@ned and the witnesses are dependent on the whales that demand the bots, since the bots provide their ROI.
Top witnesses and Stinc despise the idea. @neoxian is telling me right now in no uncertain terms that it will never happen.
2FA is expensive, slow, and a PITA. Worse, it will force whales to depend on capital gains for returns on their investments, and they like their ROI the way it is now.
They're in charge. That's why this is the present situation, because it benefits them, and they're the ones that matter. They have all the Steem.
That means now we need to find an alternative source of income for whales, instead of forcing them to stop earning altogether.
Any ideas? Manual curation is one way but takes more effort than earning through bots.
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What I have thought of is that investors have traditionally been availed of capital gains. For Steem, when the price of Steem goes up relative to other assets, investors gain capital. This mechanism is fully in place on Steem.
That's what made the BTC millionaires, capital gains.
Steem has attempted to provide a mechanism to promote content creators, instead of centralizing profits in the way other social media platforms do, like Fakebook, Twatter, etc. Creators on those platforms get nothing for their creations, unless they can monetize their followers with a mechanism like what Youtool does. However, that leaves those creators subject to having their accounts banned, as we can see happening in a massive wave of bannings, demonetization, and discouraging followers from those accounts.
The problem that has arisen on Steem is that the original miners of the token (mining is now not possible) have almost all the Steem in existence, and they have discovered that they can use the rewards mechanism to gain rewards, rather than promote creators. This is the problem at hand.
Unless we consider mechanisms that make rewards mining impossible, we can't solve the problem. We can easily solve the problem by ending stake-weighted VP, but the whales profiting from stake-weighting don't want that to happen, so Stinc and the witnesses won't do it. They can't go against the whales, because they're dependent on the whales for their income.
The whales can change it, if they collectively want to encourage content creators.
Capital gains is far more potential of extraordinary profits, but cash is king, and the whales want the cash they get now, and they can avoid the risk that Steem won't rise in price, depriving them of those amazing returns. There's a reason blue chip stocks are in the portfolios of the wealthiest people in the world, and it's because they're low risk.
So, Steemit has got caught in a self-perpetuating loop of being tied to the whales, whose best interests are served by eliminating risk as much as possible. While whales could profit far more from rising Steem price, that's not guaranteed, while leasing delegations, selfvoting, and circlejerking is guaranteed.
tl;dr No. I haven't come up with an alternative mechanism for whales to profit, other than capital gains.
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Then, I think I'll try an experiment to rally all whales into one post of mine: which will create dialog regarding supporting good and undervalued content creators.
The whales can select the people they'll support for a week and then change the people after that period ends.
Discussions can take place in that post until forever as to who'll support whom, why etc.
This can go on until the majority of quality minnows have established themselves in the platform.
What do you think?
I'm expecting it to be a huge flop so I'm not disappointed later on.
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I do believe there are efforts underway to do exactly this.
Somewhere in the 40s of rep, IIRC, there seems to be some upvote love thrown at promising accounts, I suspect to encourage them to stick around. Only about 10% of accounts remain active after a year on Steemit.
I've seen this backfire, as people see a couple posts with significant rewards, and think 'I've made it!', quit their job, and try to make a living off posting on Steemit. When the support moves on to the next account, they discover they acted prematurely to live off their Steemit earnings.
Sad.
For this reason, I don't support the idea. Folks find the sudden withdrawal of support devastating. I was bemused by it, but came to terms with it when I realized the reason for it.
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