Hello and thank you for your comment!
Actually, the issue was that some witnesses and I want to prevent vote trading services.
Many other witnesses were not willing to do that. They called this "censorship".
So the only radical proposal left was to remove the possibility for delegations.
But now, after my voting posts, quite a few witnesses are willing to consider blocking vote-trading services after all.
I think this is progress.
However, I would be very interested in your arguments for removing delegations on the basis that we would already have blocked vote-trading services.
My arguments are quite simple:
And now:
If @megadrive and other witnesses will protect scammers and won't care about investors, I will power down and dump Blurt back on the market, this will take the price where it was when I started buying -
$0.006
Ps.
I agree with that. Bad idea
@ctime @double-u the best way to disable it is to cut off the food source, we can disable the ability to delegate to this particular account in blurtwallet.com, same way as we are protecting users now from sending to the blurtlink account.
We then educate the users and approach them one by one to remove the delegation, if they continue then we simply do not support their posts or don't support their witnesses. @saboin @tekraze thoughts?
It's doable on the UI.
Yes, we can do. Tomorrow we will
This is kinda danger game, I don't like this idea at all, it will cause a lot of conflicts and discussions
Here's my alternative sollution:
Return all curations rewards from delegated power to Blurt Power owners
Scammers will give up, they won't be able to cheat and profit on it anymore. Blurt Power holders will be happy to delegate their power to honest curators. Curators still will be able to profit by publishing reports. Investors will be happy too, they will know that the game is FAIR
How do we return the delegation without the user keys and without hardfork?
Hardfork is needed.
That's not possible right now, our lead time for hardforks is at least 3 months.
I understand. It is time to talk with devs and community. It is time to ask them if it's possible to do and how difficult it would be.
Ps. Right now, I would suggest to do nothing with upvu account, just let it run as it is. I remember the POB drama, when they blocked azircon account. The price of POB token went down from 2 HIVE to 0.2 HIVE
I'm in touch with the devs and there are still many gitlab issues unfinished before we can add more to the list. We wouldn't block the account, just new delegations to it via the UI, they are welcome to spin up a new ui and get their users to use it, or have users use the cli wallet to delegate.
The thought of this concerns me too. It appears that a lot of the Korean "investors" have bought Blurt in order to use UpVu. That's going to be a lot of Blurt for you to prop the price up.
Why hardfork?
VgA
Because this proposed change can be done no other way than hardfork.
I have another solution as well, for unfinalised airdrop attestations we can exclude accounts from receiving tokens which delegate to such harmful accounts. I can do this with the STATE token airdrop and put it front page for awareness.
Blocking the ability to delegate is the same as returning delegation, and is something we have the power to do right now, we don't have the ability to cancel/return delegation.
Maybe I am just tired but in the first paragraph you say "return all curations from delegated power to Blurt Power owners". Then you go on to say "Blurt Power holders will be happy to delegate their power to honest curators".
Why would someone delegate to honest curators if their curations from the delegation are returned? I cannot wrap my tired brain around this.
@megadrive,
please read this comment as well.
I think this is also a very good idea:
https://blurt.blog/blurtgerman/@ctime/r3nx30
Thank You for starting this discussion
I couldn't find you in Discord.
Please write me once there:
double-u#9382
I'm not there. It would be nice to have own chat on blurt.blog, something like beechat on peakd
Yes but not possible, we are unable to do a hardfork at this moment, it takes months of planning, whatever we do has to be at user-interface level.
ok
Very good!
In your very 1st reply to double-u on this subject, you say:
...as a reason for keeping delegations and allowing these services to continue.
Reading how this has escalated and seeing users with large stakes throw their weight around... and seeing that the person who's pushing for delegations to be removed self-upvotes 100% of their own content (and will therefore be one who profits the most from this decision)...
What plans are there to prevent these users from profiting from their successful removal of @upvu?
I don't see it as removal, by limiting the ability to delegate from the official wallet it will stop further delegations to upvu, and hopefully educate users that the account is voting on the wrong type of content and lead to some delegations.
Regarding other users and self-voting, it is their stake they purchased so they are welcome to self vote provided their content is original and not PLG.
Whilst I agree with the outcome (I said to you when we first spoke about my concerns regarding UpVu), something about all of this sits very uncomfortably with me.
It appears (so just my perspective) that a powerful user (a witness) dislikes something and generates good support with a clearly biased vote which they consider to be the opinion of the entire community. This then adapts slightly to another powerful user threatening to (not just stop increasing their stake but) remove their stake if somebody isn't stopped / removed. Threatening to dump their Blurt and lower its price if they don't get what they want.
2 users = over 10 million Blurt. Both users will profit financially from this user being stopped - one through additional self-upvote rewards, the other more honourably through curation.
What if these 2 users decide that they don't like somebody else? What if they think that mine is the "wrong type of content" or that I'm voting on the "wrong type of content". My 50,000 Blurt investment is insignificant compared to these bullies.
I also see that at no point has @upvu been tagged or given the right to reply or to change or adapt what they do before these measures come in to force. You might have done this behind the scenes so my apologies if UpVu has been given the opportunity to vote on "the correct type of content".
I know that you're busy so I'm not asking you to explain this decision to me.
I don't understand how somebody who self-upvotes at 700 Blurt per post is not damaging the Blurt ecosystem.
When I joined Blurt a year ago, I didn't like the self votes either. I addressed this at the time just as you did. There were also posts on the topic and it was discussed.
My conclusion in the end:
yes, if you don't overdo it, it's perfectly ok.
That was my post on the subject at the time, but it would be discussed elsewhere....:
https://blurt.blog/blurtgerman/@elkezaksek/upvotes
PS. Bosco must be very excited - I'm excited for him 🙂
Yes he is!
It is like he has won in a lottery...
Hi, thanks for your concerns, sorry for the delay in response have been trying to launch Digchain and Gamestate, both of which give airdrops on the Blurt community.
I don't really see what any large user can do, the foundation runs the blurt.blog and wallet frontends and we have the final decision on when such actions are taken, we are not swayed by large holders of Blurt, I'm not impressed myself with threats of dumping, but I do believe the market is strong enough to handle it, and it would be their loss and would help in distributing Blurt.
I have suggested that such future lobbying be done neutrally via the @blurtoffical account with an unbias request for vote, where the user does not know the stance of the foundation on it. This would be preferable to a whale posting and skewing the vote because users want upvotes or witness votes from that person.
In this case we did not feel the need to consult upvu as the content being voted on was clearly poor and PLG, there is simply no excuse for that.
Regarding self-votes, we have different philosophies here, we didn't carry over some of the stigmas from Steem, we have a view that if people paid for their stake with funds or via "sweat equity", they should be entitled to use is however they wish, so the occasional self-voting is perfectly fine if balanced with curating others, we don't police that, nor do we have a way of policing that at present, so please feel free to self-vote, of course I don't speak for the entire community, some may not like self-voting.
I'm a bit old-fashioned, I don't self-vote at times, sometimes I do, the cool thing on Blurt is there are more freedoms and less judgement.
Thanks for taking the time to reply - I appreciate you're busy and I didn't expect you to. You're a hard man to ever disagree with.
This experience has left me with a rather bitter taste in my mouth and I'm pleased to see that future decisions like this will be approached differently, although in this instance, it appears that the heavyweight bullies have "won", irrespective of whether it's the "correct" decision or if the same decision would have been made via a route with more integrity.
In response to my disagreement (vote) that delegations should be stopped (as with others who opposed this point of view), I had supporters of the movement challenging me - akin to the "democratic" polling stations previously experienced in countries like Zimbabwe where people would stand outside with their machetes.
This naturally discourages others from voicing their unhappiness with the approach and as you say, one particular whale has continued to upvote his supporters which encourages them to continue this behaviour (didn't President Mugabe do this too?) So if a vote is ever proposed by @blurtofficial, I suggest that this kind of provocation / bullying (through lack of better word) is prohibited.
I'm afraid that I'll always be opposed to self-voting (so perhaps I can disagree with you on something). Whereas upvoting services only benefit the upvoting service and the user being upvoted (at least 2 people benefit with this approach), a self-upvoter only ever benefits 1 person. No matter what excuses they have for doing it (they upvote 400 other posts before upvoting 100% of their own content), it's a selfish act and to me, that's contradictory to the idea of community.
I totally agree that self-voting is a selfish act, but capitalism and making money for ones-self is also a selfish act, if you are self voting to give yourself more visibility so your words can reach others and have a positive impact, I don't see a problem with that. Voting only a small group of friends is just as bad as self-voting I guess.
I am very familiar with dictatorships swaying votes with threats and even sweeteners like buckets fo KFC for voting for their party, Blurt actually needs a way to vote anonymously. Maybe using a privacy chain and attesting ones blurt account on it and broadcasting a secret vote tied to one's blurt power weight, not sure how that would look, but yeah it needs to be done in a way that anyone can vote without feeling afraid they will lose witness votes or regular support from whales.
Great finally someone who's doing against this service something👍
VgA
Great response and reminds me why I love this community.
I think you hit the nail on the head and how services like these should not be promoted. It's not about the delegation itself but how they use the accounts that get that delegated power, imagine for a moment how I feel that day after day I try to boost blurt and I don't even get to 500k blurt. I don't ask for delegations either, but I do seek to delegate to other manual healing projects or initiatives. Not delegate me I vote for you services, or services that tell you I give you so much percentage of money. They take everyone's profits without making any effort. So I agree to eliminate them.
I understand your point fully and consider that these accounts, scammer or farmmer should be disabled immediately. And when I say bot if I have mentioned it, I mean those automated accounts that offer proxy votes, vote buying, accounts that only deceive users among other things. As you rightly mentioned if there is someone who cheats users, steals their earnings then let's eliminate those accounts. There are other people who also do a good job with delegations.
Do you think there is any other way to eradicate these services apart from eliminating the delegations? according to your experience in other networks has it been possible to combat these services or not yet implemented something to combat them?
I am all for doing something about the pay for vote services. But taking away all delegations prevents me from basically delegating from one of my accounts to an active curation account. It also prevents me from curating to those who do work for me such as curators and moderators. Those moderators of my community who want receive a delegation from one of my accounts as payments. It helps keep them growing on the platform. Then there are those I feel worthy of a delegation because from their very first publication the quality of their work is exceptional and the potential is there for some wonderful contributions to the community.
Now I can gift them some Blurt, but some quickly become inactive and I have just given away blurt. I recently took a delegation away from someone when it was brought to my attention they were plagiarizing their work. I can take away a delegation, but cannot get back a direct contribution to their account. I am sure if I was not so tired I could come up with other types of examples.
I have helped many newcomers get a start even with a small delegation. This started on steemit with some users, and now with the addition of Hive and then Blurt those same people continue to churn out superior publications... Those users may not have continued without the assistance I could give them.
Again my largest delegations are from accounts I own to my primary 3 curation accounts. Doing it this way when the time comes and I want to start up one of the other accounts I can, or leave the three with ample voting power.
I have never asked for a delegation, and never will. In the early days of Blurt I saw some getting a delegation to get them started with a project. I never asked and never plan to do so. I like the freedom to have my curators curate posts they find worthy, without the feeling of an obligation to vote on a post.
I would really like to see the two issues separated somehow. Delegating for a vote is totally different from delegating for the reasons I have discussed. One needs to be curtailed and the other be allowed to flourish.
I was in the midst of making plans for an unused account to be set up to delegate to newcomers. I still have not arrived at criteria for choosing who could get one. The delegation would be temporary to get them started and discontinued at any time. For now I cannot focus on such a thing. I do not want to waste my energy for naught.
I have the same opinion as you:
We need to make upvu impossible.
Only, what is the best way to do this?
The easiest way would be to block this account.
This is very bad idea.
If they don't want to remove delegations because it supports curation groups then it makes sense to return all curation rewards from delegated power to Blurt Power owners. Scammers will give up, they won't be able to cheat and profit on it anymore. Blurt Power holders will be happy to delegate their power to honest curators. Curators still will be able to profit by publishing reports. Investors will be happy too, they will know that the game is FAIR
Returning the curation rewards to the Blurt Power owner is something we had discussed for possible addition in a future hardfork. I don't think it will be possible to add that in the next hardfork, but probably further down the line.
Thanks. I'll stay here, and will keep investing. You and megadrive will get my witness vote once it's done
Yes, for now I have more faith in these 2 witnesses and several other witnesses
Ah, now I understand you.
I find this suggestion of yours very good!
I believe I understand that you want all funds that have been generated in this account. Be returned to the delegators. These services keep a portion of the funds generated by vote. So I understand that it should be something like freezing the account and returning the funds, that's what I understand.
No, he is not suggesting a freeze.
He proposes that the delegators receive all the rewards from the votes of the service.
This would make the game uninteresting for the service (upvu) and the service would disappear.
Ok. Ok. Ok.
In the end it's like using a voting trail, you are just following the votes of an account still get the rewards for it and the followed account has a bigger impact without earning more.
Hallo Werner man könnte auch die Delegation Pro Account begrenzen so das die denen man eine Kleinigkeit zum Start delegieren möchte nicht davon betroffen wären !
VgA
Hallo, es ist inzwischen schon eine andere Lösung gefunden worden; nämlich den Weg von Delegationen zu dem schlimmsten Service (upvu) zu entfernen.
Alle anderen Delegationen könnten dann so bleiben wie bisher.
Das freut mich endlich mal jemand der was gegen diesen selfvote Circle macht 👍
VgA