Not everything has to be symmetrical. The reward distribution has been largely successful at not incentivizing bad actors with downvotes. This also reduces bad actors from amassing stake which can have negative outcomes for the governance of the network.
If your concern is with the clarity of the white paper, that functions only are based on stake-weighted support, I think your read on that might be too narrow. The white paper makes itself clear enough that the post rewards can be upvoted and downvoted. If you want to play lawyer, I'd argue that
A) The sentence you highlighted part of starts with "In a DPoS algorithm" meaning we're talking about an example.
B) "all other consensus-based functions" in the above context doesn't mean distributing rewards from a pool. It means who makes the blocks and who determines the course of the network.
C) If you were to ignore A and B, "the weight of staked funds supporting them" can mean cumulative including positive and negative votes from staked funds. And before you repeat yourself that this means witness and proposal votes should include downvotes, no it does not.
I do not see how you can dance around this. Are you saying that Content curation is not staked consensus-based?
The issue is, tackling abuse of the rewards pool that downvotes are supposed to solve correct? What is supposed to solve the abuse of witness voting or proposals?
Better clarifying the purpose of downvoting in the whitepaper could help a lot as well as mentioning why downvotes are not applied to other DPoS functions where many in the community are arguing, not so much myself but recognize the issue as just as important, that is easily abused.
Better clarification/definition of what rewards pool abuse is as well as what other functions downvotes should have as well can help better regulate or give more substance to an organization like Hivewatchers; where we can fund them better as a community, have a whitepaper they have to follow in regards to monitoring and executing downvotes in a more regimented way aside from just spam but being able to regulate threats of violence or any other actions that might be draw negative attention to the chain from the authorities. I personally think eventually, if we can better clarify the function of downvoting with a very specific clarification for exact purposes of downvoting we could fund Hivewatchers more, maybe even have some sort of governance applied to them as an organization essentially making them a DAO.
I once had a very long phone conversation and a few discord conversations with @patrice about many issues regarding downvotes but when we were steem. A lot of concerns she expressed to me years ago as well as others is coming to fruition in regards to legalistic matters and content creation. It is just the issue is, I am not sure what the difference between @steemcleaners is from watchers and what happened with that spam api that people had to stop using a few months ago. Having someone coming at ya from @hivewatchers, in a "unofficial way" saying not to upvote comments (after HF update?) while threats of violence is being conducted on your content and others even comments saying "I am calling FBI" seemed to bring glee to this unofficial watcher member.
So I suppose the alternative aside from elimination of rewards pool would be to better define what downvoting is intended for in the whitepaper and laying out specific examples so the community can better understand downvotes as well as possibly turning Hivewatchers into a DAO that would be specifically in charge of executing downvotes on Content in a more clear, fair and just manner that makes sense to the community and protects the rewards pool also from large stakers.
The distribution of rewards is essentially a consensus based process although few individual posts or comments ever come close to meeting the blockchain definition of consensus, which is what I meant by context.
The current solution is that there is sufficient stake amongst people that act with the interests of Hive in mind that the barrier for abuse is very high. And while some people have very large stakes in the network, nobody has unilateral control over the top 20 producers or the unilateral ability to fund a proposal. As we saw with Steem, if there is a single entity with enough stake for unilateral control and uses it in bad faith, there is a path forward as well, but that scenario does not seem likely to happen on Hive.
In regards to Hivewatchers, as far as I know there is a scope for them to cover and deviations from that scope are generally pointed out. I sometimes am the one pointing that out. But I don't agree that getting into specifics of abuse in the Hive white paper makes sense. Hivewatchers is already funded by a DAO, with support from the stakeholders of Hive. Is the reason for bringing up the non-symmetry between reward pool voting and witness/DAO voting that their proposal can't be downvoted?
You and I seem to differ on how much weight and purpose we put into the Hive white paper. I generally see it as a document that reflects what we have, and it gets updated as Hive changes. I get the sense you see it as more of a constitutional document, that directs what Hive is or should be. Am I correct?
Yes, I do see the Whitepaper a very important document that should be used to strengthen our blockchain. The U.S. Constitution is a somewhat good example but more so outlines natural rights where as the UN Human rights doctrines seem to be the main issue of concern globally in regards content but not where I want to take the convo.
Essentially, as a 18 year union member who has stood up for other people's working rights as a steward or crew lead through Collectively Bargained Agreements, I recognize the importance respecting documents such as a whitepaper or contract. Still we can point out how a decentralized chain is not an institution but is it not something that we have to protect beyond the rewards pool and hostile attacks from low stake users? I do not like the division and culture playing out that has undertones of the centralized steem day in regards to large stake holders and witnesses.
I would love to have a better written whitepaper that allows for the community to feel need to align with witness and protect them just as the large stake holders want to protect the rewards pool. I would love to see more accountability for large stake holders and witnesses without demonizing them or having them feel unappreciated.
Can you point me to the Hivewatchers DAO? seems 100 HBD daily is really low. I would love to read more about the Hivewatchers DAO and how we can further implement so that way they can eventually maybe take over the downvoting responsibilities of the chains content but in a transparent way while providing significantly more funding.
The DAO funding Hivewatchers is the Hive DAO/proposal system at 105 HBD/day.
We seem to agree on the culture-unifying potential behind a white paper, or a foundational document by another name. We almost were able to successfully defend Steem, except enough stake was in the hands of people that were not on the same page as everyone else when it came to blockchain dos and don'ts... to put it lightly. I don't know if it was that they were ignorant of what a blockchain should be or if it was just cynical greed, but it was a disappointment.
Not long after Hive was (re)born I set out to write a guide about Hive and what it meant to be a blockchain in very simple terms that I felt could be such a document, but after writing it a bit I felt like it was tonally aimed at 5 year olds and it got scrapped.
I love it! We are young chain with a bright future ahead of us with people/witnesses like you who care! I do think you are onto something with your guide. Maybe you can finish writing it and work with Patrice to make it more legalistic and more of an outline for how downvotes and upvotes should, I guess ethically be applied to content; such as over rewarding and what exactly that means and how specifically downvotes should be used to protect both the content creators, node operators where content is stored and of course reward pool.
I might have shelved it because I felt like it was more marketing copy. Here's an excerpt:
You may not know what a blockchain is, but Hive is one, and you might not even notice. That is what makes Hive incredible: seemless interaction with a global, decentralized currency and content platform.
Hive is a blockchain network, what is that?
A blockchain is a way to store data (blocks) in a way that can not be changed. In Hive, this data can be transactions (Adam sends John 6 HIVE) and content ("Here are my favorite recipes"). You have probably heard of Bitcoin, which was the first network to make a blockchain work without the need for a central authority. Hive builds upon that invention to do much more than send tokens from one place to another, and does so much faster.
The Hive blockchain is decentralized, meaning no single authority has control over the blockchain. This, believe it or not, is what gives value to Bitcoin and other blockchain currencies like Hive. If you do not need to trust a central authority, you can trust that your own balances won't be altered. How Hive accomplishes decentralization differs from Bitcoin, which gives it several advantages.
Hive Governance
The Hive network has people called witnesses to produce new blocks.
This is great! I do hope patrice responds.
Also in regards to witness and proposal downvoting, it is my assumption that if the upcoming elimination of old witness votes does help solidify the witness ranking than the witness should be exempt from the downvoting function for at least 3-5 years as a reward for investing into the chain.
The issue becomes transparency and the bias that is applied to community content that either the witnesses ignore or participate in leaving many in the community disgruntled.