> that can probably be fixed with hard-caps per post in order to force the rest of the small-medium rewards to increase

No afaics, that would just open the vulnerability for pacts. Once you lower the threshold for sufficient¹ (see blog post), then you've reduced the protection against them.

Agreed on your other points, except I do think the market cap for a social network that somehow creates a new token ecosystem could be much higher than Facebook and perhaps even into the $trillions if the right confluence of factors comes about (e.g. the world realizes the negative profit future of the industrial age economy and wealth moves to the knowledge creation age economy), but that is a long shot so I will concede to your concern.

> I'm not completely sure I understand your 2nd bullet on #1. Is it assuming that I go grab a huge pile of free signups, and then have each of them post articles and they all vote on one another's articles?

Even if we set a threshold for voting above the level given to free signup accounts, the attacker could buy STEEM POWER and vote his free signup accounts above the threshold. Then consolidate them by using them to vote (or just continue voting them up from his STEEM POWER) to reach the threshold for powering them down.

The point is that if we allow voting to be linear it enables targeting which accounts we want to transfer value to via voting, and popularity of the content becomes irrelevant in this attack.

> I think we need to very carefully consider how a 1-account-1-vote might be implemented via a semi-autonomous verification system.

I assume you mean that if we can identify account holders then we can prevent Sybil attacks on free signups. But this isn't the only vulnerability with 1-account-1-vote (linear) weighting. Besides, account verification will likely drastically curtail signups, because nobody likes to be forced to do KYC just so they can try the site and vote.

> As things stand right now, the big voters are simply too big for minnows to have any financial incentive to stick around.

In my opinion, unfortunately (or fortunately for me) it is impossible to fix without discarding the concept of voting from a shared debasement pool. I am moving on to completely redesigning a Steem-like onboarding mechanism

Apologies I didn't immediately see your comment. Ah I had just finished commenting that I was pleasantly surprised that you upvoted my blog post. I didn't expect any whale to upvote it.

It is great that you are open to constructive criticism. And that you recognize the value of the blog posts which erupt into discussion, because I believe the highest valued content are those that increase engagement and foment sub-communities.

My blog post is also trying to help people understand that the options available for the design are difficult. It is not any diabolical master plan. Since you and I used to debate long ago in 2013 at Bitcointalk.org, you've been trying to find a way to onboard the masses to crypto-currency. Now you have something which is sort of working and has made a big splash, but there are still big challenges remaining in order to make this scale and diversify out.

I am very active in thinking about possible design improvements and tweaks, as I am sure are all of you who are already developers for the Steem ecosystem.

Here are my old thoughts on **["fair" cryptocurrency distribution](https://steemit.com/steemit/@everythink/my-old-concept-2014-of-cryptocurrency-with-low-volatility-fair-distribution-and-high-capitalization).**

Can you expand a bit on that?

The white paper says curation rewards are 3.875% same as for author rewards. I heard the white paper needs to be rewritten because some major changes have occurred hence.

I didn't know that curation rewards are that high. I haven't really thought about how making them high would impact my thought process. But off the top of my head, it seems to me the same issues that apply to author rewards and the potential for pacts forming also applies to curation rewards. How do you see it mitigating the vulnerabilities I presented?

It seems to me curation rewards make it worse, because the minions have an extra incentive to vote with the whales.

I’ll refer you to my other replies to your comments so I don’t repeat myself.

Don’t forget [Yours.org](https://www.corbettreport.com/interview-1355-ryan-x-charles-introduces-yours-org/) and maybe soon Kik.

If you want to make any name suggestion for our project, then please comment on my next blog.

How we do we distribute ~40% of  money supply that Steemit, Inc. controls and has earmarked for free signups?

Your suggestion would likely cause the adoption rate to plummet.

> They would be better off voting (at an optimal time) on a superior post. 

They can just work with a group of authors that pay them kickbacks. They can choose the best posts that come out of that group of slave authors. I mentioned kickbacks in my blog post. I've read recently that whales pay 'whisperers' to hunt for the best blog posts for them, so they could be instructed to recruit slave authors. I am not saying any our excellent whales are doing this now. We are talking about game theory for the future.

It seems to me curation rewards make it worse, because the Steeminions have an extra incentive to vote with the whales.

> A sham post can easily be spotted and downvoted to zero by other whale/ voters, as that behaviour is against the long term interest of SP holders.

The whale can split up his voting power to hide his activities and/or the slave (kickback providing) authors can produce good content.

The problem with Steem's voting reward algorithm is not that 20% get 80% of the rewards, but it is that the selection of the 20% is done by 1%. And this is motivating the wrong behaviors and focus of content produced.

> So basically youre saying that because you don't like how people would vote if their votes had any impact, their votes shouldnt have any impact. 

No you apparently entirely missed the point of why a vulnerability could cause some attacker to siphon away all the wealth.

> But the real argument youre making is one for centralization.

I am not making that argument; the game theory is. There are no good design options and that is the least likely to be overrun by an attacker.

> Also, im not sure in what sense youre using quadratic weighting ... Voting weight is linear here

The white paper clearly says the reward is votes squared, which I also mentioned in the blog.

I replied to your other comment on this page. And that is enough already.

I like that.

And for the censorship resistant storage of content on a blockchain. See [what the centralized social networks do](http://www.wired.com/2014/10/content-moderation/). No one should own and control our effort to build a following and our production.

The most salient (mathematically accurate) response I can think of at the moment, is level at which thresholded rewards such that the vulnerability would become enabled. See my reply to AlexGR.

In other words, the whales must remain in control.

Vitalik wrote an excellent blog on the game theory of [Collusion](https://vitalik.ca/general/2019/04/03/collusion.html) which is relevant to this blog of mine.

I had seen allusions to Dan's use of that term. Haha, I think he got that subconsciously from me, as I had so often referred to [Bitcoin as a Trojan Horse of the DEEP STATE](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=160612.0) since 2013, and he has turned it around to have a positive meaning. I am just joking about him getting it from me, but I was known to be the one heavily using that term at Bitcointalk.

Of course most of us understand the motivation to move away from spamming ourselves with ads.

And the greater incentive for mankind is to stop the sort of censorship and theft of followers that the behemoth social networks are doing (see my comment reply to @spookypooky below).

As for professional bloggers, I think it is all about building community and monetizing the community. Ads are a form of that but they have low relevance which is why we find them spammy.

Thus intuitively I don't expect a globalized monetization to be conceptually correct. One of the differences between the design instincts of Dan and myself, has always been that I am looking for degrees-of-freedom and (at least in the past) he was trying to design in some globalized interest rate and collectivized monetary aspects. This was one of the key differences I observed between our thought processes when he and I used to discuss before he left Bitcointalk for his Bitshare forum. However, I also see he has innovated in ways that are insightful. I am thinking the globalized debasement can be used with some localized community degree-of-freedom, but I haven't yet worked out exactly how to do this. I am still in analysis mode.

Btw, this system is a tremendous accomplishment. A lot of development effort in this and an ecosystem with a lot of people contributing. Kudos.

This experiment is providing much data and a testbed for increasing our understanding; and is causing a lot of brainstorming in our cryptocommunity.

Edit: note [I have replied](https://steemit.com/steem/@dantheman/people-rank-using-page-rank-algorithm-for-better-curation-and-rewards#@anonymint/re-dantheman-people-rank-using-page-rank-algorithm-for-better-curation-and-rewards-20160811t031807328z) to Dan's latest blog proposal.

Note that dilemma predicted by my 2016 blog [is happening](https://steemit.com/steem/@anonymint/re-smooth-re-ats-david-re-steemitblog-a-radically-updated-steem-whitepaper-20180415t190818066z).