This is where we are at guys. @charlieshrem is ranked 70th in the Witness voting. https://steemit.com/~witnesses
This is after being inactive for over a year. When Charlie came to the Steem blockchain in 2016 I was pretty neutral about it. He was propelled way up on the STEEM witness list by Steemit INC / @ned and it was extremely lucrative. Eventually Charlie decided to focus his energy elsewhere and has a new company https://cryptoiq.co/ and also seems to have done some work with the Jaxx wallet.
As you see in the screenshot above Charlie posted that he wrote another blog about his time in prison. Instead of posting it on STEEM he posted it on Medium. https://medium.com/@cshrem/a-geek-in-prison-part-12-progressive-relaxation-by-charlie-shrem-mindfulness-meditation-in-2e755bb9c55e
Is He Embarrassed?
We have had so many people come and go over the last couple of years it is hard to put everyone in the same box but time and time again we see this pattern. We support new people coming in especially the ones with relative "celebrity" status and then they peace out. It is odd that @charlieshrem is still running a witness node. Is he afraid to be associated with blogging on this platform?
Issues
I have brought up the issues with the witness situation several times and I actually have witnesses acting like my ideas are non compelling and I don't know what I'm talking about. You will have various disagreements but I have invested a lot of energy into social media and have interviewed many people about why they use different platforms.
Issues
I have brought the issue up previously that STEEM Witnesses are sticking way too long in their positions and that vote decay needs to be introduced and also that they need to be rotated out if they have been a witness for 6 months in the top 20 especially.
A lot of them aren't really doing anything for STEEM and aren't involved in the project at all.
The way the voting is set up right now some of these people essentially never get bumped out and then people can't figure out why all these people just leave all the time.
Conclusion
I don't feel that a lot of the issues will ever get corrected with STEEM and personally I'm done for the most part expending energy making suggestions for this platform. It is a great use case and a great learning experience and some of the 3rd party development has been really amazing.
For most of the STEEM witnesses this blockchain has just became almost a production test network and a funding source for their EOS related projects. I'm not even trying to pump up EOS. The STEEM blockchain from a technical aspect is pretty amazing. It was the initial distribution, governance, and a host of other issues that have held it back from its real potential.
I'm already working on solutions over here and ultimately things have to be done differently for a platform to realize the true potential of this technology.
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feels like its been a long time
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Yeah it has been almost two years since he was really active and it actually took a long time for his rank to fall below the top 40 spots on the Witness list. For a few this platform has been a real cash cow.
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Yeah and i thought the idea of long-term leadership roles is contradictory to decentralization lol
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Yeah the way it is set up is so contradictory to the ideals in my opinion. One of the things I feel like is tough in trying to create these decentralized communities is people really agreeing and being able to move forward with a plausible solution. We saw it with Bitcoin where there has been the block size debate which caused one of the best developers Gavin Andresen to not even be working on it anymore.
We see it with STEEM where there is a lot of disagreement on what to do but unfortunately even if a large majority of people feel that for instance Vote Decay should be added to an upcoming hardfork the majority of the power is held by very few and why would the witnesses approve something that could cause them to lose their positions?
We have learned a lot from this platform though. I feel like we are at a tipping point with all this stuff. Either we are going to see some of this 3rd party development end up being their own SMTs and their own communities in a way or we are going to see a lot of that development work and ideas get ported over to the EOSIO software whether it is on the EOS mainnet or individually launched.
It is hard to really say for sure but it takes a ton of funding and talent to put all this together and get this far and as rocky as it has been the community was always the most powerful thing. I'm working on my own project and if everything goes right Steemians with a certain reputation and certain SP level will get an airdrop of equal distribution on the platform. Also EOS hodlers will get airdrops as well of an equal distribution.
Nothing is going to be perfect but for it to have the best chance I feel that it has to have a wide distribution and not something that is so out of wack to where there are God kings from the get go.
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Brian I want some of YOUR Tokens I am your BIGGEST FAN !!!
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👍
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One issue with witness voting is that most people don't even vote. I think there needs to be more publicity when it comes to voting so that people are not just witnesses because of dormant votes and other people not even voting. People need to be "forced" to vote. Also, look how fast jerrybanfied was knocked out of the top 20 because of that video. I guess when something is in people's face, they are more likely to react to it.
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It is interesting for sure and personally I feel between vote decay and possibly even a system where individual votes are accounted for by saying that each account with over 500 SP is a relevant vote so that somehow is factored into the algorithm of ordering them.
The Jerry situation was interesting because he was one of the only people to ever show up "late" and effectively campaign and rise up into a relevant position. I believe he was the most voted on Witness and wasn't necessarily there because a few founder / ninja miners voted for him.
The situation was entertaining and will go down in STEEM history but I feel that other witnesses looking to move up really tried to use that as fuel to jocky for position. The craziest part of all of it was that he shut down that witness node when he could have easily just kept it up and with no vote decay would have stayed high in the ranks and very profitable.
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We need trusty witness in the Steem blockchain.
This guy is an example of what a witness cannot morally do.
IMO I think that a good approach would be a kind of Election campaign, as in politics.
A witness should sell his program and then people would vote him or not, depending on his commitment and success reaching promised milestones.
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Yeah the thing is with most elections there is an expiration date on the term. Like in the United States a president is in office for 4 years and then can only be elected one more time for a total of 8 years.
Well 6 months is an eternity in crypto and there are too many people hanging out with votes that never decay. So yeah it would be nice to see other people be able to take a crack at it.
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woh I never knew Charlie Shrem was in steemit. However running for witness when inactive is pretty scary. I want witness to do work like how miners in bitcoin do work and spend money to secure the network. Charlie Shrem is also been part of pretty scammy icos lately. It a petty...
Fuzzex was one that I thought was ok, but no they just have to get bought out by Roger. :(
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Well they are spending money on server costs but when they are voted into position they can just hang out and be super profitable for a long time without really doing anything on here when there are a lot of technical people who really can't take the risk of pissing around trying to become a chosen one.
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I'm glad you know what time it is.
Never trust a man with a beard...
www.frot.co.nz
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Hahha, I actually had some pretty insane facial hair at one time.
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You look like Magnum PI
www.frot.co.nz
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Epic!
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Just stumbled on this post way too late. I'll throw my thoughts in just for the hell of it. The issue isn't anything vote decay will solve. The issue is that users are voting witnesses for arbitrary reasons and not changing up or removing their votes. A witness that's ranked highly but doesn't give two shits is a very minor, but existing, risk to the blockchain. A user with a lot of staked funds who votes arbitrarily is as much of a risk. The only real solution is user education.
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Well with 85% of people losing interest and leaving oftentimes they may vote but then they are gone or inactive. Also if they are using a proxy oftentimes those people have their own interest that they are trying to capitalize on and isn't necessarily for the best interest of the platform.
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Agreed. If people are holding STEEM, as all voters do, you'd think they'd have a vested interest in voting in good witnesses that will help their investment retain value and grow.
If we do go the vote decaying route, there's a lot of technical issues that will have to be resolved. Take a look at this Github discussion: https://github.com/steemit/steem/issues/953 (my account there is Gryter with the red/black logo).
Part of the issue is it's difficult to predict the actual results of decaying votes. We can create projections and models but we don't know how scammers will react to circumvent it and if there will be any unforeseen consequences (kinda like what happened when RCs were implemented).
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It is honestly rough on STEEM because it is like it is lead blocking for all these other chains who are using DPos and have some sort of platform like this.
Even watching CPU and stuff on EOS is kind of interesting yet frustrating if you don't have much Staked.
It is all a crazy experiment for sure!
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