I was going to write down on @acidyo post here, but as I was going, developing my comment, it became obvious that it was a new topic all by itself. So, hence this post.

(image source)

My comment to the situation

Trying to be proactive and think about this in a positive way. As I have delegated 100 HP to them to monitor for how long they would be able to maintain those profits. Now reduced to 10 HP just to keep monitoring.

But, ultimately vote-selling confuses the way this blockchain value gets perceived. In that, I agree 100%! Being wrong or not, it still depends on people's opinions about what they want to see in the future about this blockchain. I am not going to deliberate on that now.

My reaction

Instead of just reacting, I was thinking about a more definitive way to separate the values in this "concern". Or maybe this could help forge an even better solution. As for me, constantly using non-automated community-driven efforts becomes a very demanding task the bigger we grow as a community.

My view

And in my view, what gets completely obliterated here, is value perceived. As "liking" something is being confused with "what power you have to decide that money from a pool can be given to a certain post"... and as a 3rd problem, how that power gets manipulated between people.

And for me it's obvious. If you are delegating power it's because you think that it would have more value in someone else's hands. Aka, you are sort of renting your house to others, but in HIVE's case, they can do whatever they want it the house until you decide to remove that ability.

My proposal

To reduce the likelihood of this "delegation" of power being abused, I think we should introduce a delegation deflation pool (DDP), parallel to the normal rewards pool! Then, ALL delegated power will consume 50% from the DDP, and 50% from the normal rewards pool. Other aspects of the DDP:

• ZERO inflation (0%) - everything you delegate will be always the same and never grow
• What would be the normal inflation from the rewards pool towards your delegation portion, will now go as liquid to DDP
• Delegated HIVE will still give 100% VESTED power to your amount of RCs
• Delegated HIVE will still give 100% VESTED power to vote for witnesses (after the already effective 30 days)
• 50% of the rewards of the portion of Power you have from delegations, would go to the DDP (this would effectively mean, that the owners of big delegations will only be consuming 25% of the power delegated to them, the other 25% would be going to the DDP).
• Initial value of the DDP is ZERO (or per agreement value)! - This is a huge problem because it would make everyone undelegate... But could possibly reach an agreement via DHF... interpret it as "initial deflation". The point is to understand that this pool will not be receiving any rewards, with exception of the inflation of the delegated HPs and the 25% of each curation.

Example 1 (very few users doing delegations scenario):

Let's assume the DDP has 50$ and Alice is the only one receiving a delegation (aka has 100% of the DDP) - let's also discard, for simplicity, the fact that part of this pool has to go also to the witnesses and DHF, just like the normal rewards pool.

Alice has 10k HP (100% delegated) - equivalent a 100$ upvote (50$ coming from the rewards pool and another 50$ from the DDP)
Bob has 10k HP (100% owned) - equivalent a 100$ upvote
Trevor posts and both Alice and Bob vote 100% on his post and let's say it results in a 200$ payout (for easy calculations)

Curation (the 50% of the total post value) rewards (for Alice and Bob):
Bob will get the normal 50% = 50$
25% of Alice 100$ upvote will go to the DDP = 25$
Alice will get only 25% (50% of 50%) from the rewards pool = 25$ + the delegated power percentage from the DDP, which will be 50$ (because she's the only one receiving a delegation), totaling Alice rewards to 75$!

Trevor will get 50% author rewards = 100$.

In this case, the only user receiving delegation is getting advantage of the DDP accumulated rewards.

Example 2 (lots of users doing delegations scenario):

Imagine the same scenario, but now instead of one Alice, we have 10 Alices with the same amount of DDP (50$).

So now Alice 1 to 10, have instead of 100$ upvote, they have 55$ upvote (50$ + 5$) each.
Bob still has 100$ upvote.
So Trevor's post is going to be 650$ in value.

325$ Will go to Trevor's post rewards...
The other 325$ will be split (because of equal HP votes) between 10 alices and 1 bob.
Bob will get 325/11 = 29.(54)$
Each Alice will get (325-29.54)/10x50% = 14.775$
The DDP will get 10x29.54x50% = 147.73$

In this case, there is a lot of competition for the DDP but the value of the normal rewards pool is not affected by the competition.

Conclusion

With this, the value of delegations will be less for business perspectives and would be regulated by competition instead of schemes or attempts to manipulate upvote rewards. Normal downvotes would still apply and therefore the curation could still be "corrected".

Witnesses would still benefit the same from the DDP and the DHF too (in %). If one day, the DDP goes to zero, it means no one is delegating. If everyone is delegating, it means that the DDP and the rewards pool will almost exactly the same all the time (for this distribution of 50%). That would be the only situation things would invert, as the DDP would benefit from the extra inflation being given to curations, as the rewards pool inflation would only go to the witnesses and the DHF. But as this approaches 0%, that difference would effectively mean 0 in the future.

There might be a lot to "align" in this "solution", but the general idea is this. What do you think?

This would separate the unfair competition of delegations concentrated on a single account against the normal rewards pool. Of course, all of this needs to be tested first, but that's why I am writing this post first.