A Comment Thread

So there is a comment thread that I would like to share with everyone and it is on the post whale drama by @zeddjacob

Now I am going to focus on sharing just the last part which was a response to the question: "Where does flagging fit into the PoB algorithm?"

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From Kryzsec:

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" From the whitepaper:

The Story of the Crab Bucket

A man was walking along the beach and saw another man fishing in the surf with a bait bucket beside him. As he drew closer, he saw that the bait bucket had no lid and had live crabs inside. "Why don't you cover your bait bucket so the crabs won't escape?", he said. "You don't understand.", the man replied, "If there is one crab in the bucket it would surely crawl out very quickly. However, when there are many crabs in the bucket, if one tries to crawl up the side, the others grab hold of it and pull it back down so that it will share the same fate as the rest of them." So it is with people. If one tries to do something different, get better grades, improve herself, escape her environment, or dream big dreams, other people will try to drag her back down to share their fate

Anyways if you read the relevant sections in the whitepaper on voting (upvotes and downvotes) you will see many things become apparent. Firstly that steemit is a live action experiment for the prisoners dilemma with n-prisoners and that the problems happening with haejin were predicted long ago.

Though quoting the paper is hard do to the character they use for spaces (its a pdf that isn't encoded as plaintext) so copying from it provides strange symbols and the formatting goes haywire. So instead I will do a paraphrasing:

If everyone were to vote for themselves then there would be no progress in the system and the currency would fail. If one person votes for themselves then that person will get undeserving rewards.

Well considering we have an over 50% average of voting power being used on self voting (and haejin is not helping that number with ~86% of his voting power used on himself) we see a problem there. However this is covered in the beginning of the voting abusesection on how to handle a specific case like this:

paraphrasing

The ones with the most stake in steem have the most to lose from self voting. Think about this, if a CEO decided to stop paying everyone and take all the profits for himself then everyone would stop working and leave. Fortunately, any work getting a high concentration of votes (upvotes) will also be subject to higher levels of scrutiny. Through the addition of negative-voting it is possible for large numbers of smaller stakeholders to nullify the rewards of collusive groups Furthermore large stakeholders have more to gain by negative-voting than they do from upvoting themselves [, because if the currency falls to 0 then all of their efforts are worthless.] In fact, larger stakeholders are likely to be more effective at policing abuse [, which includes collusive voting and self voting,] than they would by voting for smaller contributions.

You can read the white paper (and relative sections) here or by clicking the three bars in top right-hand corner and scrolling down to the steem white paper.

The relevant sections are:

Distributing Currency
Voting on Distribution of Currency
Voting Abuse
Crab-Bucket story

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The question now comes to one that is implied at the end of voting abuse when talking about crab mentality which is:

Is [Haejin] the abuser profiting at the expense of others?

My argument, when looking into it, is yes. So irregardless of Bernie or Transisto or whomever someone wants to put as the face to this anti-haejin campaign, I believe haejin is getting collusive votes and is taking an irrationally large sum of the reward pool for a single person. There is a website that lists everyone by their expected payout (i.e. the sum of all of the payout values) and haejin (ranking in the number 1 position) was around 2 and a half times the next person. The only difference is haejin has been ranking number 1 for weeks. More to how haejin is harming steem as a whole is in part of each time a post pays out, it removes steem from the reward pool. When enough steem is removed then the value of votes decreases (as the value of a vote s proportional to the steem in the reward pool) as well when a single user (like haejin) holds so much steem and actively makes it liquid (i.e. trades it away) the value decreases as there is an influx of it (this is a common law of monetary inflation, and basically haejin is like the Weimar republic by using steem to basically print his money) and since the vote is also proportional to the value of steem (which has been declining) its not hard to realize that our votes to counter the abuse are dwindling...

To add another layer of abuse is that there are many sources that show just how inaccurate his TA's are (one of which was a mock portfolio made of all the cryptos that haejin said would go up,well the value of that portfolio is in the negatives had you actually bought into them, and a lot negative)

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Now going to be external from this is to give a brief definition of PoB (Proof of Brain) as it is defined in the bluepaper (not whitepaper) which describes PoB as:

Token systems that reward users as they contribute to a token-based community system require
mechanisms for establishing and evaluating content’s social value: we call this “Proof-of-Brain.”

and thats about the extent of it with exception of some minor details later on. What this means is that as a user you are supposed to read something and decide on what you think it is worth, if you think it is worth more than it is receiving than it is receiving than you should upvote it proportionally, if you think it is worth less than you should downvote it. Each person will have their own value that they give the post and somewhere along the way the value should average out between that based upon some function of their stake in the system and what they believe the value should be. Well when haejin has people vote on his TA's within seconds of creation (even the ones with videos) or large stakeholder users come along and vote all 10 of his TA's in rapid succession it brings into question whether they actually read the content or not.

Anyways, this is my take on it. "

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Wow, that is a long answer for a simple question... Anyways I lied, I just wanted to put it on this account somewhere to get this position across on why the whitepaper (and bluepaper) support such an argument. I know few will see this post but its worth it still. Anyways go read the entire thread!