Problem
The ideal curator is someone who loves the platform and understands what will make it a success long range. A person that thinks rationally about curation with a long-range perspective. We don't want opportunistic people who are short sighted whim worshipers in a position of power. The incentives with respect to powering up and down should, therefore, be aligned to promote this outcome.
As it is now a short-sighted person might power up in a moment of elation and regret it the next day. With a delay on powering down, we are preventing the emotional short sighted whim worshipper from exiting a position of power quickly.
This keeps a lot of toxic people locked in a position of power that might not have the long range interest of the system in mind.
The solution is to filter for patience
If it was possible to power down almost instantly but the power up period was long-ish, it will only be people who truly are committed to the long-range success of platform that will take the time to get into a position of power. Everyone else would quickly power down and become liquid.
An instant power-down period would also be able to supply the market with liquid STEEM in a situation of high demand and it would facilitate a wider distribution of the token instead of having it locked up in a few bigger accounts.
I propose a linear gradual power-up period of 52 weeks and a power-down period of a few days.
This is a solution in search of a problem. Why make it a pain in the ass for the 99.999999% of people who are good actors, just on speculation that someone at some time might spend a whole lot of money (to buy 500,000 STEEM or more) and be a dickhead with it for the 2 or 3 days until they get bored?
I disagree. There is a delay already. I would be in favour of getting rid of all delays getting in and out of voting power if it was possible. But there is a reason to have a delay getting in or out of voting power. And that is to prevent gaming of the voting system by hiding who is in control. Emagine transferring voting power between different accounts instantly and voting on different posts and witnesses. This would create confusion as to who is the person in power. It's just better to have the delay getting into power than getting out of power.
Now we found the problem
Ha, digging deep there. In the context of this post, I stand by my comment. In the context of witness voting, a power up delay makes more sense, with the benefit of hindsight. Don't tell me "gotcha" in the context of voting on posts.
Exactly. Maybe the Steem rewards for upvotes are not so critical for the infrastructure here. At the moment we have 12 sock puppets witnesses that are not even able to handle the price feed. This messes with the rewards. If you power up and start interacting on the platform with the community that should be encouraged directly.
But if you want to have a say in governance, voting witnesses and such, voting rights should be earned 'gradually' over time.
I'm tagging @theoretical here.
We have to do this.
This is interesting, though the only answer I can give at present is 'I need to think about this.'
Love you mug! I think this has already been accomplished with the reduced inflation. Although I totally agree that quality content and quality curation should be our primary objectives, increased participation is 'currently' the primary necessity. To attract bees we need to use honey ... we can bring them in with the desire for riches, once they are here the community will fine-tune them, re-orienting them toward more long-term considerations. Racing after money is also a great innovation catalyst .. fueling this kind of competition will also produce the quality projects needed to attract the millions we need to take over THE WORLD!
I think it is important to encourage rational participation over short-sighted vote buying participation. Not sure why you think changes to inflation has done much to move us closer to that ideal. Voting power is "honey". There is a sense of accomplishment powering up if it takes time and patience instead of feeling trapped and locked in when powered up. It needs to be desirable to power up.
Perhaps I do not fully understand how this would be put into practice. Do you mean that someone could not come in and drop $20 k to purchase a tonne of SP, as we have seen done a few times of late. Would you suggest throttling a person's ability to accumulate SP .. ie. from curation + only a certain amount within a certain timeframe?
It would work just like now. The delay associated with getting your liquid STEEM out of the SP would just be changed to a delay getting in to SP. You can still buy and sell as much liquid STEEM as you like.
interesting!
Great idea, please repost this idea buty with a current 13 week power up/down process, I think we do need the cool heads to prevail
Powering Down instantly is a great idea Steem needs to hear about, and having tyo wait 13 weeks to power up keeps a lot of bad actors out of steem!
Also we would be able to power down curation instantly
This would be bad for the price of steem. The more there is liquid steem, the lower the price will drop.
Short range while the toxic people leave the platform it might depress the price a bit. Long range it would have the opposite effect because we will have much better curation and content. Attracting many more users.
It will actually be more desirable to power up because there is no huge disadvantage as now, where you are locked away from the market.
I can't see how it would make curation much better. Maybe a little bit, but in the long run it's really difficult task to reward right users at the right time because this is, after all, a decentralized system.
Bigger problem is that it's really hard to find good content from Steemit. For example, I don't care about photography, traveling or food, so while many posts in those categories might be high quality for those who care about them, they are pretty much just noise for me. "Good content" is not good for everybody, only a small subset of users. Most of the posts in trending are not interesting to me. That's why I don't see much benefits of focusing on curation. Some good writers might get a few bucks more, but that's about it.
I want people to have financial incentives for long term. Having to commit for the long term success of the platform makes people think more how they act. If users can sell whenever they want, most of them will not be committed to the platform. They don't have skin in the game. When people don't have skin in the game, they tend to act recklessly.
Also think about this. If my proposal is implemented people who want to power up quickly would buy much more STEEM than they need to shorten the power-up period. This will increase demand and take away STEEM from the market.
Which would be wonderful for people who want to get into the platform. The price drop would be temporary.
We want the price to reflect actual demand for the token. If the price is being artificially propped up by the power-down delay, we need to fix it.
Of course we should make it artificially harder to get out of the system. That will force people to think more about their investment.
In the very first video I saw about STEEM, the guy noticed the power-down delay after he powered-up. That was a very tiny stake. But people don't necessarily think before they invest.
This idea would completely eliminate the "it's a ponzi" objection, which is a nice benefit.
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nate ( @picokernel had this same idea where you just make the power up a DELAY so if you WANt power you have to WAIt for it but the power DOWN is INSTNT so youd be MUCH more likely to power up MILLIONS of dollars if you knew you could get it back Instantly! the power UP should have the delay!
But maybe not thers a reason they didnt implement it that way, but we can experiment these features on our own test net style steem forks where we will get to test out all these types of features
Great minds think alike ;)