Thanks for the upvote on my crypto winter blog
You are welcome. I might be the only one left doing it :) but I vote/d based on appreciation of the contribution.
I do agree that weighted voting systems tend toward increased concentration. That is readily apparent in stake-voted rewarded block production (DPoS) as well as Steem's stake-voted 'content' rewarding system.
However, it remains unclear to me whether that failure mode is total or if the magnitude of the effect is small enough to be tolerable given sufficient concurrent value creation.
Social trust may remain sufficient given sufficient concurrent value creation. Even in a cryptocurrency system that isn’t debased, the whales can extract value by manipulating the market price and even crashing the price causing panic selling, then repurchasing at the lows.
I presume you also intend that ‘value creation’ can in theory comprise non-monetary forms.
What I’d really like to see is a system succeed based primarily on people using it because they like the capabilities enabled by decentralization, not primarily based on any monetary motivation. IMO, that would be the Holy Grail achievement. We may or may not be able to get that achievement purely without any monetary incentive at all. I would probably not want to risk it, and would try to find some way to enforce that the monetary reward was a long-term “we’re building this together as a global community” theme (because realize most users aren’t getting more than a couple $ per day of earnings any way, so if they were going to get a larger multiplier by HODLing that might be an incentive if there’s sufficient social trust), which was sort of the idea originally behind the 2 year weighted average lockup of STEEM POWER before it was reduced to afair 13 weeks.
But one problem with Steem’s former long-term lockup model was it was unduly penalizing short-term speculation, arguably killing liquidity, and complicated planning/diversifying a crypto portfolio.
I always thought asymmetric debasement was counterproductive. If you’re going to award tokens to grow the value of the blockchain, then debase the money supply for everyone. So then you’d only need to lockup for longer-term those who you’re rewarding with free tokens, not those who are buying free trading tokens.
There’s other issues also such as the fact that if you have any common enterprise issuing tokens even for “free” (i.e. at no monetary charge) then they’re probably securities. So that is another reason Steem had to reward based on decentralized voting, but again I think we may agree that might be a relative weakness in terms of reducing social trust as compared to a system the whales couldn’t so easily extract value from. So finding the solution that solves both of those issues I think one of my major insights, which btw if and when I launch many/most will likely think “wtf?” and probably think I have made a silly insight because I won’t have a premeditated document (unless this is it) like one Larimer wrote laying out the entire scheme in advance (but that will be if because they didn’t entertain the possibilities of the long-term plan that will surprise later). Which is as designed, because for one reason there shouldn’t be any profit expectation if we want to be sure we’re not issuing securities. I have some other insights also, such as a design for ledger that decentralizes the objectivity of consensus. One thing to keep in mind is that there’s distinction between law and reality. Clever is the one who can leverage that distinction. So much work to do. I hope I can get there…
Don’t currently have the means to send you a private message, so I’m sharing this with you. No reply need. FYI only.
Note I added a new section to my latest blog which seems to project that the altcoins are going to near zero again in the next crypto winter! Must see!