A Parable — SteemCN

A group of smart people get together and develop a money and government system allowing all in society to function more efficiently. At first all are excited and willing to be led by smarter ideas. Overall, things are better and fairer than before.

Then the same group of intelligent people begin to succeed enormously, building up good government and themselves in the center of town.

All experience an increased standard of living, but the masses are just not as smart or disciplined as this group. In fact, they are very poor comparatively. The discrepancy is very great.

So this original group gathers and considers. They think to maybe give of some their riches and benefits to those in lesser circumstances. But then they absolutely reject this idea.

How can we demean them with this help? We built a fairer system then they have ever known. It is not our fault we are smarter, more sacrificing and harder working. We earn according to our efforts and intelligence.

But if we do nothing they will rise up against us. We are so successful they look pitiful against us. They would rather leave and live more comparable with each other, even if worse, than stay around us.

So they said, lets modify the system to benefit those at the bottom most, as long as they try. We have no desire to live opulently, just to live well. And maybe this system is not as fair as we think. If the masses leave, we will be left holding the bag. We are too small to run this system and all will fail. We need them as they need us.

But we cannot just hand them our success. We cannot help being smarter, but we can distribute more generously to the masses, and they wont run us down or leave. Then they were be better off and we can still live well. Besides we know, eventually under this system, all will be rich. So if it is modified to benefit the masses a bit more, it is to our advantage.

Rather than say efforts and intelligence, it could say merits and intelligence.

Anyway, the idea is, these people will not want to change out a system that rewards merits, but only to modify it, so that rewards are not completely proportional to merit. But it's a parable, it kind of speaks for itself.

So obviously this has something to do with Steem. What if Steem tried to spread out rewards more communistically? Well, that would be interesting. But lets say they wanted to spread out the high gains that can be gotten by some, a little better with all participants, still mostly tied to merit?

This is how I'd do it. I'd take the richest accounts, making up more than 50% of all influence or steem. Then I'd suggest that they pool together and get up half the ownership to agree to improve or modify the current system. To create a new government lets say.

Then I'd change it to more like n * log ( n ). But only for verified or real accounts. Everyone else would be maybe m^2 / log (m), where the maximum possible is the above formula. So almost the same disadvantage to small accounts but no advantage to large ones.

So you ask, how is this fair to those who lose money over this deal.

As the price of Steem drops the power to regain influence increases. Eventually perhaps enough witnesses/miners can agree to change the code. Those who lose money are paid out of the 50% that's been collected, such that they cannot complain about loss of funds. As the value goes down and as some cooperating rich powerdown, that which is owed also decreases. This is tricky but fair I think, especially if value is already trending downward.

What about those who've spent or exported their dollars?

Those rich who refuse to help are not punished, except they may not be granted verified status. If they are helpful to the system in other ways, having a little extra steem/influence is not a big deal. That of the 50% which is not used helps create some useful bots or goes back to the original owners.

Also the set percentage asked of each 100 or so 'rich' people, should probably be just from total Steem earned, not invested. (If all rich agree to lose some of their monumental influence, no big player will end up with extra steem/influence.)

Maybe a community bot that reacts to voting could be developed. It could even be like a little government who serves the community and whose actions are controlled directly by vote or indirectly by elected officers. If this entity has even 20% of total influence, all individual real accounts will be heard, despite size.

Rewiring the system, does not give you back the effect of influence over time, it just repays you more for what success you may have had. This may encourage back some who've left and it will encourage all who wish to join. Also positive feedback and general future success could increase value.