Very thankful for the patience of those around here who continually explain advanced game theory dynamics and sybil attack realities to those who are uninformed. I've been working hard the last month to catch up, and I greatly appreciate this effort of education.
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when I saw someone responded to this, I figured it would be you @lukestokes, even before I looked at the username. That's the whole reason there is a need to sign up through facebook or redditt (I believe that is still true). Steemit is looking for unique individual users who will engage and use the system, not total number of accounts.
I guess people could keep making email accounts and facebook accounts and sign up for the steem power and only vote on one users post and eventually power down and transfer to one account, but most trying to game the system are looking for a quick buck and not willing to get their money over years.
I know how to game systems pretty well. It's just how my mind works. It's gotten me in some trouble, but I can now use it to point out bugs or exploits to help a community instead of just myself.
Thanks @bendjmiller222. Even then though, 3 Steem Power isn't going to impact much of anything. That's the whole point of this design. It's those who are VESTed which get to influence the network. Having 100 accounts at 3 Steem each is still only 300 Steem Power. Not exactly a whale and certainly not an influential vote, even if combined. The white paper gets into this stuff in detail, but I guess many haven't read it or thought it through.
Regarding defences against this kind of gaming, such as with bots, for example, well, first of all, flagging works effectively to push them off the page with subzero reputations, but I think that some kind of minor PoW that cannot be accelerated would limit user post rates, same as what HashCash (the precursor to bitcoin, in fact) and Bitmessage do, precisely to rate-limit spamming. Bitcoin uses it to rate-limit new coin issuance. It works as an inflation controller, but as Steem proves, you can direct inflation to useful purposes. Dash also demonstrates this principle as well, by redirecting it to fund development and platform marketing. Steem doesn't need this because the users themselves are the biggest marketers, and right now, playtesters, and maybe eventually the idea of this being a governance system to regulate developers may become integrated too.
I have read the white paper multiple times actually and
This was actually meant to be a compliment (rereading made me realize that it may not have sounded like one).
You are correct that one hundred accounts at 3 steem power is not a very big account, but you could easily outsource and pay x amount of dollars for people to make fake facebook accounts and slowly build up a following of a lot of micro accounts voting for them.
It may not make a lot of money (then again if the price were to boost up, the value on each account could add up to a nice payday for someone), but I believe is clearly not the way steemit was designed to be used.
Steemit has added a lot of features to prevent abuse, but you are absolutely right in your reply to mine that a bunch of small accounts most likely won't be able to do much unless they scale up their micro operations.
Content is really what should be making money and finding content. I think that less steem power could even be given (or none) and make peoples first post worth a little bit more in some way. Just an idea.
Exactly, it will be the great and quality content which will bring in fresh writers. why not give more weight to writers who have pulled more people into steemit based on their content? also aka the referral.
I understood it as a compliment and attempted to thank you but accidentally typed "Then" instead of "Thanks" (which I just edited). Sorry for the confusion.
That's an interesting idea... your Steem onlocked on your first post. Unfortunately, I think Steem is required in order to use bandwidth on the network to post, but I'm not sure how any of that works yet.