If you follow my blog, you might have noticed, that I am not happy about the way rewards are being distributed since hardfork 19 Equality.
Thanks to linear rewards I can blog about nothing else but this topic and pay myself for it. If that makes any sense to you, feel free to ignore the issue.
For this post, let's look at how easy it would be to collude and 'cheat' with non-linear rewards.
Let's assume:
If 10 authors colluded and agreed to each make a post every day and upvote each other, they would gain a significant advantage over 10 authors, who each made a post every day and only upvoted themselves.
Even though the first group only made 10 posts and the second group made 100 posts, the first group would get 10x more rewards out of the pool:
Group 1:
10 posts with 10 r_shares -> 10 x (10)² = 1000
Group 2:
100 posts with 1 r_share -> 100 x (1)² = 100
Let's do the numbers for a group of 100 authors, who each only make one post within 10 days, and always vote for each other:
Group 1:
100 posts with 100 r_shares -> 100 x (100)² = 1,000,000
Group 2:
( Let's assume they just post and selfvote 10 times/day for 10 days )
1000 posts with 1 r_share -> 1000 x (1)² = 1000
Even though the first group only made 100 posts and the second group made 1000 posts, the first group gets 100,000x more rewards.
There are a few errors in the numbers above.
One being that Group 2 has an even bigger advantage on any given day.
Those numbers were just to illustrate the idea.
If you were to actually try and game such a system and collude like described above, you would probably soon run into problems with the distribution.
Who's turn is it to post when ?
Obviously your profits would grow by magnitudes if you can grow the number of authors, who collude with you.
If you were to get 1,000,000 authors to join you, sure they would be impossible to coordinate ...
I think you would soon come to the conclusion, that it's the easiest and also the fairest way to pick the posts that have the most relevant content at any given day to circle-jerk over.
If the content is halfway decent, you might get even more people to join in on your scheme !
By trying to game n^2 I just re- invented social media.
... Oh wait ...
