The Armchair Economics of @randowhale

Randowhale was born recently. In response to vote buying equity 'whaleshares'.

What is @randowhale? 

You basically send 2sbd or 2steem to @randowhale with the URL of your post and receive a whale vote from 1 to 50%.

Given the current voting power of randowhale this seems to be a (clear) profitable thing to do over time if your post is above 40 dollars or so.

It's not much of a gamble right now, it's a rational investment decision.

One of the issues with having a whale sized amount of SP is that you need another whale to come after you, forgoing  curation rewards, passing them to the initial whale - there is therefore no incentive for them to do this from a financial perspective.

Randowhale locks in what would be curation rewards and also gives the blogger a chance to profit. It's a win/win.

Who created it? 

Where do I see this going?

Given a market of rational people I would expect the randowhales voting power to decrease to the point where the average vote adds around 2sbd to the payout. A real gamble, if people are rational, then an actuarially fair bet.

This is a much more complex decision however, due to the n squared algorithm. Not all votes are equal, a randowhale vote on a 5k post will add significantly more than a randowhale vote on a 10 dollar post.

Will we reach a steady state?

I see a few things potentially happening.

Randowhale will have a 'day of rest' every now and then... to recuperate voting power OR there will be a dynamic shift in voting power based on the current value of the post. As higher valued posts will have a significantly larger chance of making a profitable bet.

Only posts that have less than x in rewards will be able to participate. This would incentivize early randowhale voting, increasing the curation rewards of randowhale and stop those with already high payouts from participating.

The price or voting percentage will adjust to maximize profitability. Keeping a relatively high voting power and a high enough price for people to rationally act

Evolving further with a shift to a more linear rewards curve...

From Tuesday this week there will be a hardfork that makes rewards more linear. There will be less of a pile on effect and posts going exponentially higher in payout value. How will this affect randowhale?

I personally think it will shift more into a pure gambling service and eventually tend to a steady state where only high valued posts will be profitable. It may actually turn into a promotion tool too as the rational demand may outstrip the voting power supply. To put it simply, a new user that wants to get some exposure with a whale vote may vote a very low value post so they are noticed and can snowball a following on steemit.

Implications

It's exciting to see these new services developed that provide demand for steem dollars. I hope to see many more in the future. At the moment these simple but innovative initiatives are what will drive the network effect of Steemit forward. An eBay version of Steemit, or a place where people can trade services like fivver. Maybe somewhere a services economy can develop. 

All these ideas are fun and would build up the network effect however they wouldn't reduce the liability of the rewards pool and the investments that Steemit is bootstrapping.

What I'd like to see is randowhale and other services for the Steem economy tie in with revenue generation. Something as simple as sending 1% of funds generated to the @null account to be burnt. This way we have a win/win/win situation, better rewards for bloggers, better curation for randowhale and a reduction in the supply of SBDs, increasing the value of Steem indirectly.

Once we get to this point, of burning based on demand, we start to see a more sustainable, revenue based model.

That's when Steemit gets a step closer to World Domination.

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