Let me take you on a journey to my imagination on how a cloned steemit could look like.
No usernames on posts
This would disable upvoting only your favorite authors, the people on your feed, the whales, or who you think a whale will upvote anyway. It would encourage us reading posts instead of upvoting them based on hot or trending, we would enjoy stories without ever knowing who published them. Creativity would grow severely since we'll no longer rely on getting upvotes from our flocks of followers.
At this moment, I feel like creativity is being limited by the same people filling up the trending pages because of this; A massive amount of followers that will upvote their posts anyway. I'm not an exception on that rule neither. But we need to make room for new, refreshing, creative authors instead of always the same people.
Anonymous transactions
This could be a simple fix by just assigning a new memo for every transaction. People value privacy for a vast number of reasons, going from logical factors to doubtful factors. But many of the users agree that having anonymous transactions is key for any cryptocurrency.
The current code makes this extremely difficult due to the need of a new account creation for every new address (username) you need, but then again, steemit is never designed to be anonymous. In fact, it's hands down one of the most open blockchains ever created.
Limited distribution to a single account
Just like your debit/credit card, the amount of Vests could be limited. If you would limit every account to, let's say, 150MV, this would prevent a fraction of the users being able to control the rest of the community. After reaching the limit, the user needs to create a new account and build that account back up from scratch. This would take time, and in that time, other users can grow as well. A more equal distribution would occur without limiting the self interests of any account holder.
Linear SP powerdown to account balance
The SP powerdown will be linear to your account balance. Meaning, a huge whale could power down less than a regular user. Instead of having the fixed 104 weeks steemit has today, it can extend in time. This would increase market stability, unlike having 250BTC dumps every week, pushing the price extremely low. After all, why would you buy STEEM at 0.50$ today if you know a huge dump is incoming in a couple of days?
Having a linear powerdown rate would eliminate this issue. Let's take the example of a limited account that has 100k SP:
Current situation: Account will powerdown minimum (compound intrest!) 960 STEEM per week during 104 weeks. In a linear version, the account would powerdown only 400 STEEM per week, but over the period of 250 weeks.
This would reduce the amount of sold SP by over 50%, having a positive impact on the markets as seen on this chart
This is only the beginning of how I would imagine it.
I'm sure in a perfect world, there will be much more options to tweak. I think Steemit will eventually implement/adjust some of the things discussed here. Steemit is still young and fresh, only in its beta stage. Steemit is learning how to make its first steps, and everything we do or give feedback about will help them learn to walk before becoming a sprinter.
One thing is for sure, Steem is by far the best blockchain ever build up to date and it's possibilities are virtually endless.
Okay, I think there's a lot of attack vectors in your ideas that you maybe haven't thought about, so lets see if I can tackle them. :)
No usernames on posts
This is interesting, but as others have mention this takes away the social from the social media platform. Also, you will not remove the 'friend voting cabals' anyway, as people will DM each other saying "this is my post, upvote please". So at best, you remove the upvote bots. However, the expense comes at plagiarism and abusive behaviour being completely unpunished. In steemit, I believe reputation matters hugely, more than the little number beside the name. Author persona (even if anonymous) is a hugely important factor in a social medium.
So, albeit an interesting idea, it wouldn't be a site I would be interested in using.
Anonymous transactions
I agree with this, would be nice to have a way to hide account balances and send/receive anonymous amounts.
Limited distribution to a single account
Okay. Here's where you miss the point of sybil attacks. Limiting the valuation of an account just means the creation of a new account. It doesn't matter if the account is limited when I can create unlimited accounts freely and easily. It's also incredibly easy for all the accounts to vote together, so all you have done is 'make it take more time', which is actually false, as one could power down their main account and power up alts, or mine with many accounts, or buy and spread to many accounts, etc.
I simply don't see any use of limiting a single account due to the sybil problem.
Linear SP powerdown to account balance
Once again, missing sybil attack vector. If the powerdown was linear, at in your example, 400 STEEM per week, then I simply make 250 accounts with 400 Steem each. Due to the principles of the site, and making all my accounts vote together, there is no reason not to do this as well.
Then, I can power all the accounts down, and since its linear, get all of the 250x400 steem in ONE week, and immediately dump 100k steem on the market. This is worse than the current situation of 940 steem per week.
So again, there would be no reason not to use sybils here, and I can immediately dump all my steem whenever I choose with this.
And for an example of how easy it is to use sybils, there's clearly 100 intelligent people that already upvoted this comment!
Your comment is right on the money.
"No usernames" is not useful if you want to create a social media platform. It could be the beginning of a spin-off, something completely different than a social media outlet.
Usernames (or, in broader terms, identities) are necessary for many reasons, if only for personal branding. I, for instance, I would like to be known for a certain type of topics, as an expert, and I would spend time and creativity to build that personal brand in order to leverage it on other places (coaching, consulting).
Anonymous transactions could be an interesting option.
Limited SP to a certain account is something that makes me go "hmmm". But I may be biased, since I come from an ex-communist country, where all people had to be "equal". At the first glance, I would say "no" to that.
Powering down does create some market predictability and opens the door for speculation (I don't think it necessarily pulls the price down, though) and I'm sure the design of this could be refined.
Keep shooting, I'll try to catch your bullets :)
What do you think about this idea?
Those are certainly some creative and out-of-the-box ideas for SteemIt.
I look forward to reading your other ideas. I am sure one or more of them will take hold.
Steem on,
Mike
I am not sure about the no-username thing because this place also has a lot of problems with plagiarism. I think that having no profiles would make the community efforts to sort that out would be even more difficult.
But on the other hand it would be a library with only titles and no author names... A crazy, but somehow fascinating idea.
And your other ideas are actually quite good I think. I especially would like as much anonymity as possible.
I agreed with you idea sir.
Steemit has a few issues, but some of them may work out in time. It needs to be seen as 'fair'. The earnings model is too skewed in favour of the whales. A minnow may get loads of votes from fellow minnows and earn nothing. That will discourage them. I think there should be options to make transactions anonymous.
If you started again from scratch then would lots more people buy in or would a new version struggle to gain users? It's hard to know.
I was recently thinking about this issue of users upvoting the content of well-rewarded bloggers without reading, just to get curation rewards... But I didn't know what could be a solution to that.
While anonymous posts can solve this, I don't see Steemit succeed as a totally anonymous platform. This could not only cause plagiarism, like @katharsisdrill has mentioned, but also a lot of low value and irrelevant content, as users won't care about their reputation that much.
Maybe a partial solution can exist, when the posts are anonymous first, and open up after payouts. Not sure this is technically possible though
Very good ideas and proposals.
Which are not in the line of thought of Steemitverse gods, I am afraid.
Which brings me to a stupid question, a partial quote from your article:
I'd be happy for a little while if a save button was introduced, perhaps access to our upvotes. And if comments weren't locked after only a month.
Hey congrats @steve-walschot, your post from yesterday was the one with nearly the most upvotes!
I found these details here @steempowerwhale:
https://steemit.com/stats/@steempowerwhale/key-stats-for-authors-sunday-october-09-2016-100-for-steem
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Its a interesting idea about no names but sometimes I like seeing work from a particular user but indeed it could shake things up abit, thanks for the upvote my turn.