative vote.PLEASE NOTE: If you engage with the trash above you also risk receiving a negative vote on your comment.

Personally, I just can't believe that none of the ten percent of the funding for the SPS is coming from the witness portion of inflation, which remains unchanged.

Even a symbolic 1 or 2 % would have gone a long way to showing that we are all in this together.

Instead, it all comes directly from content creators. When will it be understood that without content creators this platform will wither and die? Why should content creators alone bear the burden?

Note, I think the SPS is a good thing. My issue is the funding. Just in case anyone goes all 'straw man.'

Yes. Also, why 10%? Where did that number come from? Not just just 5%? Why not 15%? I just don't understand. Also, I agree, Witnesses should be giving up some of their funds. I think 5%, just so that we're both losing half. ;)

I would definitely like to see something coming from them. I find the fact that it all comes from the creators disrespectful of those who put the work in day in and day out.

some witnesses work harder than all the content creators combined lol steem doenst have godo content anyway it mostly sucks, mostly, we have great people but they are lost in a sea of garbage which si NORMAL its NOT ABNORMAl for a social mediasite to be FULL of trash they ALl are LOL :D But we have to actually hit a saturation point to get to the point wher ewe can actually get GOOD content rise to top liek reddit and 240 million users

just give @steemit inc tiem toi realize they MUSt sacrifice or INVEST millions of steem on NEW account creation , THEN we can onbaord millions of reddit users and BOOm we win

At the current market price, it would be just under one million a year for funding. If the price raises it even more funds to get things developed with. Yes, content creators and commenters will take a hit. But because of this, our dependence on the development of the chain goes down. So say steemit goes bankrupt we can still find developers to put the changes in that we need.

This is also a very good backup plan for us, without faster forks and development steem was going to die anyway.

Yes, this is true.

My point is not against the creation of the SPS. My point is the direction of the funding being solely from content creators.

The witnesses are stakeholders too, it is only fair that all stakeholders contribute. To leave all contributions coming from just one group is far from ideal.

I will reiterate. I am for the SPS. I am not for all of the funding coming solely from content creators. When you add the other changes into the mix it exacerbates the pain that will be felt from them.

Let us not forget that highly competitive days are coming. To discourage, even slightly those that could potentially draw audience to the platform is counter intuitive.

You got to remember these witnesses are also content creators. So yes they won't be taxed for securing the chain. But they will be taxed for using the stake they own. Which is used to upvote content or sale votes.

Much of the funding will come from things like vote bots and self voting whales will feel this tax, more than most of the content creators or voters. The whales who own a large amount of the stake will feel this tax more than lower users since 10% of their fee's will out shadow the normal users. So whales also being witnesses are voting yes to a tax that doesn't benefit them as much.

There is more to this, that people are overlooking.

Not all of them are content creators. In fact, some of them are conspicuous by their absence on the chain. There is far more to being invested in Steem than running a cloud instance of a witness on Privex.

The many I know of actively curate content or make posts. Yes, some don't post as much but that's because they're developing. Though some are just draining the system and i can fully agree on that.

Most of the funding is going to come from bots and whales. Since they make up a large number of funds paid out. They're taking a hit in some way which many have multiple accounts. So they will be paying their fair share in some way. And at current market cap they don't really make a lot when the price is low.

This really should be seen as an investment in the system.

The SPS is an investment into the system.

Agreed. On that, I have never disagreed.

Funding - I categorically disagree that the funding should come entirely out of the content creator portion of inflation.

Last I checked the median payout was .01 SBD. SPS will lower that reward for producing content. It's retarded to further decrease incentive to become and stay a Steem user. Retention was already at ~7.5% YOY last I checked. Reducing potential rewards will not improve retention, and will shrink the market for Steem. You might note that reducing the market depresses the price.

This tax will create capital losses, not capital gains, making an existential problem worse.

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It has been determined that you are trash, therefore, you have received a negative vote.PLEASE NOTE: If you engage with the trash above you also risk receiving a negative vote on your comment.

A la fina el SPS es dinero par los testigos ellos son los creadores de todas las iniciativas d acuulación de steem .
Por eso son testigos. Crean la trampita, acumulan y después compran el voto para estar en la mesa...

Confiemos más Blocktrades que le da igual Stem queEOS. Estas Grades ideas para estabilizar la moneda Steem con un fondo especial creo que es más un pago de soporte finaciero. Las grandes ideas que tiene de ellos deben ser poque les estan pagando como asesores...... era muy bonito el cuento aquel que steem liberaria el mercado a la final hay que someterse a la mano invisible de las Crytos.

No, es no correcto

It isn't true it comes solely from content creators.

Apart from the fact that literally all rewards come from investors who are paying them (via inflation), not from people who receive them, it comes from the reward pool which pays both authors and curators (stakeholders). The latter will absorb either a 25% share or a 50% share of the SPS budget depending on whether you based it on the existing split or the post-HF21 split.

But, again, all rewards are paid by investors. Shifting around who receives them does not change that.

I think my point is quite clear. I am aware that it comes from both creators and curators.

To mince words semantically like this is merely disingenuous.

Edit, I don't mean that to sound as abrupt as it reads. I am trying to get my kids out to party :0)

Well forgive me but I do think think that it not shifting solely from creators/authors but also from curators is more than a semantic point.

Nevertheless turnabout being fair play, I do think the more important point in my reply is not about curators vs authors, but that in fact all rewards are coming from investors. Before the fork, all rewards come from investors, after the fork all rewards will still come from investors.

For investors to start spending some of that inflation budget via a proposal pool (where by the way, anyone is free to make proposals stating what they intend to do for Steem and how much they request to be paid to do it, even including for that matter, content creators) rather than continuing to spend all of it via the content pool is not changing where it comes from, it changes where (some of) it is going.

I doubt very much that there are too many investors happy with overall performance of Steem over the past few years, and the reward pool is the headline feature of Steem representing by far the largest portion of the inflation budget. If we aren't happy with how things are working, and many are understandably not, questioning whether it is doing its job, and then looking to spend some of that budget on other ways of adding value to Steem should hardly be viewed as radical.

When witness rewards were cut 80% a couple of years ago in order to focus the witness role on core blockchain maintenance and away from general project funding (with the 10% of inflation budget assigned in order to sufficiently fund that essential core blockchain role), that was done with the explanation that:
1. Unlike other systems, Steem has a way of allocating general funding, the reward pool (and this has been and is being done to some extent).
2. In order to allocate funding for specific projects or jobs in a more structured manner than the relative chaos of individual posts and votes, adding a worker system could, and probably should, be considered later.

Well it has taken over two years to get here, but now were are finally at the point of doing #2.

IMO it is a completely reasonable, and even pretty modest, adjustment to make at this point. After some further experience, we can reassess.

> it is only fair that all stakeholders contribute.

All stakeholders will be contributing, because the funding will come from inflating stakeholders existing holdings, just as funding for everything else comes from that.

The question of allocating that inflation budget is not or should not be one of different groups each trying to grab the most they can for themselves at the expense of the others, it is or should be one of looking at how that budget can best be spent to give Steem the best chance of success.

I sincerely believe that the witness reward should not be reallocated here, not because I am a witness and am wanting the higher (or at least not lower) pay, but because witness pay already went through a process which cut it (by 80%) to the lowest possible level reasonably consistent with chain safety and security (and going forward even that assertion of safety is open to question in my view).

I also sincerely believe that the reallocation of a portion the payouts from the main content pool to a proposal pool is in the best interests of Steem. It also doesn't directly translate into a cut for content because some 'project' funding can and should move to the proposal pool, freeing up more of the main pool for content and general social uses. I for one will be looking to use some of my new downvotes against posts/comments which try to extract project-like funding from the main pool when they can and should submit their request to the proposal pool instead.

My thoughts exactly.

"Even a symbolic 1 or 2 % would have gone a long way to showing that we are all in this together."

Great point!

Totally, just even 1!!

@meesterboom I’m one of the few to offer to sacrifice from the witness funding to show solidarity, another very few agreed with me, I’m still pushing that agenda as you can see on my forum post https://neosteem.com/topics/thecryptodrive/tokenbb-topic-sps-inflation-funding-split-prop-1560906423422 sadly you unvoted my witness (even though im fighting for creators like you) because I got into some heated discussion with a friend of yours and said one thing to offend him whereas in the rest he was way more abusive to me.

I am glad you are still pushing that agenda, it is a credit to you.

The issue of unvoting you as a witness is a separate issue to this one.

It’s to do with the other guy who swore and slandered me way worse than the misinformed observation I voiced :)

I hold my witnesses to a high standard though.

:0D

“Let he who is without sin cast the first stone” - you never been in an argument before? You don’t think other witnesses havent? If your standards are so high why do u vote NGC, he intimidates and abuses countless ppl on the platform including women, threatened to rape one of my team members even a while back.

> Let he who is without sin cast the first stone

Lol. I don't claim to be without sin. I have engaged in far worse arguments and swearing on here.

But it's my vote. And I can do with it as I please.

Ps. I don't condone his every action but I quite like NGC.

Wow ok your standards apply different to different people and apparently by my saying to someone that if they stopped voting their commenters they may not stick around is worse than someone who threatens to rape a woman on this platform. I don’t understand your standards, I thought u were quite cool for a long time.

Stop dragging other things into it.

This comment thread is about the funding of the SPS not about your butthurt at me unvoting you as a witness because I disagreed with your behaviour to one of my friends here.

My vote. My choice. What don't you get about that?

I’m not going to let it go as long as you hide behind your standards, you just proved double standards, at least man up and reckon u unvoted me to support ur friend and lets move on.

I'm not hiding behind anything.

Just in case my last reply wasn't clear enough.

> unvoting you as a witness because I disagreed with your behaviour to one of my friends here.

You acted towards one of my friends on the platform in a way that I did not like.

Simple.

I removed my vote from your witness.

My vote. My choice.

The only person making an issue is this is you.

And seriously, telling me to man up? Get a grip.

That’s fine I engaged, then misinterpreted his blog comments section and made an off the cuff incorrect assessment not fully knowing the loyalty of his commenters, every other message to him was diplomatic while i endured a barrage of abuse and even a post was made to slander me. You can understand why im pissed, and Im generally one of the nicest guys on here. i’m diplomatic to everyone and sure I can slip up.

Unvoting me was an extreme reaction and doesn’t give witnesses confidence in speaking out for fear that they may slip up during their engagement and lose votes, might be why alot just discuss stuff in private chats.

Anyway I have had my say, it is your vote, i feel it was an extreme reaction but it is your vote, so yes i concede you can cast it how u like. Thank you for the discussion.

I just read the above exchange and

You are my Witness!

That means alot thank you so much.

> and even a post was made to slander me.

If that was true, you'd be able to place a link here, now.

> Title: One Angry Guy and An Asshole

https://steemit.com/art/@nonameslefttouse/i-only-made-this-because-i-m-angry

No, the difference between slander and assessment of what someone acts like, two different things. I also sense you don't get humor where you're from.

Assessment. Just because.

Perfect.

As you can all see, there are NO edits on that post.

There is no mention of @thecryptodrive ANYWHERE within that post. That post does not even even talk about the conversation I had with @thecryptodrive.

The post was tagged ART. In the post I was talking about society, in general.

UNDER the post I wrote:

> So anyway. A top 20 witness told me today you'd all stop speaking to me if I stopped upvoting your comments.
>
> I've known some of you folks for nearly three years. I think more highly of you than that. What he said was incredibly fucking stupid.
>
>I'll be taking a short break. See you soon.

Again, NO EDITS. No mention of @thecryptodrive.

The conversation I had with @thecryptodrive took place here:

https://steemit.com/steemit/@thecryptodrive/ptbx45

@thecryptodrive:

I apologize for using foul language. Calling you a ~~"Fucking asshole"~~ after being disrespected was a poor choice of wording.

I will not call you names today.

I am not impressed with your lies.

Everything is on the blockchain. Timestamped, forever.

I expect you to begin telling the truth, now that I've placed this evidence here, and for all to see.

You, claiming I wrote a post to slander you, is libel.

Can we move past this now, like gentleman? I will not back down.

I totally agree with you the post did not have my name, however curious people could easily look into your comment and reply feeds and see who you were referring to.

> A top 20 witness told me today

Helps narrow down further to date and witness range.

I'm sure you wouldn't be happy if I wrote a post and said "I had an encounter with this rude person today, the experience of this and being unvoted in solidarity by a friend of his, made me almost want to change my stance to be now in favour of the 50/50 author rewards and stop fighting for the authors. I won't mention his name though but this is how I feel."

But yes please let's move on like gentlemen. I think we can both do better things for Steem than argue with each other.

And those same curious people can see how you're not telling the truth, which isn't going to help you, and that is no fault of mine.

> I'm sure you wouldn't be happy if I wrote a post and said "I had an encounter with this rude person today, the experience of this and being unvoted in solidarity by a friend of his, made me almost want to change my stance to be now in favour of the 50/50 author rewards and stop fighting for the authors. I won't mention his name though but this is how I feel."

Go ahead and write that post so people can see.

> however curious people could easily look into your comment and reply feeds and see who you were referring to.

What would they see had you not insulted them in the first place?

Lesson learned?

Also, I don't want to argue either, which is why I left that conversation, politely, even after you kept going and throwing what I deemed to be insults my way. It's all the blockchain. I don't need to protect my image, I stood up for myself.

You're talking about the conversation we had. People can just as easily become curious, dig through your comments, and see what you're talking about.

> I'm sure you wouldn't be happy if I wrote a post and said "I had an encounter with this rude person today, the experience of this and being unvoted in solidarity by a friend of his, made me almost want to change my stance to be now in favour of the 50/50 author rewards and stop fighting for the authors. I won't mention his name though but this is how I feel."

But you're basically doing that, by playing the victim card and pouting about lost votes. A vote you lost after you had insulted that member. I had nothing to do with that, and you're blaming ME! He acted on his own!

You need to take some responsibility for your actions here or it's just going to go around and around and keep biting you in the butt. That's my advice to you and I'm speaking to you with respect.

I don't know why you picked me, out of all the people here, to step on. It says you're a good guy on your profile but you've not been a good guy to me. I apologized for my mistake. I'm also from Canada though, and that's just how some of us talk when we've been disrespected. We're polite, until provoked.

I don't want to argue but please stop throwing me under the bus when everyone can see the conversation, whether your words lead them to it, or mine. Nothing about it changes. To me, it wasn't even that big of a deal until I saw the GARBAGE you were saying about me here today.

P.S. Look at who voted for this post of yours. Nice and high up on the list it says @NoNamesLeftToUse. I hope you realize I didn't have any issues with you, personally, and supported some of your efforts, long before this little problem we're having took place. I was angry at first. I got over it. The more I think about this though, and how you're acting. It's quite upsetting.

@nonameslefttouse I have some information that will help you. And help others see this cryptodrive is selfish fuck and no different than the others on top. He IS Steem. And they do not give a shit about the little guy. Be back in 60 min. with the full report. If you enjoy these I will make one for all top 20 witnesses. My insider is helping greatly.

It has been determined that you are trash, therefore, you have received a negative vote.PLEASE NOTE: If you engage with the trash above you also risk receiving a negative vote on your comment.

No one needs to justify their reason for voting someone. You may ask but that’s about all you can expect.

> It’s to do with the other guy who swore and slandered me way worse than the misinformed observation I voiced :)

For the record:

https://steemit.com/steem/@nonameslefttouse/pth3gv

Hey back to what you were saying about marketing, I believe most of all the new Worker proposal projects will be MARKETINg based. I believe 1% of the steem inflation put into marketing could increase steem user base and price back to all time highs or at least $2-$4 range :D

There were discussions about this. Some were in favour (most noticebly @thecryptodrive), but the majority was against it; including myself.

I can only speak for myself, but the reasoning was quite logical. The SPS is very similar to the reward-pool. It's just more fine-tuned on achieving results, instead of just having a playground for people to co-operate. So taking the cut from the reward-pool makes sense.

In contrast, witnesses are the backbone of Steem and its ecosystem; which includes Steem Engine & co. Taking from that source would possibly mean pulling the rug from underneath.

Witnesses in the TOP 20 are making roughly 9280 STEEM per month; backup-witnesses are making far less (roughly 1/4 or lower). 9280 STEEM at 0.4 USD is ~3712$. (Brutto; tax has to be subtracted) Infrastructure is roughly 400$-1000$ (or more); depending on factors like full-nodes, hivemind-nodes, etc. But this only includes hardware costs, not the costs associated with the individual(s) behind the witness. Besides the obvious requirements as in securing & monitoring nodes and reviewing code, there are many unspoken requirements from witnesses; taking part in discussions, answering questions, helping new/old members, etc etc.

Now imagine BTC would drop to 3000$ and STEEM were to stay at its current level; this would result in a 12 cent STEEM. 9280 STEEM would suddenly only be worth ~1110$ (Brutto). At that point, maintaining a witness would still be possible, but a far bigger risk-factor, as the costs of running Steem nodes are essentially only rising (MIRA is helping, but TOP 20-30 witnesses do have to run high memory nodes in order to keep replay-duration low).

Especially, as infrastructure costs are really just the fundament. And you want to have experienced witnesses that feel their time is valued, which includes adequate payment.

> "Even a symbolic 1 or 2 % would have gone a long way to showing that we are all in this together."

I'm obviously not arguing with you that a 1% cut wouldn't really matter in the great scheme of things, but then why even bother with doing that, when the logical thing to do is to reduce the reward-pool in favour for the SPS pool (as I explained above).

Just because people would have a better feeling, as in we're all in this together? That's just sugar on top. Because what if I told you, that we're already in this together?

I'm a witness and developer for sure, but I'm also a content creator. Over my 2 years here on Steem, I've produced 283 posts. That's probably not as much as really dedicated content creators, but its still something. So yeah, the reward-pool cut also effects me directly.

Thanks for mentioning me as a proponent to taking from the witness pool. I have been heavily negotiating for witnesses to shed 1% as you know. I do believe strongly in securing the chain but I also feel that 1% is not that much and the public relations between witnesses and the community benefits would be far greater. If we don’t it just creates an us vs them scenario and breeds witness conspiracy theories.

Why not take from witness rewards and make the remaining witness rewards a proposal in the SPS system?

Interesting!

Why not do so with the whole rewards pool?

Why the do so with the wowl rewards pool?

I am a bot. I turn comments into owl related puns.

That was exactly my thought in the original SPS discussion.

Another alternative is that SPS proposals, if approved, can be paid directly out the same reward pool that currently pays posts and comments (making the observation that both a "proposal" and a "comment or post" are fundamentally the very same thing: making a transaction to the blockchain that says: "Please vote to pay me").

I think in both cases this is premature if only because the existing implemented, tested and ready-to-deploy code does not work that way, but also because I'm pretty sure people want more confidence in seeing SPS do something useful before more tightly integrating it into Steem. (Those with experience seeing a nearly-identical system work on Bitshares may be more confident, but not all of us have that experience.)

I know, and I hated it 🙂 ... But the more I look at the what seems like failure of the rewards pool to reward valuable contributions while the inflation pulls the price down, I’m wondering if it’s the road we are heading down.

The only way that would ever work though is if we had a front end that was good enough on it’s own to actually attract people, engage them and make them want to stay or perhaps a separate reward mechanism (Content token?).

As a social media platform we are lacking a way to encourage people to enjoy and engage and so it’s now just all about rewards. As silly as it may sound - emojis, “claps” or other “expressions”, ways that make it easy to find content and other users with same interests, resteems with ability to add comment etc would make it actually fun to interact on the platform... and maybe there wouldn’t be as much focus on an upvote.

I also agree that the SPS has to prove itself before additional funding is considered, as we really have no idea what to expect at this point.

Agree with you about emojis, etc. Also the UI is very clunky, and between that and RC costs, it discourages casual interaction and humor in the sort of way that drives reddit, twitter, etc. It needs a serious re-imagining, like maybe comments are removed from being payout items and are just comments (which would make them much cheaper). As well as emojis, etc. of course.

As for the dynamic split between SPS and the rest of the pool, I'm not sure why you hate it. Stakeholders would vote on the split one way or another, and if stakeholders aren't sold on the existing reward pool mechanism pulling its weight, sooner or later it is going to get drastically reallocated or even zeroed out by hard fork. You can't stop stakeholders from doing that, and the economics of it may become too compelling for it to not happen (if Steem doesn't die first). Giving those same stakeholders a direct vote on the matter doesn't seem all that different to me.

Yes I understand that stakeholders are already essentially deciding where the rewards pool goes, as they should, and if things continue a change will most likely come.

My concern was directing it all to a system when we have no idea what it will look like. A system that will rely on participation, through voting, to ensure the decisions are made. When it’s in the code it’s hands off in a way. If it was directed through the SPS it seems like it would require stake holders to be more actively involved is all... and I question whether they will maybe? Maybe that’s not a logical concern.

Ultimately my distaste for the idea was that I think we need to see how the SPS works, how stakeholders respond etc before taking such a step.

Fair enough, but I believe (could be mistaken) that at the time I even said that it shouldn't be done now but if at all in some future iteration. So I guess we are in violent agreement.

Yes you most likely did state something of the sort, just my initial reaction to the idea was dislike due to the reasons above.

> So I guess we are in violent agreement.

Gosh, don’t you hate when that happens? :)

This idea that comments should be removed from the payout pool entirely is interesting. Right now, because I can reward comments like posts, I want to. I want people to interact with me, and I like when they do, and when I see a comment I like, I want to upvote it.

But if all comments were simply "decline reward" I can imagine two feasible workaround scenarios. One, there would certainly be a bot developed that you give posting permission to, and when you "liked" a comment, it would go to the user's most recent post that hadn't paid out yet and deliver your vote value there, while letting you leave the $ emoji on the comment (or whatever)
Or two, people would just stop thinking of comments as posts. It would take away valuable functionality, I think, but this EIP is already taking away most of the valuable functionality of steem as a crypto-rewards social media site, so why not that, too?

Idea three would be that if you want to reward comments and interaction, you pay them a tip either directly (as Steem has very cheap on-chain transfers, in fact fundamentally they really ought to be cheaper than votes, although I'm not sure this is currently the case) or via a tip bot, which already happens on other social platforms.

Yes, that is a roundabout solution. Ease of use is the number one predictor of a platform's success (citation needed) but steem is at least flexible enough to offer those. Hopefully a bot will come to fill the gap and we'll get some integration with a frontend.
SMTs really should have come before this change. It would be less negativily impactful if we were already using community currencies.

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You should submit those feature requests on https://github.com/steemit/condenser/issues

There is a little handful of devs from the community, including me, who are working on fixing bugs, adding features to Steemit (see my recent posts).

Features that requires more effort could be funded by SPS in the future.

I appreciate your thorough reply and the work that you do as a witness.

I understand your projections of a stagnant price or a lower price for Steem. On the other hand all of this is being done with the hope of increasing the price.

I also believe that witnesses have the best chance of benefiting financially from SPS since many are building as witnesses they can also make proposals and get paid even more with SPS.

In actual fact my bigger concern is the voting curve. I've invested a lot of money in Steempower and I'm very concerned that my vote for commentors on my blog will be negated.

I don't buy votes but I do give my own posts a 100% upvote. Keep in mind that on most of my posts I give away between 5 and 10 Steem in prizes. I feel that my business model will be destroyed. Maybe I'm wrong and time will tell.

For the first time in 3 years I'm powering down in order to be flexible enough to make drastic moves if necessary.

One last thing. Too many changes all at once. The last time it was an awful hardfork, not smooth at all.

I don’t understand one thing, you say that if BTC drops to 3000, Steem drops to 12 cents, but when BTС grows by 2-3 times, from 5000 to 14000, Steem does not grow, it remains at the level of 30-40 cents. It looks like a game with only one goal. Why it happens?

1% would be a 10% reduction, and 2% would be a 20% reduction. Would these be catastrophic? Perhaps not, but when the current level of witness rewards were set (as part of a previous hard fork which already cut them by 80%), that was done with a goal of maintaining a safety margin in case of realistic but pessimistic scenarios on the Steem price and operational costs. 10% or 20% reduction would be a big hit to that safety margin.

Given:
1. Desire to maintain the core blockchain operations at a safe level
2. The poor performance of the content reward pool in numerous ways
3. The observation that SPS and content rewards do the same fundamental thing (both are proposals to be paid by stakeholders for contributing something of value to Steem) and should therefore be considered on the same "budget line" so to speak.
4. The reward pool already funds proposals of various sorts, developers, community projects, marketing, etc. not only "content creators". Post-fork these can shift to SPS which again means that the two pools ought to be viewed as shifting on the same "budget line" (projects using SPS instead also means leaving more for content creators, in rough terms offsetting the shift).

many witnesses and stakeholders, myself included, view the proposed split as the best tradeoff, despite what may seem like "unfairness" when viewed solely from the perspective of this group vs that group. Sometimes perceived "fairness" can and should take a back seat to function and good economics, particularly when you are talking about an arguably failing project which if it continues on its current trajectory is likely going to ultimately result in no one getting anything.

Finally, it may be a hard truth to hear, especially for community members and content creators such as yourself or @meesterboom who absolutely have contributed a lot, but the content reward pool by design is supposed to be an engine which drives Steem's growth, not only with literal "content" but by attracting and retaining a growing community of people who contribute meaningfully to Steem. Sure there are some who do this, but as an overall mechanism, it clearly hasn't worked and on that basis alone is a prime candidate for having a slice of its budget reallocated to better use (or at least different use with the potential for more value add).

Witnesses, by design, are supposed to securely and honestly sign blocks to maintain the integrity of the network, securely and honestly adjust blockchain parameters, and approve hard forks (which in practice includes some consultation with developers on what is included in hard fork proposals). That portion of the system has generally worked, including at low Steem prices, and most if not all of the current witnesses are doing these things well (this hasn't always been the case).

The bottom line is that witnesses are mostly (if not all) doing their job; the content reward pool has not been doing its job. Looking at this from the perspective of what is best for Steem as a whole, the reasons for the proposed adjustment to the budget ought to be pretty clear.

Different adjustments can be made in the future with the benefit of further experience.

Thanks for taking the time to reply. Your arguments are valid and well expressed.

Honestly my biggger concern is the new voting curve which I think will severely damage my ability to reward commentors on my posts. I've spent most of my 3 years here trying to encourage engagement and incentivising real human activity.

Will changing the reward curve destroy other business models? If the problem is bots aren't there other coding solutions? If the problem is self voting are there not coding solutions to limit that activity?

I've read of others delegating their Steem Power, buying stake in Palnet and moving their activities there.

I'm keeping my eyes open, trying to learn and staying ready to make the needed moves.

The curve is an interesting question for sure. I personally believe there needs to be some curve, but not necessarily this exact one. The Steemit devs have studied things carefully and have their own presumably good reasons for proposing this particular curve. I'm pretty open minded on this particular aspect of it and will be looking to engage with both Steemit devs and the community on the matter going forward.

> If the problem is self voting are there not coding solutions to limit that activity?

Not directly, since people can always move stake to different accounts, and generally tiny payouts are a huge burden on people trying to catch milkers/self-voters (who aren't always literally voting for the same account but may be voting for accounts of other friends/collaborators or sock puppets).

I'm sure your own efforts are well-indented and may well contribute a lot of value, but apart from AI (if even then) there is no way for a computer algorithm to tell the difference between your tiny votes and someone working with some friends/sock puppets to milk the pool to death by a thousand cuts, so we need to put some sort of speed bump in there.

Thanks for the raising the issue.

Thanks to you. Seems like a plunge into murky waters. I was wondering if each Dapp couldn't have their own reward algorithms similar to what Palnet.io has done.

That is one way things can work. Individual apps can have their own tokens, algorithms, and eligibility policies. For example they can easily ban anyone they want, which is one way to address some of these problems but is also much harder to do at the core level of a public blockchain.

Well, and that's the big problem. The biggest positives in the communities I'm in is that personal engagement: People reading, responding, and voting on things in comment sections they like. That's the way in which steem most resembles social media. This change is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I'm told there are tremendous abuses of the rewards pool going on. Undoubtedly this is true. But this change has too large of an impact on the best of steem's ecosystem. This change must be struck down. I'm doing everything I can to get the witness votes needed for a different top 20, but it certainly feels like there's a wall of rich people making the decisions for us. I've invested what I can afford into steem. They happen to be richer. That doesn't make it right. They're pulling the rug out from underneath all the target demographic. You want to attract the masses? Make Steem attractive for the masses. Not for the Steem whales. Their incentive to behave well should be that they want the value of steem to go up, because they already have a lot. Changing the system so that they can acquire more steem is not going to make them behave better. They'll just have more power to come out on top while the rest of steem sinks.
Trickle down economics doesn't work. It's been demonstrated time and again that it only leads to greater wealth disparity and an overall lower standard of living. This is that.

Yes yes yes!

Might I suggest we incorporate the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition to our HardFork21 code?

interestingly, in case steem price would go up to lets say 10$, all the top witnesses become multi millionaires with high monthly income that should be the incentive for any witness to be ok with some lower $ value monthly income for the work today with the low steem price. as mentioned by some others, it would been the best if everybody would have contributed to pay for SPS.

Cheers old dog!! As is yours too!

1. I agree with your thoughts But this is not possible because they wanted their vote for successful implementing HF21. If they take their share, they will hurt.
2. All other things of HF21 are good.
3. I don't figure out the outcome of downvote pool. Is it good or bad? Let's see what comes with downvote pool.

And by the same principle why not a thin slice off the Steem Power interest so that all beneficiaries of inflation system - fund the SPS. After all, I think I'm right in saying that 35 accounts hold over half of the Steem Power. I guess that would have been unpopular with the whales.

jajaja lomismo pense, bueno es lamisria del poder y la miseria de los gobernados d nunca onfiar en los gobernantes...es como una maldicón a voces...aunque sea 0,5 hubiera sido motivante,,,

Yes indeed, anything would have been motivating. There would be no issue if they said 0.5 but the fact they vote for everyone elses haircut is poor!

Witness rewards are what controls the security, if you cut witness rewards, you cut funding for a proper server infrastructure. Which means the chain might go down or worse get forked out. Which would be a distaster. I don't think it's worth to reduce chain security to show that "we are in this together"

Yeah. Right.

He is right.

I disagree that a token amount would reduce chain security. I am not talking a huge amount, anything at all would show some solidarity. Just now it smacks of arrogance against those who create content.

The most often referenced number is 1%, and I do not consider that to be a token amount, it is a 10% reduction when the starting total is only 10%. In fact I have long term concerns about the sustainability of witness funding given the declining inflation schedule, so I do think that cutting it even further is dangerous.

But really the main reasons I don't think it should be done are:
1. It confuses two different things: a) core blockchain maintenance, which is an essential function to keep the blockchain working at all, and b) investor funds which are spent (via inflation) to try to promote Steem, grow Steem, and generally make Steem successful, which is the underlying purpose of paying content rewards (it isn't simply out of charity or entitlement).
2. The purpose of the reallocation is not punitive or even any sort of sacrifice. There is no sense in which "sharing the burden" or "fairness" rightly applies here. It is a decision to spend some of the ongoing budget differently and hopefully accomplishing more going forward, including for the benefit of content creators.

I just have to disagree. And not with any of the facts you have eloquently referenced. It is over the sourcing coming entirely from the content part. There are many and perhaps valid points you have outlined above but it just smacks of witnesses looking out for themselves.

It looks arbitrary to me and it also looks as if it was decided amongst a biased group. Of course the witnesses wouldn't vote for any kind of cut to their allocation. Were there many non witnesses in that discussion, relative to the whole I mean?

There are always options. what about the ten percent coming from the rewards pool before it is split between witnesses, content etc?

You speak on behalf of securing the chain and the witnesses themselves. I have very valid fears that anything that further discourages content creators will ultimately see the demise of the platform and not in the long term. The situation is already dire.

And I am genuinely not saying this from a worried I will lose out perspective. We need the SPS. I hope it helps us move forward but I disagree with the sourcing of that ten percent.

> it just smacks of witnesses looking out for themselves.

I can't speak for everyone. Sure it is possible there are some with that view. But, truly, you are as far as I know making this accusation with no evidence at all, and simply on the basis of how it feels to you. Is that fair?

Anyway, it is stakeholders who are in charge, not witnesses. If stakeholders think that this isn't going to improve their bottom line or just isn't the right approach, witnesses who support it can and will be voted out and we go back to the drawing board on something that stakeholders will support (or alternately perhaps do nothing at all and keep things as they are). Witnesses are really just the messengers, not the ultimate deciders. (Some, perhaps most, are of course also major stakeholders, so their views carry additional weight and authority on that basis.)

> There are always options. what about the ten percent coming from the rewards pool before it is split between witnesses, content etc?

This is exactly the same as the 1% (10% cut) from witnesses already discussed.

>I have very valid fears that anything that further discourages content creators will ultimately see the demise of the platform and not in the long term. The situation is already dire.

So you think that instead of shifting 10% from the content pool, if we instead shifted 9% from the content pool and 1% from witnesses, this dire outcome would be averted? We're discussing here, an increase in the resulting content pool from 65% to 66% of total inflation. That is literally a 1.5% increase in each payout, all else (Steem price, etc.) being equal. You think that will save the (Steem) world? Consider me quite skeptical about this.

On top of all the other points I mentioned, the bottom line is that nearly all of the budget is now going to the main content pool. Shifting of any percentage from the content pool has the smallest relative effect, and has a much bigger effect elsewhere. The 1% we are quibbling over is about a 1.5% change in the content pool, and would be a 10% reduction to witness rewards. You do the math on where that makes the most difference and carries the most risk. I have already stated my view.

I understand where you are coming from emotionally and philosophically in terms of "fair" and "sharing the pain" and all that, but ultimately the substance of the argument doesn't hold up.

You say it doesn't hold up but you don't seem to be able to grasp the point of view of the average user of this platform. You can argue ( hopefully not heated) at much as you like with the numbers and how little or how much difference or makes but the perception to the average user is that this is unfair

That is my point that that anything further to discourage content creators is not good. We can talk about safeguarding the security of the chain till we are blue in the face but if there is no content beyond the guff we are seeing there won't be a chain to safeguard.

This portioning as I stated looks to your average user to be unfair. That's my point. The average user has been ignored and maligned to date and this looks to compound that further.

And this

> Anyway, it is stakeholders who are in charge, not witnesses. If stakeholders think that this isn't going to improve their bottom line or just isn't the right approach, witnesses who support it can and will be voted out

The winesses decided this.

Wouldn't the freedom/pumpkin vote negate your average non whale users even if they acted en masse? I would like to see the numbers on that.

I don't think the stakeholders ultimately do decide unless you bring it back to stake and that is wholly different kettle of fish because if the freedom/Pumpkin stake

> The average user has been ignored and maligned to date

By whom? I certainly don't malign the average user and I would like to think I don't ignore either, though certainly it isn't possible to pay individual attention to all of thousands or tens of thousands (or possibly more) average users.

> The winesses decided this.

No, witnesses have provided input to the developers to help decide what is included in the proposed release. Witnesses (and stakeholders) have not yet decided whether it will be approved/activated. If not then it will be back to the drawing board to come up with something else, or perhaps nothing will change.

> Wouldn't the freedom/pumpkin vote negate your average non whale users even if they acted en masse? I would like to see the numbers on that.

In point of fact we don't even know if freedom/pumpkin supports this, because no one to my knowledge has discussed it with anyone known to be that person/account. It may be that freedom/pumpkin changes witness votes to oppose the fork.

BTW, there is no vote negation. Yes larger voters have greater weight, but all votes count. P/F only controls several percent of the total and can easily be overruled by the sum of many other votes, both large and small. Don't buy the idea that any vote is too small to count. If anything that rhetoric is a trick to discourage small stakeholders from participating which only further reduces their influence.

I certainly don't mean you when I say the average user has been ignored and maligned. I was referring to a generality that I have read on many an occasion where authors have been blamed for selling and putting downward pressure on the steem price. None of what I am saying is an attack on you for whom I have a great respect for. Those same writings where authors are generalised often seem to consider them almost a nuisance.

I tend not to believe the whole freedom/pumpkin ownership is a mystery but that's an entirely separate issue.

>No, witnesses have provided input to the developers to help decide what is included in the proposed release.

I am only going by my take on the below text.

> At the request of the Witnesses, we have included code in this release that would add a long term funding mechanism for the SteemDAO/SPS. If this hardfork is accepted by the Witnesses, 10% of overall inflation (pulled from the rewards pool) would be used to fund proposals made through the SteemDAO/SPS.

Is the wording incorrect or ambiguous? Or did Steemit Inc decide off their own bat where the ten percent is coming from? It reads as if the witnesses proposed it. Which is the basis of my original point.

You are of course entitled to disagree and argue against it. But it remains. I do thank you of course for your alternate views on this but in this occasion I am unswayed.

> Is the wording incorrect or ambiguous?

I'd say ambiguous. Somewhat a desire to dodge responsibility perhaps, but that's also somewhat fair because as I stated earlier, the true decision makers are the stakeholders via witnesses as I will describe again below.

> Or did Steemit Inc decide off their own bat where the ten percent is coming from? It reads as if the witnesses proposed it. Which is the basis of my original point.

They asked for input and witnesses gave their views. The way the process works is:

1. Discussion between witnesses and developers (Steemit in this case). This discussion is advisory and can not truly commit to anything because the witness list may change (see #3 below). The discussion also goes in two directions: a) witnesses indicate what they believe is best for Steem and what stakeholders want, b) developers indicate what they believe is best for Steem and what they are willing and able to develop (as well as covering schedules, milestones, roadmap, etc.)
2. Developers (Steemit in this case) release code implementing a fork. This has not quite happened yet, but there is a release candidate or near-candidate under final testing.
3. Witnesses decide whether to approve/activate the fork implemented by the release. Stakeholders can change witness votes to influence the process. The witnesses voted in when the fork needs to be approved are not and will not necessarily be the same ones that were participating in discussion in #1 above.
4. If approval does not occur in a reasonable amount of time, either return to #1 or #2 and repeat, or drop the effort to make changes at this time and the blockchain continues to function as before.

It is also worth noting that the process has a relatively high hurdle in terms of voting to make a change. At least 17 of the top 20 witnesses (which are voted in at the time of a fork, not necessarily the same ones as now) need to approve the fork. So stakeholders who want to stop a fork need only replace 3 or 4 witnesses (I don't recall which) with new ones who agree.

> I certainly don't mean you when I say the average user has been ignored and maligned

Well who then?

> authors have been blamed for selling and putting downward pressure on the steem price

I don't consider this maligning. It may be a true statement about the economics and market. This does not mean that any individual author is doing anything wrong, or even that all are. But this is may be more about how efficiently rewards are used to create value than the fact of them being paid at all. That doesn't make the problem go away though, and authors as much as anyone suffer from it (lower price -> lower rewards).

IMO people working on EIP, SPS, witnesses, and developers are all making a sincere efforts to improve Steem. If you think anyone is acting against the best interests of Steem overall you are entitled that view and IMO should absolutely call it out. I don't buy the view that adjusting rewards and mechanisms, even in a way that may (though I remain unconvinced) be negative for authors, is bad for Steem. Steem is more than just authors, but authors are surely part of Steem and worthy of respect, just not absolute deference to maximizing direct author rewards to the point of failing to make Steem the best it can be.

> IMO people working on EIP, SPS, witnesses, and developers are all making a sincere efforts to improve Steem. If you think anyone is acting against the best interests of Steem overall you are entitled that view and IMO should absolutely call it out.

I do not think this. I think change is positive and has to be done. My original point is the apportionment of the funding.

I am not going to call out individuals but it is the perception of many day to day users that creators are ignored or considered almost a nuisance. You may consider this anecdotal, but as one of those creators in communication with many other creators, that is a perception that is held.

> Discussion between witnesses and developers (Steemit in this case). This discussion is advisory and can not truly commit to anything because the witness list may change (see #3 below).

So this advisory discussion involved the witnesses proposing not to shoulder any of the burden of the 10%..?

The true decision may ultimately be the stakeholders but if an unpopular change gets in you know how long it may take to get it out.

There is a release undergoing testing. Which means the code base barring any major defects is almost complete.

> Witnesses decide whether to approve/activate the fork implemented by the release. Stakeholders can change witness votes to influence the process.

It's too late at this point. This is reactive. I say be proactive and air concerns before it gets to this stage. The later a change is required in the dev cycle the more expensive that change become to implement.

Hence me airing my concern.

> So this advisory discussion involved the witnesses proposing not to shoulder any of the burden of the 10%..?

Some witnesses proposed no change to witness rewards including myself for the reasons already stated. To reiterate, witness rewards were already cut 80% in a previous adjustment, one which conducted a reasonable modeling of the minimum safe witness reward structure. The (soon) existence of the SPS does nothing to change that modeling nor does it change a reasonable assessment of the minimum safe witness reward structure. In fact, I would argue based on this sound logic, that if you think the shift from the reward pool of 10% is too high and it should only be 9%, instead of trying to make an unsupported reduction in witness rewards to make up the difference, SPS itself should just be reduced from 10% to 9%. But I personally do not see the need for that all, and I think SPS benefits more from that 10% increase than the rewards pool would benefit from not losing that last 1.5%.

Other witnesses proposed to shift some witness rewards, but ultimately a majority if not supermajority of witnesses were not in favor of that, and not doing so is what the developers (who are also large stakeholders themselves) decided to code.

You are free to view this as unfair self-enrichment or some such, which seems to be the undercurrent of what you are implying even if you don't come out and say it, but I don't. I sincerely believe that nearly if not literally everyone involved on all sides of these issues wants the best for Steem and very few if any witnesses are strongly motivated to maximize their witness rewards beyond what is truly necessary and responsible as a system design. In truth, it just isn't a lot of money for most who are successful investors, business owners, well-paid developers, etc. to even justify the hassles involved, including debates like this one, so we are all must be far more motivated to help make Steem a success, or if not most of us would probably just frankly quit.

In the end, as I said, stakeholders will decide.

> I say be proactive and air concerns before it gets to this stage

These exact same concerns were aired several months ago when the SPS was first proposed and developed its funding was discussed. There is very little being brought up now that wasn't already brought up then.

Then, just as now, some suggested that some witness rewards be shifted to cover the cost, and some suggested that witness rewards not be shifted. Some suggested that reward pool be shift, some suggested that SPS be funded only by donations.

What happened more recently is that witnesses and developers had a discussion, considering all of the views that were aired several months ago and since about whether and how SPS should be funded, and the informal consensus that came out discussion was for the 65/15/10/10 split. Ultimately the stakeholders will decide.

> witnesses and developers had a discussion

I see this and I think. Aren't we all stakeholders? Shouldn't a discussion have at least been considered over all stakeholders and not just a subset. There are many ways to do this now.

Shouldn't all stakeholders have an input earlier in the cycle to avoid costly decisions having to be made?

A proposal could have been made to all stakeholders. A for and against. But there wasn't. Do the views of non developer, non witness stakeholders not count. Or do they count at a later stage when the code has been written and as I said before it becomes far more expensive to change.

> You are free to view this as unfair self-enrichment or some such, which seems to be the undercurrent of what you are implying even if you don't come out and say it

For the record then, I imply nothing. I view it as unfair and maintain it my right to do so.

> the hassles involved, including debates like this one

Is this discussion onerous to you, a hassle? Then let us agree to disagree. I am happy to move on. I have stated what I think which I believe I am free to do. You have stated what you think which is indeed also your right.

> Shouldn't a discussion have at least been considered over all stakeholders and not just a subset.
>
> Shouldn't all stakeholders have an input earlier in the cycle to avoid costly decisions having to be made?

Yes and yes, and that has been the case, starting several months ago when the SPS was proposed and discussed, and in numerous ongoing discussions since. So, if you are asking whether input from non-witnesses and developers is a part of this process and is directly considered, then I would say yes. If you are suggesting that all stakeholders and platform users are directly and personally involved with the development and collaborative discussions supporting development on a day to day basis, I would say no, that is not practical (and indeed is the very reason why Steem, and most current DPoS blockchains, was designed with a modestly-sized witness set: there is a limit to the number of people who can constructively have personal involvement in such a process without everything becoming too unwieldy; at a technical level it would work to have not a top 20 but a top 200 or even more, but from a practical standpoint when the network is seen as something evolving, that is impractical).

> Is this discussion onerous to you, a hassle? Then let us agree to disagree. I am happy to move on. I have stated what I think which I believe I am free to do. You have stated what you think which is indeed also your right.

It isn't extreme, but it is still a meaningful added time commitment for those witnesses who choose to engage personally in these discussions with the community (this particular one only being an example, I'm not calling it out as a specific concern). Those that don't are criticized for being out of touch and not engaging. I can understand and see the merits of both approaches, particularly when witnesses are being paid about as much as a fast food worker (or maybe, given that the Steem price has recovered a bit recently, a fast food manager), before expenses, and then are accused of using their position to do "unfair" things to in order to protect their pay check.

> A proposal could have been made to all stakeholders. A for and against.

That is exactly what is being done. The process of on-chain governance allows all stakeholders to have a say for or against approval/activation of forks.

> Do the views of non developer, non witness stakeholders not count. Or do they count at a later stage when the code has been written and as I said before it becomes far more expensive to change.

Disagree, as stated above. A wide range of views from non-developers and non-witnesses have absolutely been heard and taken into account earlier in the process starting months ago, including on the matter of how and how much (and if) SPS should be funded. Ultimately witnesses and developers make a practical call to distill that down to what concrete implementation they think is best for Steem. They/we may well get some things wrong but we consider all sorts of input and do our best.

Ah, I see now.

> accused of using their position to do "unfair" things to protect their pay check.

You think I am accusing the witnesses, ergo yourself.

I am not going to retread everything I have said but...

I will say that yes, I believe it is unfair. I do not believe that adequate input from non-witnesses and developers has been sought.

I believe that in this case, there is too much bias, conscious or unconscious on the parties involved to make the decision to not include themselves fair.

I am not alone as you have stated.

I am happy to end it here.

I honestly appreciate the feedback and input

I have appreciated the discussion!

>Shouldn't all stakeholders have an input earlier in the cycle

Yes, and it was never a case. I would really appreciate a system in which we have a fixed maximum percentage for any budget line minus the part outvoted by all the stakeholders.
Like for example max 2% for witnesses, but if 50% of all stakeholders have voted for "minus" it would be 1% only.
A huge amount of computing power is spent to decide that this particular meme will get a few cents more that another meme. Some part of this computing power surely could be reallocated to allow all the stakeholders have a say on the global parameters too.

Have you ever noticed how some around here will say things like, "If these content producers were producing something of value, they could be out in the real world making money."

All that does is prove how disconnected they are from the real world. This is the real world and since so many fail to see that, they can't wrap their heads around how the arts and entertainment industry generates billions annually, in the real world. Since this platform is all the land of make belief to them, they have no problems with stepping on content producers, kicking them to curb, losing out on potentially and eventually billions of dollars, so they can scratch their heads and wonder why they can't even get a few thousand dollars pouring in, while thinking they live in a dream land.

Hopefully it's not a coma though because it would be nice if some folks around here could wake up.

If only they could wake up. If only they could see for a moment what they are creating. Or rather what they are not. As we both know if they carry on deriding content creators then they will only ever see ever diminishing returns. And then nothing. When it is too late they will try to change things up but it will be too late.

Lots of people were panicking when Dan announced Voice which in the end turned out to be a damp squib fraught with problems before it even began. There will come a competitor though, one that understands the basic paradigm and seeks novel ways to solve it.

The content creator bashers here can attempt to make it hard for them or carry on the way they are going and make it easy for them. I am not holding my breath

I don't even see how something marketed as a social media platform like Voice is a direct competitor to a content production platform like we have here. I realize some use this platform as a social media site, which is fine, whatever. What would Facebook be though if people weren't sharing content from content production platforms though? What would Youtube be if people were not sharing links on social media? Many people saw Voice as competition but social media and content production go hand in hand. Each one makes the other one better.

Bashing content here is like visiting Youtube and being angry about videos.

I think maybe because some see their own efforts and see how they run their blogs, they just assume everyone else is the same. Start running the blog like a business and act like you're stepping out on a stage with every post, and you get guys like us, and in the real world, when performed live, the seats fill up, the money pours in.

We've both entertained thousands of people since showing up here, while working under conditions that make that nearly impossible. Imagine what it would be like if the odds weren't stacked against us.

> I think maybe because some see their own efforts and see how they run their blogs, they just assume everyone else is the same.

Hehe, I often say similar in that those who cannot produce content worth a damn like to run down those who can by running down everyone who does. Saying that all the content here is crap and that its ALL low quality etc. Its a porr tactic of theirs and yet sometimes it seems to work on some sheep who parrot it back blindly.

I guy walks into a bar. Tells everyone they don't know how to drink.
That made way more sense in my head.

I get it though!!!!

Yes I agree completely. Especially when some of the witness funding was said to be to help them build projects. The rewards from being a top witness far outweigh the costs, especially after MIRA, even with steem at $.40. Why we are not directing some of the inflation from them is ridiculous to me as well.

Exactly, it's ridiculous and will cause a lot of negativity

I cannot see how that will encourage new people to come here.

Witness funding was and is not intended to fund projects after it was cut 80% (I believe in HF12).

Some witnesses do get involved with projects as part of their campaign for votes, and given surplus funds under some conditions, but that's not a core part of witness rewards based on how the budget was designed.

By contrast, witness rewards were intended to support projects prior to being cut 80%. That bundling was not seen as a good approach and was a good part of the motivation for the huge 80% cut. It was always envisioned that: a) existing reward funds could be used to fund projects via voting for posts, and b) something like SPS could be implemented later to more directly fund projects without the somewhat messy process of doing it with posts. It took almost three years to get there, but better late than never.

And you think the current inflation allocation setup is the right way to go for witnesses? Their costs are fixed in USD, which means a tanking steem price could make it un-economical to run a witness node at all... which would put the entire network in jeopardy.

In this system witnesses secure the network, in a POW system the miners secure the network. Miners are not able to mine at a huge profit for long before the system corrects itself. We have no such correcting mechanism with steem...

Instead, network securers continue to get inflation regardless. Fundamentally, that doesn't sound right to me.

With the recent cost reductions to run nodes it also makes some sense for there to be revenue reductions as well and this was the perfect opportunity for that to happen.

There are no cost reductions to run witness nodes as yet. Over time the costs have simply grown, though to some extent this was expected. The MIRA version (with its associated cost reductions) isn't recommended for witnesses.

I don't think the witness reward mechanism is perfect, but if we are looking narrowly at the reward amount, I think the analysis that was done when it was reduced by 80% and set to 10% of total inflation was reasonable and hasn't changed significantly, therefore the split shouldn't change. Proposals to revamp the system in a more fundamental way can be considered. I'm open to looking at it.

Why is it not recommended? That was one of the selling points sold to us by Steemit,Inc... That this new version would help decentralize the platform as it would make running witness nodes cheaper.

I would guess it will eventually get there, but not yet. The main priority was reducing the costs of Steemit's own expensive RPC nodes, and they did that.

MIRA can reduce expenses of running a node (full RPC, seed, witness) but at the cost of a much slower replay. On my witness test node, a replay usually takes 20-22 hours without MIRA but when I enabled MIRA I gave up after 3 days of replay still not completed. For a top witness, it is critical to be able to replay as fast as possible in order to get the node back on track on events such as a HardFork where a replay is required.

MIRA will help with reducing the costs of other nodes but for witnesses nodes it's not recommended for the reason above.

Interesting. Thanks for the explanation. Was that just smoke and mirrors then from steemit,inc saying that MIRA was going to help reduce the costs for running a witness node and thus making steem more secure and more decentralized?

It will help for new comers who don’t have enough votes to produce enough blocks at first. They can do with waiting few days for a replay. After a replay it’s all good. Also good for secondary witness nodes. So if a top witness runs multiple servers then yes it will reduce costs, just not recommended on the primary witness server.

Posted using Partiko iOS

I see. Thanks.

Like others have said, why not take from witness rewards and make the remaining witness rewards a proposal in the SPS system?

A fine idea! :0)

Because the system needs a stable core to function at all, and that requires that witnesses not only be paid but paid enough to always maintain stable infrastructure and contribute enough of their time to necessary 'soft' functions, but also enough so that concern of losing a witness slot is a meaningful incentive to remain a good actor (if you are doing it break-even or at a loss, who cares if you get voted out once you have messed with the chain, possibly for personal profit or paid by someone else who profits).

Without a stable functioning and secure chain you can't even conduct an SPS vote. For example, witnesses could tamper with the vote by censoring transactions, or punishing accounts which vote the "wrong" way.

A DPoS chain depends fundamentally on the competence and integrity of its witnesses Putting that at risk puts the entire system at risk.

[IMAGE: https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmR6r2HrY639YmwLswF8nvbsm1hERzkDJcV88x6LZNvHgX/trash.png]

It has been determined that you are trash, therefore, you have received a negative vote.PLEASE NOTE: If you engage with the trash above you also risk receiving a negative vote on your comment.

The witnesses would never allow a fork to go through that reduces their precious rewards. Are you out of your mind?

The majority are leeches who contribute the bare minimum to get that big @pumpkin vote. Once they've got it, they're golden.

Shall we talk about how a single person has sole control over our witnesses? Nah...wouldn't want to bring something like that up...

Yeah, that's true. I was having a crazy moment when I suggested it. Even crazier to think that any of them would be game!!

bwahahah, u were smoking weed coin when you type it out, see my even more ludicrous enquiry/suggestion below

I've been hovering around 80 for awhile and wouldn't be bought. The only one I saw publicly against it was @yabapmatt, who, ironically now - is number 1? Not saying your logic doesn't make sense, I've been trying to help the little guy since I got here being a 'little guy' myself. I love your views, really, not just kissing ass. Just wish more people were as perceptive.

Our main issue (by our, I mean the vast majority of @thealliance community) is the 50/50 split. Is there a way the masses can really have the power here or is this place actually centralized? I know no one that is in favor of this with less than 5000 SP.

@drakos has also publically come out against it, and with a whole lot of campaigning, he just went from 21 to 20! The community is against these changes and is doing as much as it can in the face of large stakeholders who are for these changes because they primarily benefit them.

Now, I've asked this question in a dozen different places, and no one has answered.

In EIP, with the promise that "The relevant behaviors are at the ends of the curve. For the majority of the curve, the payouts are nearly identical to a linear rewards curve."

Does that mean that my $0.03 vote on your comment will still be worth $0.03 all by its lonesome there? And you'll get the penny or two which is all I can offer for your comment, but that I think you deserve? Or does it mean you'll get $0.001 cents? How much does this curve punish these teensy votes?

edit: ugh nvm, @drakos got pushed out of top 20 again. Let's see if we can get him back in there and get some more up there! Unvote the current 20 and vote for the folks against EIP! We only need 3 more (since @yabapmatt is against it, too!) We need votes worth about 160k to move him up.
1400 (mvests)500 (approx steem/mvest)0.233 (USD/steem)=$163,100
Hm.

Witnesses are at best basically business minded folks (being nice here) and less about long stability, growth, and sound ideologically minded thinking economist.

If the thousands of the multitudes of BTC core miners can unite to refuse to give up their fat transaction fees and slow down the progress of Bitcoin adoption as a transfer of value, do you think a simple band of 20-30 top witness would ever be able to openly debate and agree to collectively give up a single dollar of sacrifice to improve our already quasi-centralized/decentralized social consensus network?

Since asking Witnesses to sacrifice Steem for price growth is near impossible, aka reducing their share in the 10%.

Keep it at 10%, hell, we can even increase it to 15%, how about 20%....BUT

Lets ALSO increase the number of witnesses getting bigger rewards. The competition will eventually breed improvement. Slowly at first, but inevitable, it will accelerate, imagine 1000 Steem miners, can you imagine how many innovations we'll have on Steem if we attracted so many technical investors?

We should just make Steem an ever-improving decentralized network....raise the top 20 witness number gradually, say 1-5 new witness sharing in the top 20 pool over time, say every 3-12 months.

Just a Simple Example: As long as there is 50-100 active witness in the network (check by math so there is no need to debate this amongst witnesses), we increase top paid witness number by 1 every 6 month (for every 50-100 witness, so if there is 400 witnesses, we should see at least 4 or more new top witnesses). At today snail pace of sustainble witnesses, we should currently see a minimal 2 new top witnesses, and in 10 years time (assuming we find a way to reward curators and content producer on Steem so it doesn't degrade till near abandonment), we'll see at least 40 top witness sharing the lion share of the top pool in 10 years time....possibly 200 new top witness (and by then, we'll probably see Steem at $100 :D )

So in theory, if this proposal attracts more people to become witnesses aka more miners to secure our network, and to compete with better reliability, full node servers, and new daap/community/innovation proposals and implementation.

No DPOS/DAO/token/smart-contract crypto has this today, it will give Steem a leg up, and better crypto and institutional investor creds, aka funds flowing in if we did this, making up for the decentralization cost of increasing the pool of witnesses and rewarding them.

ALTERNATIVELY:

Let Top 20 Witness share of the witness pool decrease over time, eg. currently it what 20/21 share almost all the 10%. So instead of keeping 95% of Steem witness income going to only 20 witnesses FOREVER!, let it drop by 5% every year until it reaches 20% (say after 12-14 years), giving more rewards to witnesses from 21 to 100 or beyond.

Incremental improvement to decentralization will help the cause of Steem. Not just stability, but greatly so with the financial community and crypto community. I say if this works, you'll see EOS, Tron, etc start doing the same, improving all 3rd gen crypto over time.

ONE OTHER THING:

And goodness sake, please implement vote expiry....that's just a non-brainer. Every vote should only last max 6 months max, of FFS lets be innovative if whale, orcas, and dolphins keep renewing the votes for the same witnesses (respectful fcukers or shifty mofo) the vote weight should reduce by 50%, so new upcoming witnesses with new votes gets a chance to rise up (do stuff to make Steem proud and not just make money) and get gradually increasing rewards so they don't end up proving themselve for next to nothing.

COME ON EVERYONE...WHY NOT?

Isn't it fun how, every time there's to be a few changes, the community comes up with a list of another 20000 changes? LOL! I hope you're doing well these days.

lol that's the philosophy of decentralized crypto my dear artistic friend, it's a crowdsource of a million ideas to evolve....and coming to a consensus.....to get widely adopted or die of the chain as an unaccepted social experiment

honestly, i think doing decentralization different to every other DPOS system to stand out will help us become more widely accepted by the growing crypto community

taking each day 1 step at a time....how are you doing?

Yeah, I'll still throw in my two cents here and there when I can as well. Getting a little better at not turning everything into a spectacle.

I'm doing alright. It's a bit too serious around here though.

@berniesanders agreed - its a rich-people fork ...

But the worst of all, FREE DOWNVOTES ?

its not bad enough already ? give the haters their hobby for free ?

i shouldn't have read this

Can SteemDAO/SPS be used somehow to change the decision wrt who pays for SteemDAO/SPS? And can we use it to somehow create a different system of ruling decision? Maybe a more democratic way with many more Steemians being able to vote for a change than limiting this to a few witnesses?

"When will it be understood that without content creators this platform will wither and die?"
I agree with you, but I think that it is important to mention that this platform will also wither and die without content curators, and to be honest, this platform currently lacks of real content curators.
I am on Steem since 2017.05.17, and I see that people are selfish and greedy.
Many people are writing blog posts, but only a few people cares about other people's blog posts.
Maybe HF21 (EIP) (Economic Improvement Proposal) will change this by "Increasing the curation rewards to equal the author rewards".
If this will decrease the number of bloggers (and content creators in general), and increase the number of content curators (and maybe the real, human interaction with it), then HF21 will be good for Steem.
We (the users and the community of the whole Steem blockchain) need to find a good balance between content creators and content curators, otherwise this platform will wither and die.

And I agree with you hence in my original comment I said that I agree with the changes proposed. I am all for the change to 50/50.

Something needs done and this is something. Curation is sorely lacking, whether this will truly help remains to be seen but it is something and I think that's important.

@meesterboom

symbolic 1% as you say, coming from the one percent would at least show they give a shit about anything but their circlejerk , true dat, and i frea the "will work for food system" will quickly end-up into a "i know you" system where who you know counts for more than what you can do ... BUT WELL

Such is the way of the world ...

https://media.giphy.com/media/LSPLH1pKRgmo8/giphy.gif

its never been about good content either, its about pseudo agressirve networking and selling what people wanna hear, the most paid post i ever saw got $4k dollar simply by stating bitcoin would rise in less than 2 pages of paper would take ... that's a crock o' shyte and everybody knows it :)

here in down-below we'll just have to make do

as we always do ...

"kiss the bishop's ring"
"and you might get a job, dear ..."

LOL

and also .. as usual, the protectorate makes Takeshi Kovacs cry ... i think most of those people have no real clue about real world outside theirs. Keep in mind the internet is NOT america for instance && this. != a regulated market ... so someone from ,.pff i dunno, name half of asia or south america ( people can actually "work" too there) puts up something for 1% of the price because they can eat from that ... that's how fast we'll see if it's an "i-know-you" system or not ... blocktrades gets 50k if i were to mention a simple messenger for services id probably get the answer that it's "too much trouble to implement" :D

... puns not excluded ... facebook is facebook because out of a billion users it has 999 million posting utter crud SEVERAL times a day, not because it gives free downvotes in the name of misterdelegation or whoever is dictating this crud ...

some good points BUT ... until i see it work and prove itself otherwise i think here the bad outweighs the good

and before i get misunderstood ... i got nothing against @blocktrades, dont get me wrong, just like yabapmatt/aggroed , they excell in both product and delivery, blocktrades got excellent support too btw, zero complaints, and i certainly personally wouldnt refuse 50 grand (lol) if i could get them - but it IS in essence, just like no matter how elections go and who wins or loses, you KEEP seeing the same faces on tv :p

... (i am not known for popular opinion, but from the looks of it this HF is gonna cost me since im not a steemonnaire, and i also dont live in a coutnry where i can simply accept work online without paying 10s of thousands in fees to the state yearly for a business license AND can underprice everyone else so i dont think there s....

anything good about it, but i'll hold my opinion until i see it lol)

m hm mh i know i know Mister Delegation (that's actually ONE account that empowers steemcleaners to police "in the name" of, without that they would have like less sp than me or something close ... well approximate overall as an example)

i know "but we want good content, not to be facebook"

but ... You get dopamine sellers in the trending section and you seem to DO want the money ?

hippiecrite morals (yea well, me and my goodspeak huh ...)

haaa ... no i'm all up for free market ... living in soviet Europe free market is a regulated farce (but also because it has to be but also because of that it keeps the circle in place et al ...) i'm just not sure the meeting-people-who-always-smile because life upthere is ofcourse positive, easy to be magnanimous when your pockets are already fat, né ?
im not sure they realize the full extent of what this "internet" covers lol ... it could be great for people in countries with low chances to earn a buck as regulation there is not as strict as here - for all i know in china or vietnam you can "just start", at least ive been told by several people, while here, you can "just pay your fees , your this your that, get an extra paper have it all statestamped ... about 15 to 40k euros BEFORE you are allowed to make a cent, and then pay 60% on that cent ...) so it could be great for them but i doubt that's how it's gonna work ...

pardon the lingo but that's how i talks lol ... usually with more cuss but its too public here ... i could rant on for an hour but i need the RC as my daily posts are quite costly , good health and safe travels @meesterboom , @berniesanders :)

maybe euhm .. off the top of my hat ... @juanmolina , @phoenixwren , @ecoinstant , @chinotattooart know some skilled people who could make good use of it if it really is what it sounds like ... @mobbs maybe ... not that i'm implying you people are living on the street but you might know people who could make use of it ... (its so easy to be misunderstood and i hate so to be apologetic because i talk how i talk so that's why i usually dont say a lot anymore here)

man, i havent made that much mentions since last year, aight ... gtg ...

steer the course and :

[IMAGE: https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmXyWmtxzEzC2YbHJufZTSwrpBeCWJ3mFyYixm5NuaHvwd/output_ft573y.gif]

don't let them decide what YOU get to say and do ... (normally i would say don't be a little bitch and spit and swallow because it gets you a fiver ... " but in thise case i'll stick to almost acceptable language (a yea, rendered flag by me @rudyardcatling)

O yea .. well

i'm out of the running but ... im not clear on the marketing strategies either ... for instance in co-op with @lemouth and the masters-of-rules-or-else-you-dont-get-a-cookie-peasant (not really my crowd, but the sensei is !!!) they had people here (or have) working on software and clustering to analyze and prep data from the mfg Large Hadron Collider at Cern , and several other projects that are not the frontpage right, the frontpage is "get paid for good content) - im not a marketing genius ofcourse, if i would be slightly not bad in production and systems, i would still need someone to do the talking for me (clearly) to sell sht ... excrement - ... sigh ... but stuff like that should be flagship-stuff, WE ARE HELPING THE ... (<-insert kiloton name here) with their project on ... and maybe this new will work for food system COULD , if helped to be not just an american circlejerk where 99% of the money goes to already witnesses HELP projects in places like ... whatever venezuela, vietnam whatever to build* stuff and start stuff up ... i think that would make a mighty fine print on the frontpage ... as in "Our name is not speculationcoin" ...
(i keep yanking again , tsk, sorry for the extensive breathe-out , really gtg now)

... or maybe one last verse ....

i know its not an NGO , its business in the first place but you DO have an image, and image attracts (as well as rejects) , the people running greenpeace for instance won't have to sleep under a bridge at the end of the month either and (maybe thats because i feel more comfortable in deep water than where the whales swim) you got plenty of activists here, i'm amazed they didnt get amnesty or greenpeace to advertise yet ...

phew, breathe in , cat ...

[IMAGE: https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmcxsmjYqRDXZem9KNHe7SrSa2d917W4CHHvWXWwDn7GeC/27-I-will-nap-here-cat-meme.jpg]

Ah, Amy comment that mentions Takeshi Kovac or the protectorate is a winner in my book!!

If I wasn't about to go to sleep, I would give a more dignified answer. But yes, I agree with you 100 percent!

Hahah, that's okay, it's already great you took time, i'm probably behind about a dozen to 100 replies my self i havent been the most social entitiy for a while ...
I was just gonna add something on mister delegation and the police , my personal opinion ofcourse.

If someone is that gung-ho on "good content" then (last time i checked) 3 MILLION in delegation to one small group of enforcers in order to censor (which is basically what it is because who is the one to define what constitutes good ? it just forces ONE kind and one opinion there, one ruleset ... almost sounds like that old German thing on "ein vo ... ein rr ein ffuu" ... :) ... in my opinion that is
what i was gonna say (made my post got RC) that much steempower in delegation locked into a few hyena's (because over time that kind of power messes with peoples minds ofcourse ... i remember the last time i went there to complain and the answer was pretty much "WHAT YOU GONNA DO ABOUT IT ..."

is not only unfriendly and very un-inviting to the newcomer trying to find their way in this niche (which is what it is in social network land) but all that power and money would be LOT better spent promoting , actively promoting said good content instead of forcing the opinion of a very few on the masses ... that's basically an Orwellian nightmare ... but it's easier like that, right , and to wield power is a drug. It's a bit harder to go about and around, i mean that's like
1000 starters with talent who can get 3000 delegation (for a limited time, no keepers, it should shift to prevent that handshake-stuff where people just clot together in what i like to call a circlejerk)

or 100 with 30.000 ... or no matter how it's divided it could seriously boost true artists and writers, authors and whoever tries hard to provide something

but all it does is play cops and robbers ...

as the french say : noblesse oblige , and they don't feel very obligated, they just want to control

its like f'kin government :p

mhh .. my worldview or way of looking at the world somewhat deviates from the norm (most people call it weird or something lol) and i often quote what i dubbed "the metaverse" as i find newton's laws apply to about everything, from economics to sociology to ... well about everything, and it makes sense, since they're at the core of the laws of nature (with entropy as my favourite, which i have just observed after two days of sleepwalking, the kitchen states entropy is a prime law at the very corse ... but i deviate a lot btw ...Euhm i was saying ...
o yea :
lol
force is never used mend , only to break and bend

an axiom of catlawick (named after watlawick ...) that's why enforcement only reaches as far...no, law only reaches as far as enforcement mostly, and in all systems, as all things in nature and physics strive for a state of balance or equilibrium (total metaverse sh*t lol), if you apply force, you can create unnatural situations, but only for as long as it's applied because once you release things will snap back in place

in essence : its a waste of time in most cases hahah ... sorry for the retort, when i get going i get going

@meesterboom - i should have been sleeping too but i got caught in a php script again ...

it happens all the time lately ... nice meeting you, hajime-mashite - maybe ttyl , its not that big but its a big place ... good luck and health

and maybe a few six figure accounts in a few years if we're lucky, right ;-)

and maybe ...

a lot of talk about communities and what not ... (yea i know, when i get going ...) but that's just all in-crowd speak, people adapt and adopt it, hoping to get "rewarded" .. it stifles personality and also its what i call clotting together, i mean communities is good, they are focused they speed up the field they're focused on , but without your travelling merchant or nomad ... or kiplings cat that's me hahah (just kidding) they grow stale, and over time wary of others - and in time scared
scared of what is over yonder hill, they just 'rust' into position as a comfort zone, and im not convinced that's actually beneficial, hoping to not get confused with eugenics , if you took that to a biological level you'd get inbreeding :p

i think i should really

.. yes i should

more day tomorrow

i'll just leave you with my favourite version of what i see way more as a parable than a childrens tale :

https://youtu.be/VmPz5gXxngA

(where i got the name for my main account, not because im such a great writer - it depends on which one of the people in my head is on top , and some are good with words

sometimes ;,-))

its janes underground inhere sometimes

now if you actually read and saw all that ?

[IMAGE: https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmV4a7gKz9LzRuYpZQtnTDqR8WhHbe7ZA6V561N5oFXkvx/name-est-mathi-matics-add-the-tolleinmber-4-9-divide-the-55886883.png]

certified granted by @goldmanmorgan, the Vault Keeper of @tyrnannoght

(though i doubt you're a kid but boys will be boys ... at least that's what women tell me)

now im gonna crawl back into me and see who comes out tomorrow

Hey! I'm sorry, I tried to read this thread in Partiko and there are so many replies I guess that it just boots me back to my notification screen. So I can't follow the full discussion and am missing some points. I'll try again later to see it, but just didn't want you to think I was ignoring you!

Posted using Partiko Android

all good and well :) im so behind on replies half the world probably thinks im gone and its just bots running :p

With this then all top 20 witnesses should cease all bidbots as they are gaming the system. They are double if not triple dipping through the failings of the Steem ecosystem that has allowed the manipulation. I am seriously concerned that the owners of said bots will just adjust their algorithm to the new cut and a few tweaks to curation algos will net them an equal cut to hf20. There had better be some damned good testing in the testnet this time to determine the efficacy when concerning the bots. Though I have large reservations about that since the top 20 are the testers, voters, and bot owners.

You will likely see bot votes being downvoted with this new system. What is the bot going to do waste their downvotes on you?

>"What is the bot going to do waste their downvotes on you?"

Absolutely, and profitably. Downvotes are going to be free. Won't cost them anything to protect their businesses from downvotes by hordes of minnows (if any are so foolish as to try to), and their stakes will enable them to conduct retaliatory flagging campaigns that will soon make examples that others will learn from.

No one rational without massive stake will be flagging whales with their free downvotes. Free downvotes will likely only be used to conduct censorship without cost or retaliatory flags to crush any who dare to oppose profiteering. The downvote pool will not somehow induce tens of thousands of minnows to act in concert, and that's what would be necessary to successfully defend against whale flags.

It has been determined that you are trash, therefore, you have received a negative vote.PLEASE NOTE: If you engage with the trash above you also risk receiving a negative vote on your comment.

Wow, that is a good point I never thought of.

As you can observe, I am familiar with how downvotes are deployed by stakeholders.

It has been determined that you are trash, therefore, you have received a negative vote.PLEASE NOTE: If you engage with the trash above you also risk receiving a negative vote on your comment.

This does sound like a major conflict of interest.

>As far as why the funding for the SteemDAO is coming out of the Rewards Pool, that was ultimately a decision that was made by the Witnesses, and we agree that it is an acceptable solution to the problem.

I'd find it more acceptable if my rewards weren't going down by ~66%, too.

It is very telling about those in control of these things that rather than making steem all for one and one for all, instead push the costs off on others than themselves.

This looks bad, but who are we kidding, ya'll haven't looked good for several years now.

>The Rewards Pool is not shrinking,

>10% of overall inflation (pulled from the rewards pool)

Jebus, and ya'll wonder how you got such a stincy reputation?

Seriously, you just caught yourself in a deceptive statement, less than 4 paragraphs later.

Get a grip, stinc.
Are you sure that this is the record you want recorded in the blockchain?

>At the request of the Witnesses, we have included code in this release that would implement economic changes which alter the incentive mechanisms to be better aligned with rewarding high-quality content.

I liked the nsomething, but only with the 800mv influence cap.
There isn't anything we can do that changes the corrosive influence of the ninjamine, except cap it.
When do we stop letting those greedy whales farm us?
It's not like this wasn't discussed 2+ years ago.
Ya'll are just mad because short hair no longer distracts us from the glaring use case issues not being addressed by those with the power to change steem in order to continue allowing the abuse by the biggest accounts.

But,...smteees!!™

>we do know how the system is behaving now and there is consensus that the system is functioning sub-optimally. Our decision to use the constant 2e12 in the new rewards curve is based on the desire to not change the system too much

Yeah, those self voting and dumping might have to find real jobs if anything actually changed.

>we believe these changes will make it easier for good content to be discovered and rewarded,

Not buying it, you knew beforehand what linear reward would do and forced them on us, anyway.
I'm just hoping that the next fork doesn't take this long.
We've wasted 2+ years confirming what was said about linear rewards before they were a thing.

But what is new?
Stinc only listens to those that agree with them.
Just ask @curie.

No speaky the corporatespeak?

No curie vote for you!

> and they serve at the discretion of you all: the Steem stakeholders.

Lol, well, at least a couple of us, anyways.

>Steemit, Inc. and its representatives do not, and will not, leverage our stake to influence this decision.

How do we certify that statement as long as stake has been hidden to avoid embarrassing forks?

But other than that, everything is just fine,...

No, really, I like the downvote thing, so one out of three is not sooo bad.

I was all for a portion coming from several of the inflation categories, which I think just about everyone was so that any one category didn't bear the costs of it all. Yet somehow that all was ignored.

Well, we are on the 'wrong' side of the class war.

I could not more strongly agree with your every statement herein (except the acceptance of the downvote pool. That will mainly be useful to bots to retaliate against the fleabite flags of minnows trying to discourage them, for free, and to censor even more because it will be free. Since it does not change the reality of retaliation, only fools will try to use their free flags to rein in bots or flaggots). I have cast my first 100% vote I can recall as a result.

Keep on speaking truth to power!

It has been determined that you are trash, therefore, you have received a negative vote.PLEASE NOTE: If you engage with the trash above you also risk receiving a negative vote on your comment.

I'm in on this because it can only make things worse, which might give a higher priority to actually addressing the cancer rather than treating the symptoms.

Strike the root of the abuse tree!

I am opposed to accelerationism. It's nothing more than treachery.

Still, you may not be wrong that no one ever quits abusing until they hit rock bottom. Fortunately, we'll only be figuratively laying in a ditch in a pool of our own vomit when HF21 drops the rock bottom out from under us.

It has been determined that you are trash, therefore, you have received a negative vote.PLEASE NOTE: If you engage with the trash above you also risk receiving a negative vote on your comment.

And good on it for doing it.
I fully expect an emergency fork after this one to stop the hemorrhaging of value and users.

All we have to do is cap influence at 500mv and we could bring back the n2.

I'm a fan of the Huey Long algorithm, because it also provides a floor for newbs that haven't yet established a network. I think that would help retention significantly. Either way, I'm in, because capital gains FTW!

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There is another proposal.
A serious attempt at repairing the STEEM Economic Improvement Proposal (eip) for HF21

Just wanted to clarify that the downvote pool is probably better referred to as a "downvote mana pool" not really "downvote rewards pool"

There are no rewards for downvoting, it simply draws from a different mana pool, aka voting power.

Otherwise great post @steemitblog

Great point. Thanks Net!

Will users be able to see how much downvote mana they have used?

My guess is that it will be added to steemd.com and other sites. Steemit.com doesn't even show how much of your regular vote mana has been used.

Post updated. Thanks!

Hello,
I'm not a tech freak, I'm an ordinary not even middle class user.
You guys forget one thing :

Content creators are everything for Steem and every dapp build on the system.

To tax these users And cut rewards And to help that their content get more punished is the wrongest decision ever.
Especially during a phase where the Steem price is down anyway.

The best way to destroy a platform.

To reward punishment will build a more worse climate on Steem as it is already.
As I mentioned before already, I'm not a Dev, but there are for sure other possibilities to fix the system.

You can build one dapp after the other, if you have no creators they all will be useless.

Have a great day, good luck
Tom

Posted using Partiko Android

This should be seen as an investment to increase the features content creators can make use of. These proposals will be created by community members who will have ideas that will benefit all users. As it is steem provides very little value. This system will allow us to quickly expand our use cases and features. Wallet mobile apps, e-commerce solutions and more will make your investment and what you earn worth more if these can provide enough value.

This also lowers our dependency on any organization. Making sure steem can last a long time and have continued development support. Without the development of the backend and frontend technologies, there is no service for content creators to make money on. Yes, users are important but without good development, there is nothing for users to make use of.

This is an investment in our chains feature and I mean our chain because we all decide by staying power up that we believe in the community. Steem can no longer only be the taking community that it has been, we must invest in our future or we will continue to slip in the ranks of coins. Someone will just fork steem and do what needs to be done if we don't.

Who's to say someone won't come up with a proposal to allow the ease of user registration. There is many benefits that can come from these proposals.

Then tax the holders of the majority of stake, rather than those who have the least of it. You call them investors, even though they are really profiteers preventing capital gains.

The regressive taxation on the sole source of value of Steem will be far worse than you imagine. The whales receive ~90% of the rewards for the content created by those receiving ~10% of those rewards. The funding proposed taxes that ~10% to fund development that will profit 35 whales most of all, and who won't be paying for it. The witnesses are dependent for their income on the votes of those whales, and this funding mechanism is perhaps the most noxious example of corruption I am aware of, since it has been proposed by the pet witnesses of those whales.

The consequences of incessant and rapine profiteering cannot be supported at a higher level than is extant, and HF21 is going to approximately halve the rewards received by content creators. That will be a disaster for Steem. Users will abandon the platform quickly, and angrily. The price of Steem will plummet. Market cap will decrease further.

I predict that three months after adoption of HF21 the price of Steem will be ~10% of today's price. It won't matter if you change your mind then, because it will be too late to try to resuscitate Steem after so much disingenuous rhetoric and blatant profiteering. The world will lose this chance to create what Steem could have been, and you will be one of the architects of that destruction.

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I suppose the way not to be punished is not to post? Or not to post under the same account? I don't know if this will work but the community is free to try.

How does the ratio of author and curation compensation change?

It shows in the graphs in the post.

Also with eip it will be a 50/50 split between authors and curators.

Would it be possible to get a monthly, quarterly or yearly breakdown in regards to fund allocation? I know a lot of people are concerned with the SteemIt power down and I think a breakdown of where those funds go could greatly help alleviate people’s worries.

Posted using Partiko iOS

Well yeah once the system is made, api's will likely be made for this. The data will be public, so anyone will be able to audit the sps system.

It should also be easy to make graphs to show when new features that are developed or are released showing the effect on the market certain changes have as well.

I guess the question is how detailed it will be and how easy an audit will be. If there’s no accountability the system could be gamed by bad actors

Posted using Partiko iOS

Oh no, it will be fully auditable, since they have to ask for a specific amount I believe. That specific number and whatever data that says yes it was accepted is enough data to figure out the spending.

People in the community keep track over every dime steemit spends and cashouts. You can expect them to do the same with this as well.

Fair enough. From what I’ve heard some people say I thought a lot of SteemIt’s Steem just disappears

Posted using Partiko iOS

Well once it hits exchange everyone's funds do.

HF21 comes in like a wrecking ball.
All these are okay on their own. However a 10% cut + 25% more for curation + 2e13 = around 2.19 times more sp required for a vote worth around 1sp to an author. In otherwords my vote is now worth ~ 46% unless I only vote on people already getting huge payouts or join a whale pool.
I think we need to talk more about the combined effects and less about the individual changes that make sense in isolation.

I think the EIP doesn't make sense. the most important now is to attract more new users into steem. This proposal doesn't seems newbies friendly. the author reward is too low, new comers can't benefit from the increase curation reward since they have little steem power. This only benefit the old big whale. And the only purpose of EIP is to discover 'good content'. but only the few large SP holders can do that. It's a paradox. Good content for someone, may means nothing for majority. And most importantly, steem is a currency not a blog platform. the value of a currency is coming from consensus of people. The more people join in the more value a currency have. "good content"obviously not a good thing to make consensus, since different people have different appetite. Wrap up. This proposal simply about how to distribution interest. our Chinese have a saying" make big cake first, then discuss how to divide the cake".Look at the price of steem. is the cake big enough to be divided? Hope this proposal to be rejected.

Posted using Partiko Android

I totally agree with you, the new ones never. It will benefit them and as they will always leave, what they will bring is that they will finish killing what little life is left of the platform.

If the steem ecosystem would be somehow destroyed, who would lose the most? The whales. Who are most of the whales? The top 20 witnesses.
I think it's safe to say that especially the whales have a huge interest in the steem ecosystem being able to grow BIG over time. And that is only possible if the userbase grows and if the new users are able to make their cut. They know this fact.
Maybe this new proposal benefits them them most in the short term, but they also face the biggest risk of ultimately loosing hundreds of thousands of dollars of their investment.

So assuming they want to screw the average joe for maximizing their profits makes no sense, because this is not possible. If they fuck it up, the price will be 5 cents in just a few weeks without ever recovering. Nobody wants that.

I tell you everything will be lost, because the new ones will not benefit. Since it costs them a lot to have good profits, the platform you must devote a lot of time so that they can see and many, they are for the benefits they can get with this I think nobody. You will sacrifice your time for a little profit, look at the boom of 2017 when the steem came to be. At 10 dollars we were many and they entered more and more each time, since you promote the platform and see that they do not have remuneration they leave or get bored. I think you should see other platforms where you have much more remuneration and keep their users.

Despite the logical assumption that the greater profits available via capital gains will incite whales to act to create capital gains, the history of Steem reveals the opposite to be true. Whales compete against each other to extract rewards and increase their stakes relative to the others. The extant code discourages investing, and encourages that profiteering instead, and this incites capital losses rather than capital gains.

Nobody wants Steem to plunge in value, but that's what EIP will cause, and whales have proven unable to agree to limit rewards so that they cannot be extracted by substantial stake. They are each acting in their individual interest, rather than as a community; competing for rewards rather than cooperating platform wide to create capital gains.

Powerdowns of millions of Steem are ongoing presently. Whales are preparing to sell their Steem before it plunges after EIP is deployed. The extant code simply too strongly favors extractive profiteering over inciting capital gains, primarily by enabling unlimited rewards to be gained by the VP of substantial stakeholders.

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If the steem ecosystem would be somehow destroyed, who would lose the most? The whales. Who are most of the whales? The top 20 witnesses.
I think it's safe to say that especially the whales have a huge interest in the steem ecosystem being able to grow BIG over time. And that is only possible if the userbase grows and if the new users are able to make their cut. They know this fact.
Maybe this new proposal benefits them them most in the short term, but they also face the biggest risk of ultimately loosing hundreds of thousands of dollars of their investment.

So assuming they want to screw the average joe for maximizing their profits makes no sense, because this is not possible. If they fuck it up, the price will be 5 cents in just a few weeks without ever recovering. Nobody wants that.

When do you plan to pursue STEEM listing on exchanges?

@socky that the real question brother

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@socky thats the real question brother

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>Our decision to use the constant 2e12 in the new rewards curve is based on the desire to not change the system too much (because we know that the system still functions)

This sounds weak to me. Don’t get me wrong, probably everyone knows the economics now is broken, it’s nice to see changes for sure, but I don’t get why to choose this specific curve though.

This specific statement is about the choice of constant, not the choice of curve. The motivation for this family of curves is in @vandeberg EIP curve post https://steemit.com/steem/@vandeberg/reward-curve-deep-dive

Thanks. I’ve read that post. What I didn’t get is the curve will go near linear at 16 steem, then the whole broken thing won’t really change much. But i guess we’ll see how it goes. @remind-me in 3 months

Posted using Partiko iOS

>Increasing the curation rewards to equal the author rewards

So clicking a button or setting an autovoter takes as much skill, sweat, and effort as creating a post?

Ridiculous.

Cg

I have to disagree with your position. Buying the stake that backs up the vote does cost in real life (or at least it should) and keeping your resources staked also has opportunity costs. There must be some balance and right now we have a 3 to 1 ratio in favor of author rewards vs voting. Content creation does not carry the financial risk of losing the value of an investment. A 50/50 split seems fair in my view as long as the right content is rewarded.

What I am not in favor of is reducing the rewards pool to fund the SPS, the funding should come from the portion of the inflation that is allocated to SP "interest". As a stakeholder am willing to forgo that income stream if it goes to projects that end up increasing the value of my holdings. According to some witnesses they are discussing that option (and I hope they give it a serious consideration).

While buying stake would be a useful contribution, the vast majority of stake was simply mined by those that have it now, and they use it to extract rewards from the pool by casting huge votes with that unpurchased stake. I'm not aware that any of the 35 whales on Steem now bought 1 satoshi of that stake. They extract ~90% of the rewards content creators make possible anyway. Content creators receive but ~10% of rewards.

I don't agree that SPS requires any mandatory funding. If proposals can't attract funding due to their virtues, that's a damn good reason not to fund them. The whole idea of the tax is simply to force funding of proposals by making it too complex to prevent bad proposals that no one would pay for otherwise from being not funded. Ancillary is that the tax being based on content creators rewards makes all the funding come from creators and none from the whales, while the whales will receive the vast majority of any increase in value such funding generates. It's a regressive tax on the poor and 90% of the financial benefits of that tax will go to the rich.

That's just an asshole move in my book.

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Nope, it doesn't, and in an ideal world we might just go right ahead and give 100% to authors.

But in the real world we need a system with sound economics in order for authors to be rewarded at all and that requires the curation share to be higher (indeed maybe even higher than 50%, but we are hoping for various reasons that 50% is high enough to work).

Think of it as a necessary evil if you prefer, rather than the straw man of someone making a claim about equal skill, sweat and effort, because no one is making that claim.

Best answer @smooth.

Cg

So earning enough money to have a significant amount of sp (let's say 10-50k) is easier than creating a post ?

Not everyone who clicks on the vote button has invested $10-$50k... However I see your point.

Put it this way, without content, there is nothing to vote on.

Cg

"Not everyone who clicks on the vote button has invested $10-$50k... However I see your point." => Those who matter a tad bit do. Content creators don't care about 1 cent upvotes

And without investors there would be no upvotes and no money for content creator. This is a chicken and the egg problem.

I don't see it as chicken and egg, because the content exists whether the investors are there or not.

For instance, if people feel they'll get a better deal with Voice, or even Facebook, then that's where we will produce our content. Investors will always follow the content.

The reason big investors haven't made money, isn't because of a reward pool share, it's because the price has either tanked since investing, or stayed stagnant.

That is due to the fact that there are no longer enough users to keep things moving along nicely, plus of course the bidbots are hogging the majority of the pool.

So you can up it to 90/10 in favour of the investor, and you still won't make any money.

Cg

https://i.imgflip.com/33vykm.jpg

@steemitblog,
Yeah I think this graphical description of upcoming changes probably work well!
https://steemitimages.com/640x0/https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmVe4pgTyir4WnwdwwSQttUTqCJsZ26SwzGYjevbj58bjT/Screen%20Shot%202019-06-19%20at%203.02.39%20PM.png

But I still doubt how that Downvote mana thing works, coz this can leads to more issues and people might rage quit by whales who misuse this power!
So I call drama for that content!
!dramatoken

Cheers~

Your chart is very broken. About a third of rewards go to bidbots. A lot of circle jerks and self votes are being cast too. An honest chart would represent those rewards flows. About ~10% of rewards goes to creators.

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You've got DRAMA!

To view or trade DRAMA go to steem-engine.com.

@steemitblog did not you learnt from HF 20 destruction to the steem price Why are you decreasing the author reward and if you increase curation reward only bid bot owners who are getting free power from @freedom will enjoy what a normal author will get for hard work in writing long articles if HF 21 Gonna increase steem price then oKay otherwise in my view it will destroy steem more why people will power up when there is almost no reward for power holders

There is a reward, with this the curation cut goes up. So they get more for having more powered up is they vote on content. Though what person is going to pay a bot to come in at a loss. Other than people who really want advertising. The bots will be taking way more of the curation than they did before. You should see people pulling assets out of bots in theory.

@steemitblog why always you busy in decreasing the author reward who surf all their time and struggle here and increasing curation will be enjoy for whales and free powr holder from freedom what a common men will take decreasing reward will decrease user interest why witnesses impose HF21 when no one is happy with it ? This is non sense stop doing this we all leave Steem and power down forever

Congratulations @steemitblog!
Your post was mentioned in the Steem Hit Parade in the following category:

• Comments - Ranked 4 with 113 comments

I think there will be a poll section in steem blockchain so that these kind of implementation can we publicly discussed. So that in future if there is any change that we want to implement can we polled in the public.

even if it publically discussed its the top witnesses who decide. The big power holders have given there power to them because they trust the choices the top 20 make.

But after that we know that what public wants and it will make pressure on witnesses to take decisions according to that.

Hoping to new networks come then.

Thanks for nothing. Always thinking how big guys can earn, and what whales call "good content" then just fuck everyone else.

Steemit.inc descentralized corporativism.

I strongly oppose all these proposals individually, and infinitely more strongly as one hard fork.

Individually, each part of EIP will worsen the problem they are claimed to solve. Nothing more reminds me that Steem is a mechanism for governance, TBH. Doubling curation rewards will increase the incentive of profiteers to extract rewards from the pool, and depress the price of Steem. The rewards curve increases the amount of rewards extracted by larger stakes, again repressing the price of Steem. SPS is become a tax on rewards, additional to the inflation tax, and that 10% inuring to witnesses. The downvote pool will increase the ability of substantial stakeholders to flag lesser stakeholders by removing the expense of doing so, and this will make the extant censorship of content ineffably worse. Lesser stakeholders will remain subject to retaliation for downvoting, and the downvote pool does not change that one bit.

None of these changes are being proposed and developed by people unaware of these issues. I no longer credit these failures to solve the problems claimed to be addressed to naivete, but instead to reveal the exact dynamic relationship between political rhetoric and governmental action. Profiteers are presently in possession of the majority of stake in Steem, and by extracting rewards by deployment of their stakes presently receive more than 90% of rewards. It is no mystery to me why EIP increases the profiteering potential of stake.

However, I suspect that the investing dilletantes proposing, developing, and implementing EIP are miscalculating the harm it will do to Steem. I predict that within 3 months of EIP implementation Steem price will be a fraction of the present price, that user retention will plummet, Steem's market cap will drop at least 10 places on CMC, and that many substantial stakeholders will sell out, abandoning Steem for greener pastures for profiteering, and the powerdowns ongoing now are preparatory to that exodus.

I strongly urge preparations to reverse HF21 be effected when these predicted affects on Steem become evident.

Further, I propose that an alternative HF be prepared in the event these predictions are correct. Investors have been encouraged to purchase investment vehicles like stocks and Steem since prehistory by capital gains. Extracting the rewards that are claimed to be purposed to encourage quality content creation prevents capital gains. HF22 should be designed to limit rewards such that nominal returns cannot be extracted by substantial upvotes, and eliminate curation rewards entirely - or allow creators to set them at their sole option. The ability to downvote should be restored to a negative financial incentive, to make it expensive to censor users. Taking these actions will restore sound financial incentive for investors seeking capital gains, and encourage content creators to remain on Steem and make the best content they can.

Please do both prepare to roll back HF21 if (when) it proves disastrous, and implement HF22 which will create strong capital gains instead. Do not implement SPS as a tax.

You're going to kill Steem if you don't prepare to rescind counterproductive code asap. Don't kill Steem for short term profiteering.

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One good idea that keeps going around: Why not take from witness rewards and make the remaining witness rewards a proposal in the SPS system? Then the funding amount does NOT have to be fixed.

That actually makes a lot of sense since their costs are fixed in USD.

Minimal =) I want to make love to the use of shape and typography! Resteem for your post,,,

Looks like the market really likes these proposed changes... Steem now 70th on Coinmarketcap. It's never been lower.

Lol, don't you know that has been the plan all along.
If we actually fixed the things wrong with this financial system things would be upended.

That is not in the plan of the elites, who control steem like they control everything else.

I actually believe their intentions are good, including the witnesses, but they can't seem to get out of their own way. I mean they would benefit much more from a higher steem price than a low one, even more so than the rest of us would.

It's as clear as the nose on their face.
Their actions are beginning to say this debacle is intentional.
They kicked out the blocks on abuse so they could extract max roi, and dump it, but now they can't figure out why the price is so low?
Nah, this was planned, as is the doubling down.

The sad thing is some of us will still be here when it is all ashes.
I still got golos, post once in a while.
Smdh.

...see my above ^ repy! lol

The actions of steem fit your/my paradigm more accurately than any other explanation...

.......but imagine if they knew it wouldn't sustain itself because the model was fundamentally flawed.....
Then it would be just a case of wealth transfer to 'them', before it imploded...Just sayin'

Even if it's not an outright sham, if it ends like an outright sham, what else would you call it?
There is very little evidence that steem wasn't intentionally kneecapped, and plenty that it was.
The reward curve was worked out before the coin went live, but the power struggle was just getting started.
Now look at us.
The abusers are winning.

Could you please tell me why you delay SMT once again how long we wait for smt and check steem price in satoshi why you not control his price why steem value dropping continuously ?????????????????????

I think steem will go 0.05$ after this hard fork. Stop doing hard fork. whenever you do hard fork steem goes down. This hard fork is useless. For the god sake please stop it.

You are absolutely correct. And that is their plan. It is finished. Sorry man. Experiment over.

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Because of the new wallet and password changes I think there Is a lot of dapps now that you can't login and use...

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Is 50:50 not fixed yet? One thing I really don't understand is that steemitblog's posts didn't include the exact ratio twice in a row. Are you also hesitant about this change?

This kind of change should be done at the SMT level. I think the main purpose of this is to keep holders who're trying to leave. Eventually ad-revenue sharing with authors is a must. Currently, Steemit requests holders to pay authors, which has been proven to be not sustainable. That's why many holders are leaving and Steemit is trying to give a myopic incentive to them.

ps. Due to several combined changes, you will not know which result is due to which change.

We should be able to downvote content anonymously, is it technically possible to hide/mask these transactions on blockchain?

That creates chaos friend. What if you are targeted by a whale and you never knew who downvoting you !? At least now you can raise a issue if some one constantly downvoting as we get to know who doing this.

Posted using Partiko Android

Can you please bring back the charting updates towards reaching the goals of implementing communities and SMTs?
Why has communication slowed down a lot again?

Hey guys, I don't know where I should report it and if it could be solved or not. But in Russia and Turkey steemitimages server is blocked by IP because of one travel blog hosted on same IP wrote about Amsterdam coffeeshops. You can check it here. Now I can not see any images on Steem posts, not even any post previews without VPN.

Maybe it is possible to change IP steemitimages IP address somehow to make it work again? I know there are not so many people using Steem in Russia & Turkey since you even don't care about recent bug on steemitwallet.com which is making unable to save changes for locale and other settings (page refresh resets site settings and I have to use steemiwallet in Russian by default). But anyways maybe you will fix at least this issue.

@steemitblog I'm sorry but I have to self upvote this bugs for visibility

good

Missing some great Commentary:

https://steemit.com/community/@dreemsteem/perhaps-we-need-to-speak-as-one

https://steemit.com/hardfork/@dreemsteem/now-you-can-see-the-numbers

Where are the Top Consensus Views?

https://steemit.com/dpoll/@shadowspub/poll-for-the-wtinesses-on-hf21

This type of economy is very effectively used by many projects that are focused on development of their platforms. With the stagnation STEEM has experienced I believe this system could very well help re-vitalize the platform. Hoping that the tests go well and there are no major bugs, but otherwise this is very exciting.

As far as content creator cuts, I believe that by focusing on improving the platform and bringing in more users, the content creators will actually end up earning more in the long term anyways.

Really looking forward to this and I am glad that the team as well as witnesses are staying on top of their game. Good luck with the implementation.

Follow me and i will return it

It seems to me that Steemit Inc. should do NOTHING. Leave all development up to individuals.
LOOK: we already HAVE new tokens-- done privately.
We already HAVE communities -- done privately by using the tokens and token tags.

Just leave things alone and someone will do what needs to be done to make Steem great again. It has already begun!

I went to Steemit.com and registered for a 2nd Steem account for myself @oatmealjoey over a week ago and I'm still waiting for it to be approved. Will it be accepted or will I have to pay money for creating additional accounts for Steem?

just one more question @steemitblog , i NEVER downvote ... not once since i got here , do i get extra upvotes for free instead ?

i think downvoting is detrimental btw, you'll never get big brands to sign up if they clash in flagwars with opposing brands
... my crazy opinion again ofcourse

Waooooooooo Many changes, it is amazing

I can see that I have a lot to learn here and wouldn't even know where to begin when it comes to discussing this. So, I will lurk. This is an excellent article but I have to admit to only barely understanding some parts of it now -- while other parts of it are within my range of understanding.

All I know is that I still believe in and endorse what you're hoping to achieve here.