What Is LeoFinance Without Whales? (Anything?)

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whale leo.jpeg

I've been thinking long and hard about this for months. Well, since I started posting on Leofinance in December and noting how supportive the community was.

The whales here build this community with votes and encouragement and anytime someone gets a vote from @taskmaster4450le or @onealfa.leo it's a fantastic feeling. I've had a couple of those votes and it really lights a fire under me.

But what about when you don't get them? Or what if they became less engaged or even disappeared from the community?

I've noticed some power-downs of big players lately. Mostly, to provide the needed liquidity for Cub Finance. It makes sense but it may leave a void for curation here.

And if that happens, what becomes of LeoFinance? Do whales have an obligation to vote for new "customers" or content creators who just "try"? Nope.

Will the platform suffer if the votes dry up? Yep.

Is this necessarily a problem? It isn't now but it may be in the future. The said goal of Leofinance is for it to be a place where people come to read financial news. It's a lofty goal and a good one but we aren't there yet. We are actually very far from it.

If we were close whale votes wouldn't even matter and there would be a slew of authors whose content is so compelling that people would find the site online, buy leo, power up and support those authors.

In an ideal world that would happen and all of us early adopters would be wealthy. But for now, this isn't the world we live in.

So if it isn't really the whales' responsibility to vote up everyone's content, then whose is it? It's mine and yours. Curation matters.

My philosophy in business is that it is always cheaper and more efficient to service your existing customers than it is to get new ones. The same thing rings true here.

Head over to the latest posts section on Leofinance and scroll the content. You will find a lot of deserving content over there to curate. Just because it isn't in the "popular" section doesn't mean it isn't good.

And even if it isn't that good, it might be from an author trying to find their voice. It could be from someone who might consider buying Leo if things go well for them here.

I made a commitment to stake all the whale votes I receive and curate content. I haven't waivered from that at all but I don't receive many whale votes anymore.

So it's up to me to cultivate the next wave of community members whether I do it alone or with you. We can't rely on the whales forever. So let's do this!

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53 comments
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Some are holding LEO since it was a few cents and taking some profits at the moment makes sense, although I doubt many will drain their accounts to dump on the market or invest in CUB. Whales on Leofinance are lucid enough, but quite fanatic.

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For sure but I'm trying to think outside of bull run and think about the platform and how it will grow. I can see myself selling hive but not Leo. I want leofinance to be around forever. I sold 1000 leo for cub and feel like that could have been a mistake. Curating has worked for me so I should just stick to it.

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You do what's best for you and not what others are doing, that's my motto. We're individuals and what applies to me might not work for you.

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I spend a ton of time curating on here. Pretty much most of the day in fact. I try to fit some reads and comments in between working on other tasks in my office. I think even if I had the funds to put into the pools I would probably still keep most of it over here. Simply because I do like engaging. Even though my account is fairly small.

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yeah, I see you everywhere. That's really cool. I feel like im on the sidelines at cub but I bought some on day 1 for the den.

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Yeah, I feel the same about Cub. I have less in my den that some people make in a couple of minutes.

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That is why in the long run there should be an implementation of some sort of “time token” for the entire ecosystem. The time you spend could be tokenized and rewarded to compensate for lack of whale engagement.

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that's a really interesting idea. I've never even thought of something like that. I wonder how it could work?

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I’ve been pondering it for some time. Obviously there are a host of things that could go wrong. But to be brief basically users time would be rewarded and tokenized to reflect time spent in the Hive ecosystem. So the algorithm would be Proof of Time. Scarcity could be baked in to the token with limited supply. More time spent=greater reward.

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I don't have as much time lately so I have been only checking my feed recently. But I am slowly growing my account over time as most of it goes directly into either being staked or used to buy LBI. So overtime I should be able to reward more authors with LEO.

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I haven't done LBI yet but I feel like that might be in my future. Just feel like it could take away from my curation. I really want to build this leofinance platform to critical mass

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I think LBI is fairly good if you are looking at the price of LEO and they also reward people for engagement on their posts. So I think if people meaningful respond to the posts then they should also get some LEO. I don't think it doesn't diversify as much as onealfa but I think its still fairly good.

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I think that if whales don't vote, the votes of the rest get bigger which is even better for smaller accounts.

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You said it right

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It seems very hard to make that happen. At least with your votes I can accumulate stake to give out bigger votes for people. I feel rather alone in this pursuit. I think If I had a large stake I would love to be a full time curator lol

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You are not alone mate. There is plenty trying the same thing you are.

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I'm tempted to powerdown more, honestly I struggle to find anything I want to vote on.

Unlike with Hive, plenty to vote on there.

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That's why Hive is and will be amazing with dozens of healthy, active and successful communities. You'll have content to consume and vote on for days. There will be something for everyone, somewhere.

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I think healthy is the key term here. I don't see any community hitting critical mass any time soon. Lots of marketing needs to be done.

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I agree. We have an awesome place to be, and a place that actually can be life-changing for a lot of people.. But not many know that we exist yet. We need a ton of marketing to change that.

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It's true - Hive is MUCH broader than LEO after all!

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It sure is. We are starting to see more and more niche-specific communities, so I think we have a very bright future in terms of content we really want to consume.

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gosh, maybe I need to relook at hive. It has always been a disappointing ghostown for me. I feel like in order to really add value to the blockchain I need to curate my stake but the only place I can build seems to be on @leofinance.

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There's just too many posts on here either shilling LEO or Cub or repeating news I already know, and some people who post good content but just cash out everything, I don't tend to vote for them.

I'm more into Permaculture than Finance, lots of the former on Hive!

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The whales tend to vote how they please, just as everyone else. If the whales are gone, that leaves the community to fend for itself. The newer users may be out of luck if that happens, but new "whales" will arise from their absence... IF it were ever to come to that.

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It makes it important to pay it forward and try to become that whale then. My stake grows too slowly for me to have any real power but I love to curate.

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The best way to grow your stake is by using tokens that have a decimal point that goes back 5-8 places. Communities like the Weedcash community, or CreativeCoin and Foodie are good places to start getting some more tokens and staking them for more influence. Of course, trade those tokens out for Hive if you want to grow your Hive influence.

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Currently, I'm trying to grow my LEO stake while holding some liquid. Its an uphill game but at least now I'm getting a little something for curating content with the little LEOPower I have.

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I would love to see more curation accounts or simply just more people doing curating. Those massive funds should be spread out. I don't hold a ton of weight but a decent amount and try my best to devote time to finding some new accounts along with keeping up with the ones I enjoy. With these platforms though you almost need a solid team of curators starting out at least at first till it becomes a little more balanced out. I do like that these two play an active part in spreading the wealth around and I myself never expect a constant vote from them.

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Active, encouraging and supportive whales are awesome and extremely important for token distribution and to have a healthy platform. A bunch of wealthy accounts are selfish and greedy though, so they are (or have been) using their stake only to grow themselves more and more. That is bad for token distribution and for the entire platform in the long haul, except for when those people decides to sell and quit.

It would obviously be a lot faster to grow into a larger account with whales supporting anything- and everything you post and that would ultimately give you a superb opportunity to spoon-feed other accounts as well.

However, each token that is distributed is good, so whale-vote or not doesn't matter in the long haul because each vote from anyone with some amount of stake will be worth something. That's why it's important to stake & grow.

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I agree. I'd like to see some accounts that are basically brand ambassadors have some higher stake. I feel like I spend a lot of time here but don't have the stake to really help people. I wish I had more. I'm way too into Leo for what I have lol. Makes it harder to vote those new accounts.

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I'm way too into Leo for what I have

I have actually felt the same way many times, but I've decided to do whatever I can, in my own ways, and work my way up the ladder so to speak, regardless of the stake I have.

The only thing I would do differently, with lot more stake than I have today, is just to give more. I wouldn't really change my approach or behaviour much.. Except for voting more and giving more to others.

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I try my best to leave meaningful comments on other people's posts. It is a great way to support new and exciting content creators with meaningful feedback.

Also, I heard if whales power down their stake the value of other stakeholder's upvoke would go up.

Leo whales are some of the most supportive. I interact with some of them on daily basis.

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We will see how it all shakes out but I have my worries about the platform. I wish I could muster more than the measly leo I have. I traded 1000 leo for cub and probably shouldn't have.

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Head over to the latest posts section on Leofinance and scroll the content. You will find a lot of deserving content over there to curate. Just because it isn't in the "popular" section doesn't mean it isn't good.

I have seen a lot of very good articles that never reach even 5 LEO, but I have seen how a guy has a lot of groceries or another one makes a clear plagiarism and has more than 60 LEO.

Well I follow your advice and look for publications without so much exposure that are really worthwhile, and no matter that my vote is not worth a penny of LEO I keep curating and commenting on many publications.

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You are not alone... we just need to keep doing what we are doing this year and it pay off. It takes time and patience to build things.

Look at me... took 4 years to reach were I am, but believe me, I was not always a believer (especially before HIVE), hence I failed on many paths that eventually thought me how to evolve.

This is a per-si an already huge feat that one day will explode so rapidly, that its going to be hard not to get viral. Just wait for it!

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Yes this gets to the nerve of the problem. This has always been an ongoing problem for dpos. That is poor distribution, reliance on whales to keep the excitement and attention there and it's just too big of a problem for a few whales to handle. So that set me on my course of there had to be some type of metric rewarding system based on participation and not just occassional random votes. To avoid that we chose not to use proof of brain but that doesnt mean there can't be some sort of programming to help assist it.

I think the bottomline is such a system shouldn't even be decided by a few individuals but almost be an automated bot or something . As bad as upvote bots have been and have plagued dpos. The reality is upvote bots did serve to somewhat neutralize the gigantic amount of poor distribution and missing of valuable content. In our model we put forth a token that used the Proof of Participation model and your time and action moved to your value. Perhaps there will be solutions like this for ohter projects in the future.

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Sounds like the MYK has a hybrid solution??

🙋‍♂️

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Well this is a complex problem and unfortunately it's cryptosphere wide. The fact of the matter is whales dominate cryptocurrency distribution. In decentralization one of the most important tenets is decentralization of wealth. That gets excluded alot and cryptocurrency has the worse rate of good distribution of any system imaginable. It's worse than North Korea.

So its a difficult problem. One solution that we believe will work is second layer tokens like bbd and btcmyk tokens. They work by rewarding posts, activity and interaction. Now unfortunately blog posting has a value of about zero. That is because we can find content free online of similar quality. So in a competitive pricing market if posts were a valuable commodity and info. Then you'd simply consume it at the lowest cost.

What we have in retrospect is a social economy of who you know who likes you in a particular conclave. This makes it more difficult for whales not only to consider your info valuable but it makes it harder for them to stay out of their own conclaves which can make the possibility of you receiving votes less and less. It is also simply a matter of resources and energy to go around to everyone.

Second layer tokens can fund and create value systems more cost effective and more possible to target. However because the blogs have a value of about zero. We'd need to use a different metric. What would be that metric? We call it the Proof of Participation system. So its more on your " attention value" and less on your content. Consider it like the superbowl. During the superbowl everyone wants to buy ads in an American Football match because they know everyones attention is tuned in to the superbowl.

In that regard posts and this attention value becomes competitive leads to good distribution and better attention value as everyone gets rewarded with these tokens that can be supplied. It's more complexities to this idea but you understand the basic idea. I think after careful study thats probably going to be one of the only ways to solve the problem of bad distribution and heavy whale dependency which further centralizes you not decentralizes.

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I think diversity in your coin holder base is a good thing, it creates a diverse set of posts being rewarded. Hence its good to have more high value accounts, so they can spread the love evenly consistent with their interests.

Too much concentration of LEO power in a few small hands will lead to authors writing articles to cater to the tastes of the whales rather than writing what they think can contribute to the community. I cant really see that at the moment, the LEO community is vibrant and diverse.

I also don't see a problem if some whales chose to engage less, because as others have said, that means the power of everyone else increases. What I do see as a problem if the whales withdraw and dump their holdings on the market depressing the price, this will provide lower value rewards for everyone. I cant see this happening, as the whales that actively vote here I see are very active and engaged, replying to comments etc. These are the whales you want for a community like this.

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IF whales would only hold, the votes for every other user become more valuable. Remember is a shared reward pool.

Fewer power votes, as more powerful the tokens becomes that vote. Same on Hive.

I think we need after all that years some Coinbase earn videos. Not for the earning, for the explanation.

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I'm not a whale. But, I try to upvote good content as much as I can. Posting, at the moment, requires a great deal more effort than I can offer. However, I can support those who do put in the time. Perhaps I shall be a whale someday.

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My philosophy in business is that it is always cheaper and more efficient to service your existing customers than it is to get new ones. The same thing rings true here.

Strongly agree with this point, sometimes we forget existing consumers because they are too busy reaching out to other customers, so the service that should be maximized is not optimal.

Talking about whales, it is undeniable that their role is very important in terms of curation and support, and can also trigger content creators to do even better. Thanks for this helpful post.

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Building a community means that there are opportunities for all. Does it mean every person will build their account? No.

Engagement is good, curation is good, but there will always be people who are easily discouraged.

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The fact that whales have been powering down to participate in CUB DeFi can be clearly felt in the spreading of upvotes.

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AFter I read MyFeed new articles, I typically go into categories and search by new. Helps be filter down to fewer articles, but I might be missing a lot of good content that tags LEO and not one of the other tags up top. It appears that tagging your post correctly is half the battle of getting noticed as new creators.

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If whales doesn't vote/power down, the Leo Power of everyone else is more 'powerful' (able to give more LEO/vote).

This process usually corrects itself. As APR is higher in CUB, LEO will flow there until it goes down 'enough'.

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I don't think whale votes are that important. Don't get me wrong, i love to get the odd one from time to time but in reality i would rather get 100 small votes and extra engagement.

In the long run it is healthier to have a thousand small curators spreading votes everywhere than to depend on a couple of big players. It is a long way off yet and could take years to spread out the stake evenly enough but for me it's great to see more people powering up medium stakes and voting.

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