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crokkon (68) in witness-category • 5 years ago (edited)

5 years ago by crokkon (68)

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gadrian (66) · 5 years ago

I have simulated how the witness ranks and the VESTs distribution would look like with only up to 10 or 5 witness votes per account. The results have to be interpreted carefully, though. I have calculated the VESTs distribution as if every account only had their first 10 or 5 witness votes in place. This is a kind of random assumption, since I cannot know which votes all individual accounts would keep if they had to reduce the number from 30 to 10 or 5. Using the first 10 or 5 is an easy choice for a test run here, but at the same time also the best I can do in this regard.

You are right, there is no way of knowing which votes one would keep. But certainly there would be some restructuring of the top. The collateral part is it will affect backup witnesses as well, as @hungryharish remarked in his comment.

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2 votes

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hungryharish (66) · 5 years ago (edited)

Yeah @gadrian. This can solved with expiry of witness votes or making people realize how much important the vote for the blockchain. Decreasing votes will kill the enthusiasm of low ranked witnesess who are in hope one day they will be in top.

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gadrian (66) · 5 years ago

About expiration of witness votes, that might be... problematic. Because this involves changes into the blockchain code that requires cycling through every vote for every witness and seeing if it expired or not. And doing that as a relatively regular interval. That imply higher resource demands (especially CPU) regularly. Which kinda goes against what MIRA is trying to do. At least that is as far as I understand it, without being a witness or knowing the insides of the Steem blockchain.

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hungryharish (66) · 5 years ago

That's an excellent point. Hope what really is best in this issue will be decided. Whatever it is it's in hands of the witnesess to decide again.

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hungryharish (66) · 5 years ago (edited)

That's an awesome thoughts and pulled a hardwork to deliver with statistics. I believe yes , decreasing the witness votes will be great idea. I agree with that decrease the large stake influence

But it's also effects the low ranked witnesses who are running the block chain with minimum profit or returns. The decreasing of witness votes will discourage or leave them hopeless.

But there is another great way to counter this problem.

Expiry of witness vote

Yes, after every period of time, the votes of a member should be expire and again he need to vote. So the witnesses are in constant check and attentive about the votes. If the top 20 witness is inactive on chain, people don't vote for him again. So there will be regular events by witnesess showing their work to block chain members and urging and reminding about the importance of the witness vote.

Most people even don't know about this and most people opts proxy instead of checking what actual things going on.

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1 vote

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gadrian (66) · 5 years ago

But it's also effects the low ranked witnesses who are running the block chain with minimum profit or returns. The decreasing of witness votes will discourage or leave them hopeless.

Good thinking, I believe! That might be a collateral unexpected effect.

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whatsup (75) · 5 years ago

Commenting here to show my support for the idea, but since it would impact those who are in control I find it really unlikely this will get support.

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1 vote

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practicalthought (65) · 5 years ago

Not sure what would stop those accounts at the top from either spreading their SP around either through new account creation or giving new delegations. I am also curious how much stake is being delegated from the Steemit accounts that are being used to vote for witnesses in that manner. Not saying it is happening, but pretty sure if they were delegating a large amount and asked the ones receiving to vote for this witness or that, they would find cooperation.

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2 votes

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gadrian (66) · 5 years ago (edited)

Owner of the stake votes for witnesses or sets a proxy. Delegatees of the stake don't influence witness voting for the delegated stake. It's still in the owner's power to vote for witnesses with the entire stake, including the one delegated away.

Also by splitting a large account into several smaller ones, you reduce the influence of each account, but you can vote for more witnesses, in the scenario proposed here. The question is: would a whale be willing to do that? There is a higher chance his or her influence won't be decisive if it's spitted.

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1 vote

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practicalthought (65) · 5 years ago

Thanks for explaining on the delegation.

I know some of the whales already do split their stake, some among dozens to a hundred bot accounts. Not sure if this would encourage more of that or not.

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gadrian (66) · 5 years ago

You're welcome!

I believe in many cases those bot networks are not created specifically with the intent to control or conceal witness voting. They seem to target the reward pool mainly, or fight flag wars with them.

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1 vote

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lextenebris (62) · 5 years ago

Let me propose a counter to the question in play. Let's engage in a thought experiment.

What if @blocktrades and @pumpkin were controlled by the same person or people? After all, as we can observe they don't have any overlapping witness votes so in principle may very well could be animated by the same intent. As such, we can go a step further and assume that for both of them, their voting behavior is orchestrated by software and not manual human intervention. Building bots to do that sort of thing is right next door to trivial.

How would the animating power be lessened by splitting the steak across multiple user IDs? As far as I can tell, it wouldn't. Given that the voting is managed by bots anyway, it doesn't matter how many accounts that SP could or would be spread across, the only important consideration is the sum total of SP/mega-vests controlled.

Would a whale be willing to do that? We've certainly seen evidence in the past that very large stakes have been split across coordinated networks of accounts in order to try and conceal the actual voting volume involved, so we know for a certainty that a whale would be willing to do that.

As such, reducing the number of witness votes is pretty clearly not an impediment at all to individual or group stakeholders who want to control the witness hierarchy. After all, the underlying architecture of the blockchain is intentionally designed to give that power to those who hold the stake.

I think it's safe to say that if the pool of active SP is currently decisive, it wouldn't matter how far it was split, as long as the voting is coordinated that decisive power remains.

Coordination is easy and cheap.

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gadrian (66) · 5 years ago

I agree with what you say with some distinctions.

By spreading the stake across multiple accounts and voting for the same witnesses, whales have accomplished nothing in terms of influence. It's the same. They may conceal this way the fact it's coming from the same account though.

If they do it to vote for different witnesses, then the influence spreads thin, and they can be overthrown by smaller votes acting together.

If consensus remains of 21 and number of votes per account diminishes to 5 or 10, one account cannot 'control' as many witnesses, unless I'm missing something. It may be a good measure.

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abitcoinskeptic (73) · 5 years ago

What about stake based witness voting, so vest / n where n is number of eitnesses being voted for? You could also not divide for 3 or something.

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baah (61) · 5 years ago

There's absolutely no problem, and it's obvious that this proposal will never go through because there are no scenarios where those stakeholders could undermine either the witnesses or the infrastructure, plus what people are trying to solve is "large stakeholders have large influence" as if holding ever more influence isn't the name of the game.

umm but they have "too" much influence

-somerandowithoutanystake

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toofasteddie (70) · 5 years ago

I agree with you. I think less witness votes would lead us to a more decentralized ecosystem.

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ats-david (74) · 5 years ago

This is a serious problem and it would be great if our witnesses actually gave a shit about this. Nine months ago I wrote this and got pretty much no responses from witnesses...top-20 or otherwise.

https://steemit.com/steem/@ats-witness/steem-witnesses-vote-number-and-decay

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shitbot (55) · 5 years ago

You have been rewarded with some SHIT! Take a trip to the bathroom to stake and manage your worthless tokens.

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freebornangel (73) · 5 years ago

What we have is failing to thrive,...

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utopian-io (71) · 5 years ago

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