We read a lot about what is wrong with Steem. I am obviously overlooking the gripe sessions and referring to the serious posts that are pointing to specific problems to stimulate discussions which, hopefully, move us towards resolution.
One such post was made by @ura-soul yesterday. This covered how the "Proof of Brain" model is broken. Specifically, the theme was that bidbots eliminate the ability to see POB evolve. Instead, the trending page is bought and paid for. The belief is that the most interesting content would move to the top under a POB scenario.
This could well be the case. I cannot dispute it. The question is "what is interesting"? Even without bid bots, couldn't a large account upvote, like Steemit, upvote a post to the trending page? Sure it could. Plus, what is quality? Or best? These are subjective terms.
The truth is the POB concept is built upon a DPOS blockchain. The core essence of the network is Proof of Stake. POB cannot get around this.
So what is the solution to this?
It is rather simple. Volume.
Consider this. We have 40K accounts transacting a day; picture that being 1M or 25 times the amount. What do you think happens to that daily reward pool? It gets diluted a great deal. Obviously, with DPOS, it is not a linear trade off, so we will not see posts payout go down by a factor of 25. Nevertheless, is it unreasonable to figure they will be slashed by a factor or 5-10? I do not believe so.
Under this scenario, we have a $10 post being worth a buck or two. The trending page will show payout of $10-$20.
Let us go one step further. What if we find 2M daily active users on here? Think that is outrageous? MySpace, which is a platform that basically died in the eyes of most, still have tens of millions of users. The truth is having a few million people on the internet is nothing.
At that point, we see a 50 fold increase in users on a daily basis. Again, if this doubles what we were dealing with before, we see the trending page equal to $5-$10. At that point, a 50 cent payout is very good.
Will this eliminate the use of bid bots? Maybe not but the incentive is decreased. We are also going to see many of these users attracted by the Communities feature which could also help to lesson the impact of the bots.
Ultimately, it all gets down to a numbers game. When there are a couple million people active and earning STEEM, that means the number of upvotes can increase a great deal. Sure, most of them have votes not worth much but it all adds up. Imagine having a post that get 15,000 upvotes. Even all their votes were worth $.0005 apiece (if that is even possible) that is still $75 when $10 might be considered a huge payout.
Source
As an aside, bear in mind the $ here means S.T.U, not USD.
While we are at it, what about USD?
That is hard to tell since we know markets are their own animal. Logic would dictate that the price of STEEM would increase under this scenario. At what rate would it do that is impossible to figure. A 50x the number of daily users might result in a 100x in the price of STEEM; or it might net a 25X. Who knows?
Thus we cannot really focus upon the fiat currencies. Besides, by the time Steem has that many users, the ecosystem will be such that commerce on here will be priced in STEEM/SBD. There will come a time when our mindset will move away from pricing everything in fiat. Sure, we will have many things that still must be paid in such. However, that will diminish over time.
As was pointed out in the post, there are already interfaces that are blocking out the trending page and removing those that used the bots. There might come a time when paying for exposure is not getting the return desired. If the eyeballs are not there, it is tough to justify the cost.
Another thing that we are going to see happen is the influence of blogging on this blockchain will diminish. We will not have 1M or 2M bloggers on here. Instead, we will have people who are using the different applications, many that have nothing to do with blogging. Hence, we will see a lot of upvotes going to those in the communities on the different applications. That changes things greatly. Those people are not concerned about the Trending page or what is on it.
It is time to seriously consider what this place will be like with a million posts a day on it. Based upon the numbers put out by @penguinpablo, it looks like we average a post/comment per transacting account. How much different will these "problems" be with a million or more posts/comments being done a day?
Everything will be diluted to such a point that earning a lot of STEEM is not going to take place. We might see the average post get .01 or .02. There will be a lot with less than that. It is impossible to be any other way since the reward pool is fairly constant (actually it is shrinking with the inflation rate) and the number of users exploding.
Of course, this is where the SMTs enter the picture as a means to provide incentive to users. Nevertheless, if the price of STEEM follows logic, people with even a couple hundred SP will be very happy.
With activity comes changes. While they are probably not related at the moment, although I think more accounts are being claimed these days than before (I am at 73 myself). Let us look at the Resource Credit numbers as put together by @holger80.
Over the last few weeks, the cost of doing things on the blockchain has dropped some. This is something I believe we will see continue as more activity takes place on the blockchain.
One thing I learned being on here, give things some time. Change does not happen as quickly as we like but it is taking place and we are moving in the right direction.
I do not believe POB is dead, in hibernation perhaps, but not dead. It is pre-mature to call that.
If you found this article informative, please give an upvote and resteem.
An anonymous decentralized CAPCHA system.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Not for Steem-wide, but for specific platforms that really care about POB, that is absolutely perfect.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Non linear rewards didn't allow for most of this abuse.
The problem there is putting muzzles on the top ~70 accounts to stop them from making steem unattractive to newbs.
We could have skipped the last two years.
This end result was known by all but those who benefitted from the abuse.
O.0
The earliest adopters were told they could use steem as their personal atm for as long as they wanted, now they see the results of that plan.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
I wrote a comment on ursa and instead of going into a long drawn out comment again on here I think I'll just write a post containing my thoughts on bid bots.
A TLDR of it though is bid bots are a stop-gap to fill a current issue on the platform, but they are not the root of the problem. Fix the root of the problem and the need for bid bots will go away.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Volume will fix a LOT of things on Steem-Some broken, some not :)
At least in the foreseeable near term, more volume will equal more bid bot usage. The numbers you use are average (or maybe median) that more volume will tend to push down. The very top should remain near the same.
You are correct in that the next million users are not going to all be bloggers. This place has used and rewarded bloggers to build the platform, but to really grow, to become truly mainstream is going to require shorter posts such as "Hi How are you doing?" It is the way of it, I think.
The trending page, as it is, is useless to me. Who knew or could have foreseen that there could be as much garbage at the top of the heap as at the bottom?
I believe it will self repair at some point. The steps being taken right now, as we speak, are trending in that direction.
Thanks for a great post. Well thought and written, in a perfect world would have made the trending page. Someday...
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
I think this will also be somewhat impacted as front-ends start to leverage the Hivemind upgrade which may make it easier to filter out those promotional posts. It will also make the Proof of Brain concept more visible for the communities that consolidate those interests and engage more actively. There is also the potential to see front-ends start setting nonweighted votes as part of the trending algorithm which could also do a lot of filtering.
Posted using Partiko iOS
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Nice write up post. For me, the question that kept bothering my mind is that which factor usually influence the rising and falling of steem price generally?
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Markets are their own animal and with crypto, all coins tend to move in line with Bitcoin.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Okay. Now i understand. So bitcoin determines steem price right
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
It has been the trend but it does not mean it is guaranteed. Markets are their own entity and prices flow based upon buying and selling demands.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
This is what I call interesting. Amazing job!
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Thank you so much for participating in the Partiko Delegation Plan Round 1! We really appreciate your support! As part of the delegation benefits, we just gave you a 3.00% upvote! Together, let’s change the world!
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
@trufflepig does a daily post showing what the trending page would look like without bidbots and self votes. This is the latest that just came out:
https://steemit.com/steemit/@trufflepig/non-bot-trending-2019-02-08
@trufflepig also does a daily post of the "best" 25 posts that did not get good rewards. So far as I know, nobody with any power looks at that one.
Presumably, if we had millions of steemers here, some of those people would be coming with money, and so the rewards pool would grow. This is the focus of a few initiatives I'm involved with that are trying to get small, medium and large business to see the value of coming here to post their social media in a place with a good alexa ranking, dapps rankings, and fanatic users.
We have some success with getting those people to invest in steem and try. Often those people get killed for one reason or another, but hope springs eternal, and action creates results.
Only if that is what you seek. Most of what I see here are wonderfully creative posts by excellent bloggers, travellers, crypto-nerds and artists.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Thanks for calling @fitinfun! Here is a small upvote for this post and my opinion about it.
To my mind this post is at least 6 SBD worth and should receive 170 votes.
By the way, you can find TODAY'S TRUFFLE PICKS HERE.
I am
TrufflePig, an Artificial Intelligence Bot that helps minnows and content curators using Machine Learning. If you are curious how I evaluate content, you can find an explanation here!Have a nice day and sincerely yours,
TrufflePigDownvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
This post has been included in the latest edition of SoS Daily News - a digest of all you need to know about the State of Steem.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Honestly, I think what @yabapmatt and @ned think is correct. A huge reason Steem will have a future is in content promotion more so than POB.
Eliminating all the bots will actually destroy the value Steem has. See, Steem has a unique ability to devour the internet. No joke, Steem is Ethereum's Web3 vision, they just don't know it yet.
Why do I say that? More and more, it is becoming easy to have your content that you post on Instagram also go on Facebook and other social media sites and that's cool. However, Steem has an even greater potential to do this because of its opensource nature and condenser.
Right now, when I post an article on Steemit its going to show up on a bunch of other websites with completely unique domain addresses and audience. It doesn't matter that one crowd hangs out at Steemit and another at Steempeak, because they all will see my post. The power of Steem is that it will eventually end up everywhere, and when that day comes, so will my content.
Bots serve a lot of value for the community. Humans like automating things, this will only continue on into the future. When I like something someone does enough they get one of my 50 streams on steemvoter. This is an awesome application of upvote bots.
Lastly, the bid bots really don't matter, because the owners of all that Steem have the right to vote on whatever they want and delegate to whoever they want. The whole point of crypto is that we get the power back to decide what we do with our money and how we use it. Nobody is forced to bid on a bot, and nobody has the right to tell someone they can't sell their own vote.
The freedom we all have is to build what we wish existed. Don't like bots? Guess what, the Engrave team hates bots and they solved the bot issue pretty well for their platform. Its simple, they charge a 15% beneficiary fee on all posts on their platform and that is all it takes to ensure I don't use bidbots on any posts I put on their platform. I expect profit from the bot when I bid, anything less than 20% annoys me. So, their 15% makes using bots on their platform a non-starter, so I use Steemit when I don't need the post to be directly on my own domain.
Another point I would like to make is this, while I don't plan to run a bidbot, I'm building a business that will absolutely depend on bidbots for profitability. This business I am working on should bring in around $200,000 and on-board approximately 1500 businesses onto the Steem ecosystem per year. I cannot do any of that without bots, specifically bidbots.
Sometimes we have to think carefully about what we care about and why we do. There's never a time to turn something into a religion unless, well, its actually a religion. We've seen people get religious about the Bitcoin Whitepaper, about immutability (that one I understand), about POS to "save the Earth" and also POB.
I won't tell anyone what they must believe in, but if I had to pick just one thing I wanted Steem to perfect, it would be immutable free speech. Am I getting that? Not as long as flagging exists, and DPoS is also a problem for free speech too, since its not difficult for governments to pressure 20 people to do things their way.
My point? You don't always get what you want, but if you try real hard, you just might find ... you get what you need.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit