Do Delegations Undermine The Entire POB Concept

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The more time I spend here on Hive the more things I see that are glaring concerns to me. With a history of running my own business for the last 18 years and seeing all the drama of crypto over the last 8 years one of the things that has recently caught my attention is the concept of delegations.

What Are Delegations?

Delegations come in the form of many use cases but in general it simply means you lend your Hive power to another account. This in turn helps the project. That project could be a curation platform, to help onboarding etc. In exchange you often times get a kick back in the form of part or all of the curation rewards from that account based on your delegation you have sent.

Does This Undermine The Entire POB Concept?

What happens is you start getting accounts with massive amounts of power not only in Hive but also within tribes. While many do their best they can with curation it begs the question. Is this method undermining everything POB was built for? That was to give everyone a vote and a say as to what content they want to upvote and feel holds value here on Hive/tribes.

Instead of 1,000 people going around and curating content to get rewards 1,000 accounts now throw their powered up hive or tokens to a curation account. That one account now has to try and do the work of hundreds of people in terms of curating content each day.

My Thoughts

To me it become ineffective, It's impossible for one account or a few curation accounts to really go around and properly curate content on the platform. There's simply not enough hours in the day.

To me delegations promotes the following

The positives

  • A easy way to protect your Hive and still help fund a project
  • Passive income for those who are too busy doing other things

The negatives

  • Passive income for those lazy
  • Centralization
  • Less activity and engagement

I'm curious to hear your own view points on this and how you feel about delegations. Let me know in the comments.


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I am not quite sure what to think. I don't know that I would call it centralization but I see where you are coming from. However I don't see a way that this is avoidable because we would have to limit people's holdings which is exactly what we seek to avoid in traditional finances. I think it will be ok, but I urge people to accumulate and try to catch up with the whales.

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Who do we delegate to in order to earn more PoB? :D

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@amr008 will put you through 😎


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Ohh, I know @amr008 have a lot of accounts doing curations :D
I know thought if there where anyone account like the leo.voter

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Oh okay

I don’t have any idea about such initiative in POB at the moment.

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Fair fair. Otherwise I just delegate it to Brofi xD

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It's the old 'double edged sword' problem

I have a good chunk of delegated at the moment (mostly because i'm taking some time off)

but also partly because i'm lazy AF

I think as long as the people keep up with where their power is delegated things should be OK

Another example of DYOR (do your own research)

But then again we are talking about people - so , who knows ?

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There for sure are many good use cases and people that do it for good reason. Double edged sword for sure. Enjoy your time off and thank you for your views and feedback on this.


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As old proverb say , every stick has TWO ends.
Even if delegation can have some negative aspects, I believe its positive things greatly outperforms those negativities.

I am keeping my eye on a number of massive present POB delegations. Could not find any info, on which terms, rules or obligations most of them have been made.

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There's a lot of good from it for sure. Something we should all keep an eye out for though as the platform continues to grow with more and more people. Thank you for your views and feedback.


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(Edited)

That one account now has to try and do the work of hundreds of people in terms of curating content each day.

This is just like during Steemit days that there was a lot of voting bots around. I guess we now have Human bots lol.

Activity is something that takes time and I think most whales if I am correct owns one personal business or two which he or she might be trying to catch up with and not have much time to be active on the blockchain. This is where delegation comes in


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(Edited)

You've made quite good points. I'd say as long as it is not a requirement or a compulsory thing then there's nothing wrong with it. What I mean is as long as people are still free to delegate or not to delegate then it's cool. Further, this people are free to take back their delegation anytime the whole thing is going sideways. Lastly another time this can be bad is if delegations are made to unscrupulous accounts. It takes brains to be able to chose the right people to delegate to, also take brains to not delegate to unscrupulous accounts. Also the people who vote on your behalf with your delegations are carrying out proof of brain for you based on the little proof you showed by choosing them😃😃

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One advantage I saw with POB was that most of the tokens were staked. Also there were relatively few whales. Once I started talking about this, I saw a rush to power down and sell our high value token, as well as people scrambling to become whales so they could own their stake of the value. Its sad to see, but I want to encourage us to keep staking and to give out those POB votes to active accounts , users who might just be minnows. It really is disappointing to see everyone sell, POB will die a slow and miserable death if we just let the same things that happen with Hive, repeat.

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I observed that some whales do use their stake to upvote good contents which they see though based on the voting power they might be restricted to the maximum number of upvotes they can give out daily,but there are some whales that just keep self-voting instead of upvoting good contents from other users....@bitcoinflood


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It starts to feel a bit off if a small group start to weild unchecked voting power. Then again, as long their voting patterns are clear, open and widely distributed it may not matter as much. I guess we all have the opportunity to build our stake and increase our votes, it is just to do it so many places at once.

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That's a really cool perspective @bitcoinflood. I will tell you about mine:

Delegation is an awesome feature that Hive has. It enables you to put your Token Power to use if you are an investor who doesn't want to get involved in the day-to-day activities on the platform. Let's face it, not everyone has time for social media or not everyone has the skills to create content.

One can always combat Centralization by delegating your power to a group of curators (with a high reputation) rather than a single entity. If they actually care about their stake being worthy in the future, they must follow a similar strategy. If as a user I feel someone is worth holding my Power without actually owning my funds then I would give it. That's PoB! It's a form of rewarding a person based on the value they are creating.

Passive income for those lazy

And honestly, this is not a negative. Hehe! In fact it's a blessing from an investment point of view 😂

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Creating content is not an easy activity to do, not everyone has the ability to write about different topics with a certain quality, even those who have it do not always receive the reward or support in the form of votes that perhaps they deserve, in that sense, I see the delegation as a compensation mechanism, a way to involve those who do not have the potential to write about issues of interest in this system of content monetization.

I must admit that there are days when inspiration is gone and no matter how much I squeeze the brain of that organ nothing coherent comes out, in my case I give up and take a break until the muse of ideas returns to the space between my ears, while I think it is valid to apply the delegation to earn some money while you support other projects to raise the value of your token.


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Yeah, I can relate to that @nirvana3003. Life happens and you cannot make sure to be active every day. Even if you are active every day, it's impossible to be online for the major part of the day unless you do this full time. Not many people can afford to do that.

In that case, you can put your stake to use by delegating it to some project which gives you ROI on your delegation. You can always choose to donate it to someone who is adding value to the platform. This will come to you indirectly when their efforts help the platform to grow & it's eventually reflected in the price of the token. It's a long shot though. 😉


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What's the account curating for POB?

I subscribe 100% to the following:

The negatives
Passive income for those lazy
Centralization
Less activity and engagement

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I think that delegations play a very important role in the whole Hive ecosystem. As you said it is possible to generate passive income for both active and passive people. This in my opinion, is positive because it allows people to have a return on their tokens and like that they leave the money in the ecosystem. I think it's important that people who don't have the time to do curation themselves have the option to have a return. If we didn't have this option, this would give Hive a disadvantage in respect to the blockchains that offer passive staking rewards.

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I don't necessarily believe they undermine the concept of proof of brain. There are a couple of projects that I believe in and have delegated Hive or CTP to help them get started and it helps me get some passive income. That being said, I do still upvote manually and comment on other posts in various tribes.

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It's hard to really say anything about it but yes there are pros and cons on this. One of the things promoted in HIVE is to stake and use that to generate more returns. So I don't see anything particularly wrong but it can definitely become more of an issue in the future. But I do think passive income and the reasons for people pursuing returns like in Defi is kind of required since there are just too many people whose motivation is just the returns.

I tend to do everything myself and haven't delegated anything out yet so this is just my view of the subject.

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At first, i was not sure how i felt about your article and then I released it was not delegation you have any issue with, its delegation to whale accounts that then control the flow of POB. I don't really have a strong view because i delegate to a curtation account and to people who want to get involved but i guess my question would be how is this diffrent from some of the big whales in POB taht got here because they got in early or bought in ? Do you also have a problem with them? In which case its more about how do we temper the power of a big whale accounts more then delgation in of itself.


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I have no issues with anyone really. Everyone has their own opinion and views and I like understanding all sides and making decisions based upon all sides and views.

I just felt the whole point of the proof of brain concept is that we all vote with our own stakes. In a perfect world everyone would take a hour or two out of their day and actually curate. But I fully understand that will never be the case. I'd rather have 1,000 people curating and commenting and engaging with content instead of 10 curation accounts.

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I actually wrote a post 4 weeks ago (Brainstorming How to Calm the “Proof of Brain Storm” (Part 2 -- Complex Version)) where I described in part my vision for a more 'pure' Proof of Brain system which involves both an exchangeable (i.e. fungible) token and a non-exchangeable token, wherein the non-exchangeable token would be the sole token upon which future author rewards would be based:

The non-exchangeable portion would be inextricably tied to the account that originally earned the token, would be automatically staked, and would be the sole token upon which future rewards (of both the fungible and non-exchangeable tokens) would be based.

I don't think I mentioned in that post that the token would be non-delegatable, but that quality is inherent to the intended function, namely that no one can 'purchase' curation influence. The only influence curators would have is the influence that they 'earned' by creating valuable content.

The net effect of this arrangement would be that no one would ever be able to ‘buy’ influence over the future distribution of either of the two tokens, because no one would be able ‘buy’ the voting tokens.

As such, my two-token solution would (I think) alleviate most of your concerns.

However, there may be some unintended consequences associated with such a system. I welcome constructive criticisms and comments in that regard.

The main criticism that I've received thus far is that no one would value the exchangeable token because it has no voting power, to which I've replied, "What about bitcoin? It has no voting power, yet people are assigning value to it." Ultimately, that question will only be answered by putting the option out there and seeing the extent to which people value it.

I still have plans to launch such a two-token system as a parallel experiment to POB. I am still working out the details and want to make sure that it is meaningful and productive and also that it does not harm the valuation of the POB token (which I clearly have a vested interest in). This is one of the projects I plan to focus on as soon as I wrap up my teaching responsibilities this semester.


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I totally forgot that post was yours!

I think I may have been one of those "but what's the value" people but I feel like I am stepping back the other way now. The second transferable token would have value as it is so hard to aquire and does not self replicate (wrong word but hope you know what I mean) like the author token would.

It would be a really interesting concept to see run, hope to see it soon and please tag me if it does!

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I like this! A two token system could be interesting with a lot of possibilities attached to it and variations. A two token system opens up a ranking type system where in the base token actually gives you vote value towards the exchangeable token based on certain factors. While token 1 can't be "exchanged" It's earned through true POB and holding more of it should mean you provide value to the community. Having a higher amount allows your vote to have more weight in the system that awards the exchangeable token 2. However you do and might run into the issue of well what's the use case of token 2.

All in all though it's already sparking some ideas and time for the drawling board. I'm eager and interested to see what you come up with and turn out. As I always say you never really know till you launch it out into the world. So theory while helpful means nothing till it's put to work. Really appreciate the feedback on this!

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Apologies issue might have been the wrong word! I more ment center of the argument.

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I see the negative effects, but I don't find them troubling.

It is a choice of the lazy people to delegate, but that doesn't mean, they would engage more, if they wouldn't have the option to delegate. Maybe all of them would sell instead.

Centralization is a risk we have to take in a community. POB is a token of trust and social proof. Getting a delegation means, you have proven your brain to others to the point, where they entrust their own POB to you.

Overall I'm not convinced, that POB would be a better place without delegations.


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Great work with the post @bitcoinflood, it's opened up some really healthy discussion and I've just stumbled onto it here after reading @amr008's response.

I understand the concern for the risks of centralization as we don't have to look far to see how some curation groups play favourites on the HIVE blockchain. The efforts needed for manual curation take time and there is always going to be a risk of excellent content getting buried and under-rewarded. Delegations can help with this if they're spread out in a thoughtful manner but the people holding delegations should always be under scrutiny.

I've received a 5000 POB delegation from @proofofbrainio and have had it for about 14 days now. Proofofbrainio mentioned in a comment here what he delegates to others for and I've taken the responsibility on board to try and spread my votes out as much as possible (work is still needed but I'm more than happy with anyone viewing my voting habits on https://hivestats.io/@calumam).

I've been thinking about how to further increase distribution over the past week or so and have started to make smaller delegations from my existing stake to others who are engaging often on the platform. This paired with the WOTW prizes and consistent quality vote spreading gives me some peace of mind for how I'm using the delegation, although I'm still trying to further improve.

It's a very important topic and like I say, people should be under scrutiny constantly when they have a delegation and I believe they should be removed if any issues are raised which put the platform at risk. I'll be making a post later on (or tomorrow) in response to this to try and get some more ideas about how it can be put to better use. I hope that it'll get the attention of other people with delegations and will lead to further improvements being made for how votes are cast across the platform.


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It is a double edged sword. I think it is necessary, like you, and can lead towards the problems you mentioned. I don't know if we would be better off without delegations. I think there are many investors that are here for the passive income and don't have the time or interest to curate. Do we still want these people invested in Hive? I think so. The ecosystem is growing in a way that everyone can have a place and be involved in different ways.


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It’s very dangerous. Especially when someone has a Delegation of a few million and decides to start downvoting people to zero.


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Delegation is a very cool feature of Hive. I use it to a lot to support small accounts. They need some HP to be active at the start, but it also gives their vote a little more power and they might earn from curation. I do not generally do it in expectation of getting anything back, but of course the feature will be exploited for profit. I think we need more manual voting to get rewards where they are deserved rather than always looking for maximum profits. I believe the next hardfork will make that more worthwhile anyway.

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I have to agree with you. On their own I really like the concept of POB and I definitely like POS consensus and its ecosystems but it's not without it's flaws.

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This is a good point. I delegated to a curation account because it seemed the 2 cents vote didn't matter much. I will look around something better to do with my HP.


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Passive income for those lazy
Centralization
Less activity and engagement

Problems we are seeing even here at leofinance

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I haven't really looked into this but just from my own random perspective, I feel like the delegations I send out bring me into the fold, as I follow the curators I delegate to and end up commenting on a fairly wide array of topics crossing a wide array of communities, where I sometimes pick up new followers or people to follow.

Regarding centralization, I do agree this is an issue I haven't questioned aggressively enough to get a satisfactory answer, and it is a concern for me. Some of the Hive Engine tokens I hold would likely be lost if one key person were to go rogue or otherwise vanish. I believe I have earned enough, and pulled enough out, to have my original investment back, but all profits are, as far as I know, ultimately not secure. I believe better smart contract implementation will resolve that in the future, setting those tokens up in more of a DAO like system, but I don't know anything for sure.

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It's a tool that can be used to do things that are good for the platform and things that are not. I would prefer to see investors delegating to real human curators over autovoting. But I think centralization is a valid concern and we should be wary of the tool being used in ways that can undermine the entire idea of what we are trying to do. We need to make sure that we are rewarding engagement and manual curation more so that people are more incentivized to do that than to delegate. I've been delegating to people that I see doing those things and I've seen @calumam delegating to help people get started and I think things like that are the good uses of delegation. Great post, I enjoyed reading all the responses as well.


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I think a lot is left to the community to regulate the affairs of their community (wrote about this in my recent post). POB does not have to mirror hive completely. So if delegation isnt something wanted here, maybe the community can do something about it.

I am not totally against delegation. It can can be useful when we have sub-communities under POB which is bound to happen if the project grows


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(Edited)

@bitcoinflood, For me i think delegating to active users account is very okay as this will go a long way to promote the financial ecosystem. Delegating to an active curation account is okay as well.

When an account (be it individual or curation) is seen to be inactive overtime, it pays never to delegate to such an account. Though auto-voting is good , but it'll be better we have more of manual voting because this is only the way we can get to go through people's post and engage properly as well.

Auto-voting has it's pros and cons. Many auto-voting users hardly have the time to go through people's post to know what the content is about, thereby leaving many great post on the blockchain with no user feedback.

So delegating more to Active Accounts will definitely promote and build the community, stimulate proper readers feedback through support and engagement while bringing the vision of the community to realization.


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it is an interesting point bro! You would hope that all the POB users would not delegate all their POBS out though


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I agree with everything you said, but only to some extent. I totally get the whole thing about passive income and that the user who delegates his power can simply be inactive and still accumulate tokens. That is a very bad thing according to me, as I would rather have active stake holders than inactive ones.

I also think you have a good point with the whole centralization thing. My voice disappear if I delegate my stake, as my power lies in the hands of someone else. There are still great initiatives out there and @leo.voter for instance is a superb account to delegate your Hive stake too, if you are looking for LEO in return. You also curate others, as you fuel the upvotes coming from that account with your powers and they also claim accounts, so you're literally doing 3 good deeds by delegating your Hive power.

That being said, you have no control over what type of content they reward, or who they will upvote. So it's basically about trust. I trust LeoFinance, so I have no issues with delegating my stake to @leo.voter, but I wouldn't delegate my HP to whoever, just because I got something in return.

In fact, I delegated all my power to others "back in the days", and I did that for free of charge. It was an attempt to strengthen the community and to "spread the wealth" more than I could do on my own.

That being said, I don't know how everything works on proofofbrain.io yet, but I guess it is- or will be something similar to LeoFinance in the future. Like most of the communities.

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Fully agree that there are good projects out there that have promise for delegation don't get me wrong there. LEO is a good example which you provided here. I might curate with my LEO tokens and simply delegate out my HIVE to help LEO on board more people that makes perfect sense and a good use case if LEO if my primary site and token I want to focus on.

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If you want to focus on LeoFinance, I think it's a good idea to delegate your HP. Especially as you earn Hive/HBD for each post you publish, so you'll still earn Hive author rewards.

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I guess you are assuming that people will eventually delegate to a curator account; that doesn't necessarily has to happen. My own approach is manual and auto voting which I try to balance. Auto votes are great to encourage people who you know make generally good content, although one should occasionally check back to see if one still likes that content.

So I guess my answer would be to keep it diverse: manual voting, auto voting, delegations... maybe that works?


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