So, we keep talking about the same variations of solutions for the curation problem, but often the behavior of users is not taken into high enough of consideration. People are going to always be greedy. Let's not pretend that people will change their behavior if we change things to nudge them slightly. We need to use their own greed against them. 

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The problem with other proposals is that "curators" are still heavily encouraged to upvote the content of popular authors and whales because the current system encourages frontrunning other voters. Thus, a popular author could post a picture of a bowl of cereal from their phone and earn a substantial amount of cash because they have a history of raking in the dough. 

<h6>Challenge:</h6> I encourage any whales/dolphins reading to post pictures of their bowls of cereal because I think that would be hilarious and it would prove my point. Actually, anyone feel free to post their bowls of cereal. 

So, any effective mechanisms should eliminate the frontrunning effect and if possible discourage it. The following mechanism does that. But it does it in a very anti-whale / anti-investor way. That's why I don't expect that anyone will take it seriously. But what I want to do is to churn the waters and inject some creativity into what I find a rather stale conversation. Maybe it will light the spark for someone smarter than me to come up with a better solution. 

To solve our issues, we give a true 75 / 25 split and eliminate giving extra rewards to the authors. This is really not that controversial. Then, we give a lucky curator all of the curation rewards. All the remaining curators are losers. 

How do we select a winner? We randomly select a winner but give higher odds to those that vote earlier to reward them for finding the post. In order to prevent bots from getting the best odds, we give lower odds to those who vote before a certain time period. This time period would be randomly selected after the fact between 5 and 15 minutes. The odds after voting might look like something like the following picture:

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x represents an ordering of the voters. Let's say the randomly selected cut off time is t. t on the graph would be the point where the probability is the highest. Pretty straightforward.

The main benefit of this proposal is decentralization of rewards through competition. Bitcoin mining works in a similar way. But instead of wasting electricity, we are utilizing brain juice through decision making.

Also everyone is not fighting for one block because we have a ton of authors who are completely ignored. We have so many undiscovered gold nuggets just waiting to be mined and brought to the light.

Naturally, smart curators who want to profit will go to authors who are undiscovered because there is less competition there. Frontrunning is now unprofitable due to the increase in competition. Those minnows that were making you the big curation rewards by stacking are now your worst enemy. Whales can no longer simply vote for the same author unless they want to regularly lose to minnows. If they want to see consistent rewards, they'll have to find hidden gems somewhere. 

This also makes the rewards more decentralized which helps adoption and grows the ecosystem. With content now being looked at more and the more authors being fairly rewarded and curators who actively curate being rewarded with more sizable bounties independent of their stake, the platform will grow. This in turn makes Steem more valuable which rewards the investors and whales in the long run. Decentralization is good, if I remember correctly?

Why will this proposal never pass? Simple. Because it requires whales / investors to take a long term position. It literally "kills" their short term curation prospects. While it aligns profitable action with desirable curation behavior, it puts the whales in a tough position as they have to compete for rewards. And we know how sensitive those whales can be if disturbed. It also requires a hardfork.

Naturally one would expect them to resort to vote selling and delegation because greedy people aren't patient. But if we ignore that, we still have a healthier ecosystem where people are discouraged from frontrunning because in all likelihood they aren't earning anything unless they are very very lucky.

Also, we don't have to commit to such a proposal 100%. We could still implement such a proposal where part of the curation rewards go to a lottery and part are dealt out the old way. So I leave the discussion to the rest of you. Hopefully, this will help the creativity juices going or at the very least encourage you to eat some cereal.

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##### Sources:
[Image](http://www.politicspa.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/captain-ahab.jpg)
[Graph](http://www.analyticalway.com/images/Distributions/Beta.gif)
[Original Post](https://steemit.com/steem/@blocktrades/voting-abuse-and-ineffective-curation-a-proposal-for-blockchain-level-change#@greer184/re-blocktrades-voting-abuse-and-ineffective-curation-a-proposal-for-blockchain-level-change-20171204t175315270z)