A simple, radical change to Steem that could fix most of our problems.

What would you say if I told you that a simple change to how Steem works could get rid of bid-bots, circle-jerks, self-voting, delegating for return, and also the incessant complaining about those things, forever? What would you say if I told you that it would work nearly maintenance-free - no flag wars, hardforks to fix exploits, or hardforks to fix the exploits introduced by the previous hardforks? What would you say if I told you that it would make literally everyone's experience here freer, happier, and more enjoyable, and almost everyone more profitable? (Sorry, bid-bot operators.) Oh, and what if as a little side effect it also solved the ninja-mining problem?

If it sounds like I'm offering you the Philosopher's Stone, don't worry - it won't stop spam. We'll still have to deal with spam.

I'll tell you about this solution later in the post, but to explain it I have to start at the beginning, so you understand the root causes of the conflict that has all of those things as its symptoms.

Proof of Stake

Steem on it's basic level is a Proof of Stake economic system. We talk about delegated Proof of Stake, but that's just for the part about who operates the blockchain. The rewards system is very vanilla Proof of Stake at the beginning. Proof of Stake systems are a neat bit of economic stage magic that use the power of controlling inflation to maintain the value of the currency. Rewards, which come from inflation, are assigned to people who commit to holding the coin for a certain period of time. Since people want the coin in order to hold it and get more of it, the more people who hold the coin, the more the price goes up, the more people stake the coin, and the more the price goes up again. It's kind of circular but it works, as long as you can get past critical mass of people staking at the beginning.

rshares

Most Proof of Stake systems simply assign their rewards in the coin that they're based on. Where Steem gets complicated is that rewards are given in a highly-restricted hidden currency called rshares. As a regular user you never see an rshare; when you haven't spent them they're represented as voting power, and after you've spent them they're represented as the dollar value you see at the bottom of posts, STUs. Rshares can only live up to seven days after they're spent; after that they're forcibly converted to Steem and SBD. Rshares are invisible, short-lived, and there are very few ways to use them, but they're still a currency, and they're still issued as stake rewards; you get them based on how much Steem you have staked by converting it to SP.

The Core Game

The reason Steem decided to restrict its stake rewards by issuing them as rshares is what I like to call the Core Game: producing, discovering, and rewarding content. This was created in order to distinguish the Steem blockchain from others by giving it a real-world use as a place to create, consume, and interact. Steem is not just one currency among many, it is a currency that supports a system of human social growth.

In order to get people to participate, the designers of Steem chose to issue stake rewards in tokens that are only good for playing the game: rshares, the Disney Dollars of Steem.

The Core Conflict

This system has attracted a fair number of people who are interested in participating in the Core Game, building social communities where we get rewarded in cryptocurrency, interacting with and helping each other, and basically creating a society built on Steem. But as the price has gone up, it has also attracted a fair number of people who are primarily interested in getting their stake rewards. Those two groups have come into significant conflict, and this is where bid-bots, circle-jerks, self-voting and all the other hyphenated things that people dislike come into the picture. All of these things are workarounds to the heavy restrictions placed on rshares in order to drive the Core Game. They exist to help the people who want their stake rewards get their stake rewards despite the ways that rshares are built to make that difficult.

This conflict continues to escalate, and will escalate endlessly as long as the two groups consider themselves to be fundamentally opposed. We need to find a way to cut the Gordian knot of the Core Conflict and end the war. Fortunately I think I've found it.

The Solution

I believe that both of these groups can coexist by a simple, radical improvement in how the blockchain functions: allow individual users the choice to take some or all of their stake rewards in Steem rather than rshares.¹

For investors: If you own 0.1% of the staked SP, you will get 0.1% of the rewards as they're issued, period. No giving up money to vote-selling services and vote-buyers in order to get your rewards as liquid currency. No conflicts over flag wars, who's in trending, whether you should self-vote, who you're voting on. No difficulty at all. Stake your money and get your return.

For participants: There's no longer any reason for a bid-bot, or a self-vote, or a circle-jerk. The people who want their rewards will be able to get them without those methods, and without bothering us. And most importantly, rather than forcing in a lot of people who just want financial reward, the Core Game ecosystem will function based entirely on people who are part of it voluntarily. We will direct our stake into the rshares system by our own active consent, and those stake rewards will make up the reward pool for voting.

We can stop spending effort on trying to find technical solutions to the conflict, and start spending it entirely on making the Core Game more appealing and attracting more voluntary participants. The great thing about investors in this system is that they provide the benefit of their stake while requiring almost no effort to maintain; the system works simply and easily for them. All of our developmental, social, and personal investment into the platform can go to making participating in the content portion of Steem extremely compelling and attracting new users into it. Which is not only way more fun but more useful to humanity. If you've looked at social media in general it's kind of a trash fire.

This also fits the dominant human value system around here quite a lot better than the current state of things, because it operates entirely under a system of active consent. Zero forcing people into participating the way we want them to through social pressure, flags, or more restrictive system design. The people who currently gain value through self-voting, delegating for return, and vote-selling will switch to earning their stake rewards directly, because it's better for them. Those of us who are interested in participating on the content side of things will be in an ecosystem where it's just us, playing a game we want to be playing, all of us making it better for the others.²

Each group will provide an independent means of value for Steem, and the two will synergize, the two groups currently with conflicting goals supporting each other as they should be. The social value of the Core Game will make Steem the best Proof-of-Stake system for investors, and the investors will keep demand for Steem high, allowing us to make the Core Game the best social media environment online. Everyone wins.³

What about Steemit?

There's a problem, and I got hung up on it for a little while. @steemit's ninja-mined stake, added to the Core Game rewards pool as it is now, would inflate vote values so much that it would be vastly profitable for people to reject their direct stake rewards and come into the social side of things and sell their votes again. But if you've been following along, you'll have noticed that I've been assigning rewards in a way that leaves out an extremely important group of people.

We can use Steemit's stake to pay the witnesses. @steemit will take its stake rewards in Steem, and use that Steem to cover the witness rewards.⁴ This will perform essentially the same function that the account sitting without voting does now: expand the value of everyone else's stake. Except that now it will be codified into the system as a mechanism for paying the blockchain's overhead costs.

Conclusion

Much of the conflict within Steem comes from trying to force two divergent goals to exist within the same ecosystem, when we are entirely capable of building a dual environment that can support both of them at the same time. Steem will be vastly improved on both a practical and a moral level by removing the non-consensual aspects from its system design. Everyone will have an easier route to their goals. We will be able to devote our energies to improving our product rather than fighting amongst ourselves.

And it's easy to implement. It's so cheap in computation power that it will actually reduce per-user system load, as the total number of votes will decrease. Once Voting Mana is here it opens the possibility to choose Steem or rshares on a minute-to-minute basis, so if you need to go on vacation you can just flip a switch and not have to worry about voting for a while. Investors will be able to change over too if they get interested in participating.

Both groups will get what they want. Everyone will be able to seek their own value here without this overarching conflict, and removing it will make everyone more successful.

I'm one of the larger beneficiaries of vote-selling here; I've been able to profit quite significantly from the fact that people who want their stake rewards currently have to sell them to me at a discount. I believe that I will be better off in the long term under this system, because the part of Steem that I enjoy most will be freed from the cost of the conflict and allowed to grow to its full potential.

Please join me.