Would Steemit inc. be forced to change the rewards structure if we all went full asshole?
After a slow start, as is often the case without tens of thousands to invest, the last 6 months on the Steem Blockchain have been great for me.
I cannot (and probably should not) complain at all as I've been one of the lucky ones who's benefited from free/cheap delegation, and a host of up-votes from the few still choosing to share their large stakes around.
Thank you 
I am now 8 months free from sitting behind a desk stacked with monitors doing work that I'm trained to do, but of which does not interest me any more. Your generosity is the reason for this.
Who knows how long this will last, and at the risk of reducing this time today, my blog is related to a recent post (and so many others since June last year) by 
I invite those here to read this post and the comments made by 
Last year, Steemit inc. chose to fork the Blockchain and make changes to the rewards structure.
With the introduction of a linear reward curve everyone will have a say directly proportional to their stake.
Sounds good, right?
In the comments of the post, not everyone was so sure:
And from another related 
Feel free to read 
If you successfully made it back to this post, and I don't blame the ones that didn't! What else is there to say or do, as more and more accounts join the self-vote club, or loan out their stake to Bid-bots, as predicted last year by many?
Is there any point continuing to pretend to be 'in a world where honest people who don't vote on themselves to get "free money for nothing"', when this (to some) clearly wasn't going to be the case from the start?
Each day that passes without a change from the top, my doubts increase.
So much so that I've gone to the trouble this morning to calculate roughly what my monthly returns would be like, should I go 'full asshole' with my current Steem Power of around 14,000, and get away with it.
Taking into account that I could vote 10 times a day, and the average value of my 10 votes being $2.59, the STEEM value of this would equate to $77.182.
Multiply that by 30 days, and kindly remove 20% for curation (did i mention the word 'roughly'), the final sum for the month would be $1852.368.
Personally, I could live off this easily. But if everyone was to make these calculations, I'm 97% sure that 97% would not feel the same.
The majority 'active' stake is held by few, who have seemingly resigned themselves to the fact that this is the way it is now - self-vote because the code allows, and this gives the maximum return on investment.
As
I'm guessing many whales are in the very same position as myself: we don't want this to continue. Unfortunately, we also can't trust other large stakeholders to refrain from the allure of profit maximization, so we all protect our own stake by partaking in the very activity that's deteriorating our investment. It's tragedy of the commons in full swing.
The issue isn't that bots or individual actors are malicious or greedy; very few people invest in crypto for altruistic reasons. When designing an economic system, you must assume everyone will attempt to maximize profits. When individual efforts to maximizing profits contribute to the value of the whole, then it's a successful system. But when the optimal profit maximization strategy under your system undermines the value of the whole, then you have a flawed rewards structure, that is to say misaligned economic incentives.
The entire economic system cannot be designed to depend on the selfless sacrifice of moral saints paying a high price in order to just keep in check the perfectly rational actions of individual profit maximizers, which is where we are now and why the battle is failing.
As much as I want to, I can't really argue with him.
So while the few good souls continue their altruistic behavior, are 'we' (check self-vote % and free delegation status) just frantically shoveling water out of a steadily sinking ship?
What if we ALL went 'full asshole' for a week to perhaps finally prove the point that the current algorithms aren't working, and force the changes that seem necessary at this point?
Would Steemit inc. act on this, knowing existing smaller accounts and new blood (without investment) would lose all hope and not touch the place with a barge pool?
I shall take these thoughts to the beach, because for now, I ain't changing.
Cheers
Asher 
