The blockchain will evolve much slower than bad actors.
All systems evolve more slowly than the parasites which live upon. If we've learned nothing else from evolutionary biology and simulation, we've learned that. Put a pile of self replicating bits into a primordial soup, turn on the sun, and let the system have a bit of mutation and within the first 15,000 generations you have a fully flourishing parasitic and meta-parasitic population.
We knew that just from playing with Ray's Tierra simulation back in the early 90s.
I'm coming at this as someone who used to be, once upon a time, in the software/security threats business but who moved on to something that suited him better: game theory and game design. And from that very different perspective, I can only say with aggressive emphasis:
You get what you reward.
The steem protocol rewards activity at loci on the blockchain. And that's all it does. The assumption of content value at that locus is completely assumed and arbitrary. The designers assume that there is interesting and useful content there because "people" are active there – but that has nothing to do with the actual content.
In my gut, I feel like the problem is the generalized assumption that everyone values the same content.
If the system differentiated between locations on the blockchain that I am active in and locations on the blockchain that you are active in and locations on the blockchain that the bots are active in, then we could make reasonable decisions about the value that we ascribe to each of those potential states. You might think that locations where I'm active are likely to be interesting and that locations where the bot is active are less likely to be interesting. I might think that locations where your active are likely to be interesting and where the bots are active are likely to be interesting (and let's be clear, this is just for the sake of illustration – because that would be insanity). What the bots think doesn't matter to either of us.
It's the lack of individuation that seems to be the attack vector on this system. I'm not sure if individuation is a thing that can be brought to the network as a whole in a way that retains the current set of expectations that a lot of users (not necessarily ones that we would like to associate with, but a lot of users) currently hold. Many of those users have significant stakes in comparison to either of us.
I really would like to solve this problem. It seems soluble from a game theoretic point of view. Viewed purely as a game which involves a series of exchanges between players, this is a thing that we can make interesting for everybody.
I'm just not sure if people want that.
Funny how people will always find a way around the rules...he has great pics, though....
Any set of rules has an exploitable architecture. Even the simplest. And in a situation where min/max is a value that can be optimized? Someone will do so, and they will profit by doing so.
That's an inevitability of systems. Orders of magnitude more if we are talking about "money," even money in the abstract. Just the idea of money will find people working very hard to get some of it. (Chinese gold farmers and World of Warcraft come to mind.)
We'll have to see how things shake out.
Im leaving them for after the article ;)