Wei Wu Wei - The profit potential of leaving things be...

Someone remarked in the discord today that they were very pleased that every time they turned their attention back to the platform new and awesome things were happening.

I don't know if others in the team are explicitly aware of or guiding their decisions by Taoist principles, but as I see it, the reason why we are seeing healthy organic growth in the platform is because precisely we are not interfering, except in as much and as far as needed to correct emergent problems.

The two big bugs that the platform faces both stem from assumptions in the algorithms controlling the regulation of spammy traffic and the calculation of post rewards.

Spam

We all here know about the spectacular :rooster: spam that plagued us for the first week of operation. Over the course of a few days many options were mooted and for the sake of expedience, a simple posting fee was decided would be the best option for stopping the haemorrhaging gigabytes of :rooster: we were being subjected to.

The fix was refined a little by allowing witness control of the fee rates, which have settled fairly confidently around 0.025-0.01 blurt per kilobyte, and per-tx fee at minimal 0.001.

People are still getting used to the idea but the lack of spammy content is pretty conclusive.

Minimal action is a feature of Wei Wu Wei. Do the least required as over-adjustments tend to have longer lasting results that are harder to change.

Rewards

Mostly I think this one will correct by itself, given long enough. But, being that users are the most valued and their posts most paid-for by the network (at 65%) we may need to make a gentle intervention for this to fix the issue. The resolution is likely to arrive within the week this post will be pending rewards.

Sometimes problems resolve by themselves and trying to fix them only makes them worse and last longer.

Considering that we are now standing at two small exchange listings and a price of around $USD0.06, we already have a price level that is sustainable for witnesses. The infrastructure has to be right before a big load of users will be a benefit and profit to all involved. So there isn't so great an urgency to fix the reward problem, as I say, given a little more time it will probably converge to an acceptable level within another two weeks anyway.

Not to be lazy...

But as in the experience of creativity of any kind, there is a point at which further labors diminish the final profit. Mastery is as much knowing what to add as what to leave as it is.

As for me...

I'm building a GUI interface for the network, starting with similar sort of functionality as the Vessel wallet. I am using the Gio - a new and already very usable library for producing GUI applications in the Go programming language.

As it is new, there isn't yet even clipboard support in the text input widget for editing, but this will be coming pretty soon and if nobody else does it, I'll be writing a super simple Markdown renderer.

For the time being, it is going to be aimed more at technical users like witnesses and developers, but it will be the fastest to build of any steem-protocol-based application, and one of the most resource efficient (yay concurrency and imperative style programming)

Still from first episode of Russian Winnie Pooh cartoon - pic related because of book "The Tao of Pooh" which observes the similarity of the philosophy of Winnie the Pooh and Taoism and the chinese word "Pu" - The Uncarved Block. And this is not the Disney Crap version.