Not with the slider, but my VP is below 4% presently as I just upvoted stuff I thought worthy, and, until I read the white paper yesterday, tried diligently to remain free of strategies other than upvoting what I thought worthy.
Given the mechanism that prevents VP from being recharged if it is used regularly, I have penalized my VP, and deprived those I upvote of the power my vote should carry.
This is also a problem that my proposed solution to eliminate weighting VP by personal wealth would solve, as there is no need to drain VP in that implementation, with other mechanisms in place (using reputation) to prevent sybil attacks.
In fact you have that backwards. Single voice single vote is precisely how the stakeholders in most democratic nations are being steadily destroyed. If your vote at the polling booth was multiplied by your tax bill (and made accountable to you), there is no way the government could take services from those who pay more taxes to give them to those who do not.
As for preventing sybil attacks, there is numerous algorithms that can be applied to the task of recognising these malicious players. Textual fingerprinting, IP addresses, social network relationships, financial transactions between individuals.
Single voice single vote leads to a situation where the most skilled politicians can manipulate the results to get the support of the most entitled pricks in society to the detriment of the rest of us.
Me, my fellow activist witnesses, and many other people, now including some newly minted accounts run by more celebrities coming to the platform, are all working hard to find the effective solutions. We have been working on this for a long time, and I can trace back my first foray into designing functional distributed systems to 2013 when I discovered bitcoin, via the black markets.
The decay of voting power is essential to stop spammers. Single voice single vote, plus no vote decay, would overwhelm the blockchain with meaningless votes, overcomplicate the rewards calculation algorithm, and it would be absolute hell.
Myself and @personz are in the midst of developing a bot that will name-and-shame self voters on the platform, and now that I am aware of more of the issues affecting minnows, who, as I see it, are given a choice with the current interface between earning immediately on self votes, or voting up others, with little impact, to build their reputation. Furthermore, as my friend felixxx, a fellow witness, has informed me, that adding the vote slider for minnow accounts will also require the witnesses to vote for a 128kb block size, because at present the blockchain would disallow more than really a very small number of transactions (post, vote, coment, transfer, powerup, delegate) for these small accounts. The increased block size will allow this to function.
If all of these measures are put into place, the user experience of new users will drastically improve, and this will foster mass adoption and see the price head to the moon, and steem become a common payment method for a lot more online, and eventually, offline transactions. Offline in the sense of point of sale in a bricks and mortar shop.
I have spent hours composing a cogent reply, but it is pages long, and I feel it would be innappropriate to post it here. I don't want to plaster @dwinblood's post with a wall of text.
I am going to edit it and post it on my page, so as to respect this post.
I do ask you, personally, to take the time to review my comments, and to respond in kind, in order that our common interest in Steemit, fairness, and the good it can do for all it's users, can be furthered.
Thanks for your substantive reply here. Please do me the courtesy of carefully and particularly answering my post at your earliest convenience.
I'll think about it :p
I wish you would. Only the grinding power of criticism can sharpen my point. You have insight into Steemit that I value.