In this post, I want to share my thoughts on the proposed worker proposal system by @blocktrades and why I believe it could bring massive value to Steem.
Before I begin, let me mention that my decisions as a Witness and stakeholder are in line with what's best for Steem and that I'm always open for discussions.
With that said, let me quickly explain in a few sentences what a worker proposal system is.
What is a Worker Proposal System (WPS)?
This is a very rough description how I would explain it, as a detailed one would probably fill up a post alone
Essentially a WPS (for Steem) is a system designed to make it easier for individuals to be rewarded for work & projects, primarily for Steem.
Individuals are able to create proposals for projects/tools they want to work on/they want other people to work on, for example with a minimum salary they want to earn or even need to earn in order for it to be sustainable.
Stakeholders of Steem are then able to vote for proposals. If enough stakeholders voted in favour of a specific proposal, the person responsible for the work is then getting paid for doing exactly that.
So with that out of the way, let me get straight to the reasons why I believe it would be valuable for Steem.
#1 Incentivizing Steem Blockchain Development
The main reason I believe some kind of worker proposal system is necessary for the longevity and success of Steem is that Steem is a technology and its success is dependant on the work people invest in improving it.
Currently, most of the blockchain development is being done by Steemit Inc. - the company who initially created the blockchain. While they are making progress, I think many will agree that in order for Steem to stay relevant, we need a lot more development from a more diverse source of developers. Especially if we want to prevent stagnation due to development centralisation.
Let's just take Smart Media Tokens as an example - subtokens for Steem. They should have been ready a year ago, but will hopefully be launched in a few months; in a light version (meaning not all features will be available from the start).
The reason they are so delayed is that Steemit Inc. was completely responsible for them, and without pointing fingers; that's a centralised risk.
Could they have been launched earlier if we had a WPS in place? I can't say that for sure, but if @blocktrades (the company) is able to implement a WPS (in addition with all the other work they have done for Steem in the very early days), then I'm pretty sure they could have done some work on SMTs. Or blocktrades could have even finished up rocksdb earlier, which would have freed up time for Steemit Inc. to finish SMTs.
But even without focusing on SMTs - imagine we, as a community, would decide that downvotes should be more powerful in order to better combat abuse. Who would develop that? Hint: WPS
#2 Incentivizing Development for Essential Projects & Tools
What do you think is one thing that many of the d/Apps listed on SteemApps.com (for example Steem Monsters, Partiko, Steemhunt, Dtube, Smartsteem etc) have in common?
Most or maybe even all of them are using libraries.
While I'm not sure which programming languages have been used for each app, I'm certain that most of them are using either dsteem, steem-js, beem, radiator or another library. If you're not sure what those are: all of them are libraries which are used to easily work with the blockchain. They are pretty much the backbone of many apps - and AFAIK all of them have been created by community developers.
One of the most important ones is beem by @holger80, which saved many projects based on python from premature death, as the previous library piston, was deprecated. Holger, who has also a PhD, spend a lot of time developing this project and AFAIK didn't really earn much from it.
Projects & tools like that are crucial for 3rd party development on top of Steem. But sadly the chance of them being abandoned or not being updated as much as they should be is quite high, as they are not projects with a business model, meaning they're not making money.
And that's where WPS would come into place. A developer such as Holger could be incentivized to make beem as good and secure as possible (we don't want errors on the basic structure many apps are depending on) for Steem.
But where does the money come from to fund these proposals?
Where does the money come from?
Well, there are currently 2 options.
- Donations
- Inflation of STEEM (New Or Redirect)
Personally, I would like to see a system that is combining both options, as I believe it should be the goal of STEEM to reward those people contributing to its success via code. And the most direct way is inflation.
Donations can help to have some bursts of support, as people have to give something from their own hard-earned STEEM/SBD. On the other hand, inflation is a way to have a longlasting method.
Which inflation source?
However, if we use some of the inflation - do we add new inflation to the reward pool or do we redirect some of it?
We have currently 5 uses of STEEM inflation as you can see in the image below.
New Inflation
We could add another one and leave everything as it currently is, but adding even more inflation to STEEM would punish investors and stakeholders and would give new investors even less reasons to buy STEEM.
The only reason why it would be a good idea is if we truly believe that STEEM is able to attract and retain millions of active users. I find this quite risky - but I'm open to discussions about this.
Current Proposal
The initial idea by blocktrades is to reduce author rewards by 20% (from 50% to 40%) and use this for the WPS fund.
Rest assured, I can understand that this might create confusion across content creators - after all, all of you creators are working hard for it, right?
Author Rewards Inflation
Yes, we do - but authors also have the least risk in the system.
As an author, having Steempower is not a necessity. You could power down and sell every STEEM you have, but you could still post your content and be rewarded for it.
You're able to live from these author rewards because people decide to keep STEEM - and not sell it. STEEM could very well get to below 5 cents if enough stakeholders decided STEEM isn't a good enough investment - which could happen if STEEM isn't keeping up-to-date with other blockchains.
Curation & Interest Inflation
The same is not the case with curation rewards (earning on votes) as well as the interest (earning for keeping STEEM as SP). Both require STEEM as STEEMPOWER, which is a massive risk from the crypto market as a whole and to STEEM as currency.
STEEM is already not seen as an investor-friendly cryptocurrency, as the inflation is quite high. Reducing these inflations, which are actually good for stakeholders, would just make the whole problem worse.
Witness Inflation
Before I go any further, I'm a witness myself, but I'm trying to be as 100% objective as I can.
Witnesses are securing the blockchain and reducing those rewards lowers the threshold of possible attacks. (@ned spoke about this problem recently on the latest the State of Steem show, if you want to listen to his explanation)
I'm sure that all of the witnesses are honest and trustworthy, but as you saw with dlive and jerry - people can lie in your face and you wouldn't see it. If witnesses aren't happy with their pay, they might be able to be used for attacking purposes.
In order to prevent this, the pay must be reasonable. And if someone might believe Steem is paying too much to witnesses, take a look at EOS BPs - they're getting paid 2x-2.5x as much as Steem in simple terms of tokens and 10x as much in terms of USD value (https://eostracker.io/producers). Why is all of this important? Well, some highly valuable witnesses already switched their attention to EOS.
If STEEM were to pay the same as BP on EOS from a token perspective, inflation would need to be increased by 2x-3x to 20%-30%, from 10% - and that's not even counting the USD difference.
Also, witnesses have the risk of having to run infrastructure, regardless of the price. Many backup witnesses are already in the negative, depending if they run backup & seed/other nodes. (@smooth wrote a great comment about this as well)
With all of this said, as a witness, I'd love to donate on a project to project basis and I'm still open for discussions on this matter.
What's next?
Discussions, Discussions, Discussions.
This is an important topic and I'm treating it like this.
As I said in the beginning, my decisions as a Witness and stakeholder are in line with what's best for Steem.
And if we decide that a donation-based WPS is the first best step or that a 20% author cut is too much and we should start with 5% or 10% or no author cut at all, then let's talk about it.
The most important part is that we're not coming to conclusions too fast and that we're looking outside the box and are willing to let others prove their ideas right.
So with that said: let me know your thoughts! Especially my fellow stakeholders - your opinion matters!
I would also like to encourage posts about these topics, as they're easier to structure than comments. (We could use the tag #wps)
Wolf
I was talking with acidyo, and he has a unique idea that I think should be considered further, look at the top comment in blocktrades opinion thread to read more.
To comment strictly on a system that pulls % from an existing inflation source.
I am sure most know by now I am not in favor of the author rewards having any taken from them, except to give to curation. I am a fan of higher curation rewards. The more I study the interest for hodling Steem the more I think we should take half of it for the SPS and push the other half to curation/authors. Big stakeholders will always delegate/sell votes in this system so what good really is the interest? I think it would be better served in making Steem power my useful. What are we as a blockchain? Look at the "60 seconds of Steem ads" (all quite good btw) - what was the theme? Earn Steem tokens for creating content. We are not ethereum. If we start messing with the secret sauce, aka the upvote, the power I have over my stake, then we start to lose our identity, IMO. And let's be honest, someone like me should have the most to lose from saying take it from the interest, but I didn't buy my stake for interest, I bought it for the upvote. Interest gives me no power to wield, upvotes do. I can't stress this point enough. And IMO - If Steem doesn't grow, it dies. Too much competition out there to think we can stay the same, numbers wise, and survive. The token still has speculation of millions of users (at least from my PoV) - you take that hope away, and the coin drops to pennies.
Worse case, I would rather add new inflation then take from the author rewards.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Can't make this stuff up, check my feed and the first post I see https://steemit.com/dtube/@coruscate/cz6iojse
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Your arguments make sense, but why isn't our secret sauce working better? I mean, there is a reason why STEEM hasn't found its way back into the top 20 - let alone top 10. What's your opinion on that?
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
I think curation rewards should be higher. Even at 50/50 the author still gets the bulk because the author does not have to share with anyone while curators can share with many people. As Joy just commented "I think it’s hard to tell authors apart from curators, nowadays most people are both authors and curators, right? I think we actually have or at least had enough content creators here for the size of Steem, but it’s just not well curated."
So the issue IMO is we need to encourage curation and the one way to do that is to make it more lucrative. I also have been brainstorming some ideas about how to help humans get an edge on bots for curating. Maybe some kind of randomizer that is visible to humans when they read (red light/green light) that says when to upvote. If you upvote at the wrong time the reward is burned. Something along those lines. If we can find a way to give humans an edge to make better money then bots, then it raises the standard of curation as a whole. This is the 64 thousand dollar question though lol.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Note that retention is already below 10% and has been steadily decreasing for some time. Further reducing author rewards can only make that worse. Let's not kill the golden geese that lay the golden eggs of content.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
I agree with 50/50 - you might have already read this post of mine. On top of that, I would also like to see better use of downvotes, so we could finally use them to clean up trending, without it resulting in an economic loss.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
I used to think this as well, and now I realize that curation should be abolished from the consensus layer entirely. Curation should be an opt-in mechanic.
Posts that have high payout are not getting curated by the blockchain; they are getting curated by the front-end that decided to curate them.
Curation is a mechanic that is very easily gamed. If we doubled down on it all bid-bot owners could create infinite money-making loop cycles. The only limit would be the number of fools willing to sell their vote while all the curation get's leeched away by the whale that voted before them.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
I agree, most people are both content creators and curators. High curation rewards are good for both content creators and curators. Curators get high rewards so that's a given. Content creators will be able to grow an audience and following more organically because of a greater desire to actively curate content.
A lot of people blame the growth of bots on greed. That's a part of it but there are other reasons such as lack of alternatives to earn using stake. Delegating to a bot returns more than 3 times curating. Delegating to a bot requires almost no work, using 10 full upvotes a day takes time and effort. Curating makes very little sense when the rewards are so low.
Another issue is lack of alternative promotion. Content creators buy votes because there no other viable ways of promoting content on Steem. Steemit promotion is a waste of money. Steem.chat and discord are quite ineffective. Frontends should offer some form of promotion. It'll help them raise revenue and it will lower demand for bots if it's done right.
Increasing curation rewards has been talked about for over a year. Even most witnesses agree it's a good idea; @cervantes conducted a witness poll a few months back. I think support is even stronger if a separate downvote pool is created, which I also agree with.
So what are we waiting for?
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
It’s sad to see that authors are getting rewards at a 3:1 ratio over both curation and interest, and 4.75:1 over witnesses, but some people still whine and cry about how authors are getting such a “small piece of the pie.” Authors currently receive more than half of all blockchain rewards - and where has that gotten us so far?
As you noted, an author assumes absolutely zero risk by signing up and posting their content. Why are they being catered to moreso than people operating nodes or buying STEEM and staking their tokens?
And why does nobody seem to comprehend economics and investing? Better incentives for investing and curating would likely lead to better content discovery and higher STEEM prices...which is good for authors. While everyone cries about author rewards being unfair, they fail to grasp the entire theoretical purpose of staking and curation incentives - and don’t allow the system to operate as designed.
Frankly, I don’t give a shit about “authors” taking a general haircut on rewards percentages. And I say that as someone who has created a lot of content on this chain. We continue to miss the huge effin’ boat by constantly kowtowing to the demographic that has the least economic impact on the system and assumes the least amount of risk in it. This needs to stop.
Authors will earn more money when the system can properly function. With the ratio of rewards directed to authors, the system will remain broken...and nobody will win, including authors who aren’t making much anyway and still dump tokens at the currently low prices in order to “get paid to blog.”
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
interesting point, as someone that has a partly knowledge of how this work and i may be wrong, you missed one big point. number of authors vs number of witnesses. let's say there is 100.000 steem to share. authors get 52.100, witnesses 11.100. lets say there are only 10.000 authors, it is 5,2 steem per author. and there are 200 witnesses, that is 55,5 steem per witness.
one of the things that i don't know about steem, if there is no authors, would witnesses still make steem?
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
I didn’t miss that point at all. Authors/Commenters are actually taking in 56% of the reward pool. The rest is divided between curators, witnesses, and interest.
By far, the largest single group of users and potential users is content consumers. Most people are not bloggers and don’t want to be. That is the demographic that would benefit most from curation rewards and would represent the exponential growth that everyone wants to see.
But what do we say to them? ”You don’t matter! Put your money in and give it to authors who need to get paid!”
If there are no witnesses, who would sign the blocks where authors put their content? Author rewards are a byproduct of actual investment. They aren’t needed in order for the blockchain to function or for speculators/investors to speculate/invest.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
that is what i did not know. so technically steem does not need authors to exist and witnesses and investors will still earn steem?
no problem with giving more to consumers/curators. but to curate/consume you need something to consume.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
As a continual buyer of steem i'm not worried about the nothing to consume bit.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Your ratios aren't as tragic as you indicate. Further declaiming against those seeking to increase retention, rather than letting it continue to slide is pejorative and whingy. We're losing content creators, and that's the source of value of Steem. Authors are not coming here, and Steem won't increase in price unless many do. The charge that decreasing author incentives further will decrease retention further is not unreasonable.
Implying emotional immaturity to those that point out that fact is nothing more than projection.
You're also wrong about risk. Spending time creating is a form of investment, and folks abandon their investment when they abandon Steem because the incentives seeking to keep them creating value in Steem are insufficient to justify that investment.
Rent seeking is antithetical to investing. It extracts value from the investment vehicle, while investors seek to increase the value of the investment vehicle to create capital gains. You're just projecting again, this time your own lack of understanding of basic investment principles. You double down on that when you point out you 'don't give a shit' about decreasing incentives to the only group that creates value in Steem. As long as you seek to extract that value as rent, you'll not see the system functioning properly, and that will be what prevents it.
Top witnesses are earning around $8k per month. It's ridiculous to claim authors are out earning them.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
You’re still not getting it and you’re arguing some points that I never made. I would encourage you to actually read the posts I linked earlier today. Most of your questions/claims have already been answered/addressed for the past two years.
To this point specifically:
This has been repeatedly demonstrated to be completely backwards. Prices do not increase because users/authors increase. The influx of new users comes after prices rise and then they leave as prices fall.
Why does that happen? Because all of those precious “valuable” authors only come to extract value from the system, then abandon the system at the first sign of decreasing rewards. Meanwhile, the invested users, whose investment and voting habits gave those authors their profits, are left with another few thousand abandoned accounts and people whining about how unfair everything is...again.
So, no - authors who come after the price spikes don’t really do much of anything for the platform. If they stick around and keep their stake in the system, then that’s a different story. But then we’re talking about new stakeholders who are incentivized to power up (or stay powered up) and curate, not just authors who dump tokens.
And then we’re back to the same issue: Incentivizing non-bloggers to power up and contribute to the system so that it properly functions, which is the entire purpose of curation rewards. And again, this was addressed and discussed in the linked posts and the plenty of comments on them.
One last thing:
No top witnesses are making $8K per month right now. That would mean that they are earning over 26,000 STEEM each. Check current prices and earned witness rewards.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Good job conflating creation of value with marketing of Steem. Authors come here because they hear about Steem from price increases. They leave for reasons. Price decreases.
As to every other point I made that you ignore, well...
Apparently you can't into $=Steem.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Uhm, ¡Holy crap!
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
And your point is...?
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
@ats-david
And my point is... that you must READ a lot more!!
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Yet you are probably the most valuable author here
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Well, that’s kind of taking it out of context. :)
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
You are being very light in your choice of words and you are treading very carefully when talking about Stinc and their inability to deliver on their empty promises - I wonder why?
Because you made the same statements in this post as in the comment on my article which you didn't respond to I'll just paste it here in hopes of getting a reply because some of your assumptions and statements are outright absurd.
I wasn't referring to myself when mentioning users who rely on their Steem earnings which is apparent from the simple fact that I haven't cashed out any of the Steem I earned for over a year and I was not cashing out before that (except a little in the bull run) which IS NOT something you can say about the consensus witnesses and some high SP stakeholders.
The same thing could happen to the price of Steem if enough authors decided to power down and leave.
@ned is a fool, citing him on anything is pointless. Just because it goes in the favor of your argument, doesn't make it right. I would beg to differ. If any of the consensus witnesses tried to pull off something like that they would quickly lose the punpkin vote and get kicked out of the top 20 and would easily be replaced with genuine people.
Remind me please how big is the paycheck for being a top 20 witness. 1.8k SP per week if I remember correctly. Is that correct?
Comparing Steem to EOS is ridiculous and doesn't make for a valid argument because EOS has a market cap 26x larger than Steem.
Punch that into the calculator and see how much witnesses would be earning if market caps were the same and then try to make the same argument if you can.
Are you implying that WP will increase the value of STEEM?
If so, then why is it such an issue to create new inflation instead of taking it from authors? While we are at, that increase in inflation, let's say 5% can also be used to bump up curation, interest and witness rewards (to prevent malicious consensus witnesses which I think is completely ridiculous but ok).
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
I am about to say that:
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
It's more of a perception issue. Those not familiar with Steem will see the high inflation as a risk and will be hesitant to invest. The potential benefits of SPS (WP) will most likely take sometime to be noticed. The short-run effect on price would negatively affect funds available for SPS. We are better off not risking discouraging investors even if it is just in the short-run.
I think taking from authors is the most logical step and would do the least harm.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
If you think that WP will bring more value of STEEM than the destroy, so the equation is: adding up 9% to 10% to the value of STEEM than increase (destroy) 1% to 2% of the inflation that won't hurt the final value of STEEM, isn't it?
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
I think it will bring more value in the long-run as long as we do not forgo something else that is more important to the ecosystem. That's why I think witness and curation rewards should remain untouched.
Adding inflation could create a perception problem, which could be avoided by using author rewards. Besides if SPS (WP) adds more value to Steem, authors will be better off.
Another problem is author rewards are high compared to curation rewards. Taking from authors will close the gap.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
¿In need of newer epiphanies @spectrumecons?
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Not at the moment. The ideas in the post need to simmer for a while longer. As I suggested in the post, the ideas should be tested as an SMT. It would be difficult to predict exact changes in behaviour. Logic indicates it would be more favourable.
An easier to digest approach, as I discussed in earlier posts, would be to increase curation rewards to 75% plus downvote pool and curation payouts in SBD as well as SP.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
How do you feel about the current author rewards?
Do you feel that the rewards you receive for your content are representative of the value that your content brings to the community?
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
It is not clear if you are quoting Ned or if the quote is your view. Allow me to provide a link below, for your viewing pleasure, which will show that if the quote is true that we should value a vote bot merchant like @therealwolf over a blockchain treasure like @gtg.
http://steemreports.com/witness-voters/
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
How come?
@therealwolf thinks (citing @ned) that if we lower witness rewards there will be a higher possibility of consensus witnesses going rogue. Consequently, I stated that it is just not true as they could easily be voted out by freedom if malicious activity is suspected.
I'm well aware of the fact that freedom decides who the consensus witnesses will be and thus I conclude that there is no real threat in possible malicious activity as a consequence of reducing their rewards.
Again, not sure how this has anything to do with @ned as he thinks otherwise.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
My point was that you may be putting too much faith in @freedom's choice of good and bad witnesses.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
I agree but it's only reasonable to assume that someone with such a huge stake would not allow a couple rogue witnesses to dilute his stake, isn't it?
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Point taken.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Don't expect me to spend my time answering your comment with your aggressive tone.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Aggressive tone? Sorry, but what are you even talking about? I was by no means trying to be aggressive. I had to go through the entire comment to see which part of it actually bothered you.
I rate it as passive-aggressive at best but I sincerely apologize if you found my two words in caps aggressive and if you find me stating that something you said is completely absurd as aggressive, but again, that was not my intention.
I was just trying to get you to elaborate on your intentionally misleading comparison to EOS witnesses in an attempt to justify the ABSURD amount of STEEM consensus witnesses earn (don't care about the current price and neither should you, especially as a consensus witness) as actually being to little when compared to what a witness earns over at a 26x higher market cap coin. Doesn't make sense bro.
Same thing goes for citing someone as grossly incompetent as @ned.
But no, you consider the tone of my written sentences as aggressive. Sorry to say that this just sounds like a scapegoat for not wanting to elaborate your reasoning which is either non-existent or as I think it is, unjustified.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
TOP 21 EOS BP are making 2x from a simple token perspective in comparison to STEEM Consensus Witnesses.
STEEM: 300+ daily EOS: 658-758 dailyIt's even more drastic in comparison to backup witnesses. If someone falls out of the TOP 20 on STEEM, the payment gets cut by 4. On EOS it's by 2 - meaning it's fairer for backup BP on EOS. Many backup witnesses on Steem are losing money right now.I haven't cited him - was a poor choice of words from my side. It was simply for people who were on SOS or who would listen to the recording, to remind them/letting them know, so I wouldn't have to explain everything as they could listen to him; since he was right on that topic. (witnesses/bp being an attack vector for dPos blockchains)
PS: I'm not your bro - watch your tone.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
You haven't answered my question again, which is to put STEEM and EOS in terms of equal market caps and then calculate the USD value of your witness earnings which you so misleadingly stated is 10x less on STEEM than it is on EOS. No surprise here. Makes me think, if you complain so much about earning so little for such a hard job here, why don't you start witnessing on EOS then?
You are like a good politician. You say a lot while not saying anything at all and even worse, continuously dodging the real question which reveals your misleading statements.
I asked a simple question because you voiced the fact how Steem witnesses don't earn enough compared to witnesses on a blockchain that has a market cap 26x higher than that of Steem. If it's so hard to calculate what the price of Steem would be if its market cap would be 26x higher, you could have just said so.
Your intentionally misleading statements, vague answers, dodging the real questions and consistently failing to answer any question in a legitimate manner, only speaks volumes about the kind of person you truly are.
Is that what's necessary in order to preserve the get and punpkin vote?
I value you as a witness for all that you have done for this place in the last couple months with getting Steem on all of the dapp radars but ffs, if you you intentionally dance around the questions asked not to answer them in a meaningful way, then we have nothing to talk about anymore.
You have said enough, sir.
Kk, edited.
Also, I have no tone. It's in your head and in the way you decide to read what I write.
PS: Who do you think you are to telling me what to?
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
My main point was exactly what I wrote in the main post as well as in my previous comment to you - it's about the direct token-to-token rewards between the two dPos blockchains for BP. (read it again if you didn't understand it) The USD evaluation has nothing to do with it. That was simply a juicy detail so people understand why some witnesses have jumped ship in the past.
I'm loyal to Steem and I see a future for this platform. And this requires me to speak from the truth. I'm very grateful to be a consensus witness and for the rewards, I'm earning with it and I'm not complaining. I'm simply observing what happened in the past to understand what might happen in the future and I want witnesses to stay with STEEM and to bring value to STEEM.
I'm not promoting an increase in witness rewards - instead I simply talk about why the current reward-percentage is not too high and shouldn't be reduced - witness rewards were actually already reduced by 80% in the past. Read the comment by @smooth to learn more
My pleasure and thanks!
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Ok, since you continuously don't want to answer my question in a meaningful manner but instead keep dodging the real question, even stating how the USD valuation has nothing to do with it which I highly disagree with as it's apparent from your post that it is just no true, LET ME DO THE MATH FOR YOU AND MAKE WHAT I'M TRYING TO SAY CRYSTAL CLEAR TO EVERYONE.
Since you are comparing STEEM to EOS which has 26x higher market cap which I repeatedly stated is an unfair and misleading comparison, let's see how much you would be earning if STEEM had the same market cap with EOS.
So, now you are earning about 10k STEEM or close to 3000 USD/month for an investment of anywhere from 200 to 500$/month. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
If STEEM had the same market cap as EOS today, the price of STEEM would be 8 USD per token.
Meaning, that you would be earning 80 000 USD/month!
EOS witnesses currently earn anywhere from 53 000 - 61 398 USD/month.
So, if you made a FAIR comparison, which you FAILED TO PROVIDE out of the obvious reason of deliberately providing misleading information, as a STEEM witness you would be earning at least 18 602 USD/month more than what an EOS witness currently makes.
To dissect exactly what is happening here, we have a witness ((0.00002%) one of 20 who earn such an over the top amount) misleading the public and not wanting to even consider taking a reduction in the insane paycheck he is getting for the betterment of the entire blockchain, but he would rather want the 99.99998% (content creators) to take the hit instead. HOW FUCKING NOBLE OF YOU SIR!
Here, take this medal of honor as my sign of deepest respect towards your selfless behavior.
Once again you helped to prove how the Steem world is not much different than the real world. The 0.00002% making a living on the expense of the struggling 99.99998% .
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Let me start by saying that less than 2 years ago I only heard of the word blockchain. It was because of starting here on Steemit that I learned more about it. Nevertheless my knowledge is still far from being an expert.
What I do have knowledge of (and experience in) is running, leading and advising companies. And up until now I've never heard of a company that's already giving (upfront) salary increases, bonuses or other kinds of incentives, for a job or project that hasn't even (or hardly) started yet.
It's after a job well done, results achieved, hitting or exceeding a target etc. they're getting rewarded. That's how those companies make their value go up.
To me this all sounds a bit like: 'Please give me your upvotes right now, my post will come later'.
To wrap up this comment: Where's the beef?!
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Exactly.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
I think they wanna create some "working capital" only now.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
I always like some numbers to better understand the possible impact. Suppose a fund of 200 K Usd is to be created quickly..what % of new generated steem is that when forming it in a month or alternatively in a year ?
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Could you please repeat your question? I don't really get what exactly you're asking.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
I was looking for ball park numbers like this :
annual steem generated = 22 million steem
allocating to a new fund = 10% meaning 2,2 million or 640 K USD
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
We as community will decide nothing. Zero. A couple of big accounts will lead the game. Like now with witnesses and HFs.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
wanted to vote on the pool but than decided it will be a waste of my 100% upvote, will rather spread it through community
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Why so pessimistic?
Here is a chance to do it another way :)
Posted using Partiko Android
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
On contrary. I'm very optimistic and I know that these big accounts will take care of this. If they don't the steem will die.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Keep in mind, that those big accounts you're talking about are having a huge incentive to achieve a high STEEM price and to keep Steem healthy. The more you have, the more you have to lose. Same applies on Steem.
I believe the community has a huge impact - I wrote this post because of this reason; to get the community involved.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
That incentive is proportionally reduced by the rent they can extract for their stake. You know that. It's what you do. That's what bidbots are: mechanisms to produce rentier income. They're not effecting curation based on content quality. No one buys your vote for that. You collect rent on your stake so they can get fat rewards, and for no other reason. Curation that is content agnostic isn't curation at all. It's a huge part of the dismal retention rate and almost entirely responsible for the condition of trending.
Please don't gloss over basic investment principles in order to steer the narrative away from your business model just because it reflects poorly on you. Step up and own it. It's your legacy.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
I understand and fully agree what you say but comparing the SP of community and SP of these guys, one can easily see who will decide where the money will flow.
And please don't get me wrong . I'm just trying to be realistic and have a full trust in these big guys.
But if they screw up so called community will just run to find another teat to suck from.
That's how life works my friend. No science here.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Perhaps what is required is a voting mechanism weighted on stake as well as popular vote.
HF acceptance would still be a stake issue; however to go against the popular will may have a cost to witness' position going forward. Even STINC's stake is said to have dropped from an overall 80% down to the 20's now.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
I just can't wrap my mind over the things you are saying. They are completely contradictory to what you are trying to say. Intentionally or not, I can't figure that out either.
Point being: how can taking 20% from 99% of Steem's user base by any means be considered healthy?
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
"Steem is paying too much to witnesses" ?? not for me 😂
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
after all, all of you creators are working hard for it, right?
i do feel a bit of sarcasm in this part.
quick calculation it is not 100% accurate but i roughly calculated how much time i spend on steem an how much steem did i get. not counting time spend in filming and taking photos, as i would do that even if steem disappears tomorrow. I would say i spend average 2 hours a day on steem, writing, commenting, supporting others. in more than a year i got around 800 steem, other is invested. in that calculation hour of my time spend on making content for steem is worth 0.14$. you may say that is even worth less.
next question (and i really don't know the answer to this) is could witnesses make steem if there is only 1000 (2000, 5000) people left on the platform?
and last question is why the fuck am i even spending time reading all of this when my vote is worth jack shit and my influence on all of the decisions is, well, 0
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
If you are going to cut author rewards, I suggest pooling that change with something that will disincentivize using bitbots. The reward pool is incredibly distorted by big players who buy (and sell) votes to maintain a disproportionate share of the reward pool. That needs to be addressed as well, because right now, bidbots are the biggest "work payment" program out here, and it is not good for the blockchain at all.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Lowering author rewards will disincentivize using bidbots somewhat, but I doubt it will be enough to discourage their use completely by any means. But it is logical to assume that bidbots will make less as a result.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Is there a way to directly address vote-buying?
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
At the moment we are in situation where vote buying and selling is beneficial to both the buyer and seller but is damaging to everyone else around them.
I think the best solution is to offer better alternatives. Higher curation rewards and higher returns from DApps could discourage users from delegating to bots. DApps could use advertising to raise revenue and they could share this revenue with delegators.
Fontends could offer promotion services that actually targets an audience rather than just littering trending pages. After all, real content creators want their work to be seen by the right audience more than a few dollars out of ROI.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Well, at least increasing the curation rewards will keep bidbots making the paper, until authors flee altogether. No authors, no bidbots.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Ok. So lets say they cut the authors reward.
Is it just me or someone else also think that all the trending posts are boosted. With big amounts.
So if they cut the authors rewards than actually in my opinion they will also kill the bots. And there is a huge amount invested in the bots i think. Also the small accounts cant sell they votes.
And i dont know why but i have a feeling that than we will see a 2-3$ worth posts in the trending.
Because almost everyone here are here to make some extra money.
So lets say if it will not worth for authors and also not worth for selling votes who will stay here?
The few big account? But how much will be the price of steem and SBD if the bots, the dolphins the small fishes they will power down and leave?
For who they will make a developments?
How steem can go to the moon if we cant get people to join us and even that small amount of people will leave who is active?
My opinion is that first what steem need is not investors but mass adoption. But i never dont saw any add about steem nowhere. They should make adds on other social media platforms also. If than if there is already a lot of users than that will brings also the investors. Who wanna invest here if there is just few whales and nobody else?
So maybe i am mistake maybe not. Even i really believe in our community but now i think this will be a wrong decission. If i am mistake than sorry.
Posted using Partiko Android
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
No one can know for sure but consider that there are around 9k minnows (500-4999 SP), 80k redfishes (0-499) and around 2k dolphins (5k-49 999).
If we were to conclude that most of them decided to power down and leave that would result in an unverifiable shitton of STEEM leaving the platform, entering an exchange and dumping the price of STEEM.
It's anyone's guess to what the exact amount of STEEM would be dumped on the open market but imho it would be upwards of 10 million STEEM.
Now consider that there are countless orcas and a few whales which either only circle jerk to reap the most benefits of their SP or delegate to bid bots. Add another 5-10 million STEEM to the sell-order considering that most of them would consider leaving after the 20% cut.
All in all, IMHO it would be a worse hit to the price of STEEM than a couple percent additional inflation would cause.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
The sad that from more than 1 million users there are just around 40k active users on steem.
@therealwolf wrote this under one comment:
"Keep in mind, that those big accounts you're talking about are having a huge incentive to achieve a high STEEM price and to keep Steem healthy. The more you have, the more you have to lose. Same applies on Steem"
So lets say they invest money to male a mall. But they cant fill up ste shelfs with stock ( authors ) and also the price is high for the people ( people who wanna join steem )
Than even they invested a huge amount it will doesnt worth. Because nobody will be interested.
That is again just my own opinion. I am more into marketing than IT😁
Posted using Partiko Android
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
I would prefer an extra inflation bucket designated for a WPS.
Inflation is deadly in the long turn. That is true.
This argument carries less water as long as the volatility is that extreme or a risk of ruin exists.
The extra inflation will be constantly evaluated if it provides the stated benefits and creates more value than it destroys.
Taking funds from other buckets, or from all of them, can easily lead to sloppy decisions because there is no direct responsibility to ensure efficient deployment of resources.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Do I understand it right that you propose to add extra inflation with the reason that we're in a "risk-of-ruin" situation anyway?
Are there currently direct responsibilities for any of inflation/resources given away? People can sell their earned inflation as they please, right? I mean, we're seeing this a lot with authors who are just here to earn tokens and sell them; not wanting to power-up and participate in the system.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
I kind of regret putting the risk of ruin point in. It detracts from my main point which is:
the rate of inflation vis a vis the extreme volatility is negligible.
As soon as it stabilises, everybody who owns a significant stake will be very observant if the amount of extra inflation is exceeded by the value it creates via a WPS.
It is a DPoS system after all.
Posted using Partiko Android
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
This story was recommended by Steeve to its users and upvoted by one or more of them.
Check @steeveapp to learn more about Steeve, an AI-powered Steem interface.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
I think that worker proposals could make a difference. I see a lot happening in a positive direction without this system in place. If implemented it could increase that momentum... but it may not be necessary. The community seems far more empowered to create without help from STINC or any other leading force.
I am not against the idea of WP's. I am not sure if it is needed, but I can certainly see the positive that could come from that system.
That said... more inflation on the blockchain is not an option in my opinion. If anything, we should reduce the inflation... the author pay is at the whim of many (near) random factors already anyway. The only place that the funds can come from is from author rewards, and, as you said... they have the least required skin in the game. Raising the Steem price could offset that quite quickly too. I was making $8 steem (and $17 SBD) when writing articles a year and a bit ago... so the whole argument is kinda moot because the pay (no matter what % of the pool it is) is completely dependent on the price of steem way more than the % allocation.
Witnesses need to be compensated to a point where they can at least afford to pay the bills. The blockchain depends on that.
Thank you for your hard work.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Good points, and I almost agree on everything, but I think the 20% cut on author rewards is probably too high and I think it would be better to start with 5% or 10% and see how everything plays out. Authors are also very important for the Steem(it) ecosystem because they are creating amazing content and can bring their network to Steemit.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
I think starting with a lower cut first to see how things play out is a real option.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
You know what? I just realized that bidbots account for ~30% of author rewards. Plus you guys get curation rewards too.
Let's just have bidbots fund development entirely. That way we don't decrease incentive to create content, and I am confident you will pay close attention to how you spend your stake on development. Let's put that to a vote, shall we?
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
I second the motion @valued-customer!!
Get ready @Dpoll, because here we go!!
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
You want to allocate an entire 10% of total blockchain inflation to worker proposals that will be controlled by the most wealthy accounts?
You want to DOUBLE the inflation that get's taken away from users from 10% to the witnesses, to 20%?
Are you trying to fork this platform or what?
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
I against totally from the cut of 20% even 5%. You guys should find the financing outside the reward pool.
I share my view on this DTube video.
https://steemit.com/dtube/@chesatochi/p473yyx6
Posted using Partiko Android
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Thanks for the link, but as I wrote under your post, there seems to be a misconception on a base level.
You guys? This also includes you. And why do you think the inflation of STEEM shouldn't be used to fund development of the blockchain?
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Because the reward pool has proved not to be a sustainable business and dapps development needs to find other stream fo finance project outside this ecosystem.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
You should read my #2 point again - I made some examples for projects that could be funded, which are clearly not apps nor business.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Thank you for this nice article, that is touching a sensible topic. I have almost no clue about coding and how it should be rewarded. However, working for an international company my experiences are the following. It is hard to find money at the beginning, but it is even harder to spend a fix budget over time efficiently. This is due to several systemic reasons, rather than to the mindset of the group of people who decide about how the money will be used. As future is uncertain, you won’t give back parts of your budget you have to hardly fight back when things get worse. Therefore usage of fixed budgets are 100% (or slightly more to show to the upper Management or to the community that the things you are doing extremely important and to avoid underspending for a not foreseeable future). Therefore I think budgets on a project basis are more controllable especially by a community donating for it. There are also examples that strongly show how dangerous a project approach is (Berlin Airport, Elbphilharmony) but there are also great historical examples that etatism (fixes budgets for everything) will fail. What people here try to do is a decentralized system. Lets try to let it as decentralized as possible. It may be slower than the centralized approach but it is why a lot of people are here.
Posted using Partiko iOS
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
First of all, I think the worker proposal system is a fantastic, it brings development to the blockchain faster, as we the community, can now pick and choose which project to fund and there (I hope) is transparency as far as the progress for the project goes.
However, the author cut is not going to make people happy, it also makes me a bit uneasy as well.
reasons :
No.1 being that the price of Steem and SBD, we are in a slough here and the thought of cutting author rewards in a slough can make people frustrated, however we can solve that by providing hope or evidence, which in turn goes back to what I said before "transparency" if people are kept up to date with the project this will automatically inspire them that the cuts are for a good cause.
No.2 is the results, we work hard on this platform to attain a reward. The author cuts would be in a form of let's say investment, if we cut the author rewards by 20% what kind of results would that yield and how do we go about measuring those results and compare that to what we have sacrificed in order to gain that.
thanks for reading
I'm gonna develop a post soon on "wps" to further elaborate my thoughts.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Agreed.
I understand that it's making you feel uneasy - nobody really likes the idea to earn less.
What do you mean with "project"? The inflation is supposed to go into a fund for the WPS that many projects/individuals can use in return for bringing value to Steem.
I understand. But please keep in mind that what you're working for is dependant on the people invested in this platform. If everyone were to sell STEEM & SBD as soon as they get it, the system would collapse. So the goal is to make sure people are more than happy to invest into STEEM and keep it.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Hey, if authors are to take a 20% hair cut, would it not be advantageous to have it similar to the witness voting setup. This way you would get a say in how your hair cut was getting invested, I am all for authors taking a cut if it gets the price of steem up and away.
Remember a smaller slice of a big pie is better than a big slice of small pie.
Damn it now I want pie. 🍛
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Hi, @therealwolf!
You just got a 0.45% upvote from SteemPlus!
To get higher upvotes, earn more SteemPlus Points (SPP). On your Steemit wallet, check your SPP balance and click on "How to earn SPP?" to find out all the ways to earn.
If you're not using SteemPlus yet, please check our last posts in here to see the many ways in which SteemPlus can improve your Steem experience on Steemit and Busy.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
I know one thing for sure, we can't take from the witness pool.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
I truly believe that adding a new inflation is a better choice...
After all those funds are intended to be distributed to those projects who we believe that will bring value to the ecosystem.
But yea, it's not an easy task to be cornered with... Time will tell...
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Not much to say other than I agree with you.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
I get WPS and the benefits of decentralized projects on the blockchain, IF they will be used properly (if it doesn't open up the possibility to take more of the inflation without something solid to show for it, much like the trending page was 'conquered')! Even now I feel WPS hasn't been explained or understood well enough, that WPS is NOT only about development projects!
Now, we have an issue, and it's not a small one. It will be hard to come to a large part of the active userbase and tell them 'we're going to cut your rewards', during these market conditions, and still be talking about better retention and more adoption at the same time.
What were those words many invoked: "came for the rewards, stayed for the community". Until we've reached the "stayed" part, the rewards played their part.
I also understand that WPS or something similar needs to happen to stimulate growth, or we as a blockchain will lose the battle.
This will be a fine line we'll need to walk on, but we can't stay still and hope it will pass away.
Posted using Steeve, an AI-powered Steem interface
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
I think the cut on author reward should be imposed on those authors earning more than the average content creator. My recent post after payout was 0.03 so what will be left for me after the 20% cut?
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
I'm against adding communism to the blockchain.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
That's not communism. That's the opposite of communism. That's capitalism, where those with the capital fund development. Communism is where everyone contributes their fair share, from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.
Basic economics. You should know this.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Congratulations @therealwolf!
Your post was mentioned in the Steem Hit Parade in the following category:
Downvoting 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
Dear @therealwolf
I respect your work here but this idea terrifies me.
It seem that in the future it will be very easy for any media to enter Steemit, power up and pretty much "destroy" independent media. By downvoting them even more efficiently than it can be done already today.
Let's face it: regular users do not use downvote on their daily basis. Even if common people will downvote anyone then it doesnt really make any difference.
Downvote is a very powerful tool, which will allow very those with resources to control everything on this platform even more. How not to see it as a centralization of power and influence? Downvoting content of unwanted independent bloggers/influencers by those in power = censorship.
That is obviously disadvantage. Would you mind sharing with us what are advantages of giving downvotes (tool of rich people) more power?
Hope you can see this problem from my point of view as I'm sharing some of concerns of regular people, with very little SP. People who in theory should be a core of this platform.
Yours
Piotr
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit