I wrote a post a week ago that received quite a bit of comments and thoughts, which I appreciate. It was quite a long post and yet there was still a lot missing. This one is not going to be about the effort mentioned in there but it might touch a little on the same versions.
As I'm writing this I'm still not sure if the comparison is great but I'm going to go ahead and try either way.
The mining of Hive is quite unique. If one were to compare it to say something like Bitcoin, it's vastly better but is so different that it's not easy to compare and you can't really compare all aspects. For those of you who don't know, let me try and paint a picture of how Bitcoin mining works. It's been a while I've studied Bitcoin, I even wrote about it for a school project what must've been a decade ago so a lot of stuff I'm not entirely sure about or won't work exactly as I imagine it these days, but might be enough for the sake of this post. So don't quote me on stuff. :p
As far as I know, each block generates a difficult "puzzle", the difficulty of this is determined by how much hashpower is active in the network and it adjusts every 2 weeks or something. Basically, imagine the bitcoin network produces a sudoku and now all miners in the world, which are programmed to mostly solve sudoku's go ham at it trying to be the first to do so. When the puzzle is solved, that miner receives the block reward and opens up the next block to be mined. When a block is solved, it also verifies all transactions that occurred in that block. At some point it became so difficult to mine Bitcoin that people with a couple miners weren't finding a block in a long time, so they came up with the idea where they would team up with other miners as well and count each others "workload" so that if one of them found a block they would share the rewards with everyone participating; that's now mining pools.
On Hive, mining works differently. We have 10% of inflation going to witnesses a.k.a. block producers, instead of them fighting against each other of who's the first to solve a puzzle, everyone instead gets a chance in a round robin kind of way to solve the next block. This more anticipated method allows us to have much faster block times, which could even be lowered in the future if we had a need for it. How often the block producers get to solve blocks is determined by the order, with most going to the top 20 and then it tailing down.
With another 15% going to HP inflation (who holds hivepower gets inflation rewards each block) and 10% going to the DAO (DHF) it leaves us with 65% going to Proof of Brain a.k.a. curation split evenly between curators and authors.
You may now see why comparing these two systems is difficult as they're quite different from each other.
Alright, back to the main point of the post and what got me to write about it in the first place. There was a recent user that returned to Hive and well let's say made quite a lot of noise about it. You see this user had in the past been caught for reposting content and often times also post quite "lazy" content if you will. This happens every now and then but it's worse when it happens to very well established users who have a lot of connections and in turn have done quite well on the platform over the years. The thing is that this wouldn't have to be this difficult, for some reason many of these users that are caught being either lazy or trying to cheat their way into more rewards for close to no effort, always play the blame game.
I don't wanna drive more traffic that user's way so let's compare it to some other users I think and hope won't ever stoop down to that level. Let's imagine @tarazkp for instance, someone I support with my voting power often and have done so ever since he was a minnow entering a public chat asking some basic steem hive questions. I usually try to treat everyone the same way I did him way back, I try to be helpful, give some advice and then curate them for a while. Keeping things manual means I may hop from one user or group of users to others over time but there's plenty of autovotes to cover my lack of consistent support. Now, of course, taraz was and turned out to be quite unique. He didn't just learn and understand things fast and properly like many others, but he stuck to it and understood the longterm goals and advantages/opportunities of this ecosystem. Okay, enough "circlejerking" for now, let's get down to a bad scenario.
Imagine taraz suddenly started reposting his content from a couple years back. Either copy-paste or changing a few things here and there like images and a few words/sentences to make it more "up to date" from an old post.
Hive only allows votes to be gathered for 7 days, which means that after 7 days new readers checking out that post aren't able to upvote it, but they can however give it a tip or just hit up a new post or comment and let them know why they decided to upvote that comment a bit higher. This example, say I would find a post of his I somehow had missed and it would be so amazing I felt the need to upvote him for it. I highly doubt anyone would mind if I gave him a 100% upvote on one of his comments and mentioned why. Now before I move on don't try and use this tactic to normalize doing this, this is like a random case scenario that's not to occur often, just pointing out that if there really needs to be a way for you to upvote him for something you missed out on, if you don't instead want to give it a tip, you can find a way to do it, just don't go through lengths to abuse it.
The problem with reposting is that, since there's a lot of autovotes in usage on the platform, you may get the same support from the same people/stake twice for the same content. Of course it could even be manual votes being "victim" to this, or lazy/overlooked votes, not saying it's all autovotes to blame, most of the time it's the fault of the author in the reposting case.
Now imagine someone would notice this and maybe they'd give taraz the benefit of the doubt and comment something like "hmm, are you sure you haven't posted this before? Could swear I've read it in the past". Taraz could now either lie or ignore the comment or say "yeah so what about it?".
We as a community have decided that reposting isn't okay due to the way rewards work on Hive. It's quite a unique platform with unique reward distribution that you've yet to find anywhere else so naturally there's going to be different rules in some cases, this being one. Reposting itself is fine, do it as much as you want, just don't accept rewards on it or if you don't like "declining" rewards (which nulls curation rewards of your supporters as well), then you can just forward them using beneficiaries to something beneficial to the ecosystem like @hive.fund.
For some reason, many authors choose the 3rd option. They blame the platform, they blame the system, they blame anyone else but themselves and their actions. "Hive is decentralized and proposes freedom", sure and it does, but that doesn't mean the freedom to do whatever you like and others just being okay and having to tolerate it. This seems like the biggest issue with some of these users, their excuses for either having gotten caught or trying to somehow swing others into believing they're the victim in these situations are often laughable at best, sad and desperate at worst.
As a new user this is understandable if they don't know about this community-set rule and most of the time they are forgiven, even if I personally don't agree with some of the hoops they some times have to jump through by certain projects on the chain. Old users should know but even they, depending on how much value they've objectively brought to the ecosystem and how valuable their presence from others is, are often given a second chance, even the case of the returning user recently I believe wasn't being downvoted for a long time after the incidents came to light.
The thing that to me personally stands out is the outright ignoring of their wrongdoing, the attempts of changing the rules, being loud and trying to actively damage the ecosystem or the reputation of those intervening in protecting stake from being rewarded to such users and content is hard to ignore.
If these users would go for option A, lying about it, they'd quickly be met with proof since everything is timestamped and immutable on this blockchain, even the content before you edited it out is still in its original block it was posted into. If they chose to ignore the comment asking if this is an accidental repost, they could eventually get away with it if they stopped reposting since that user maybe won't share his findings forward and give taraz a second chance personally but keep an eye on this future content.
The option I didn't mention above which for some weird reason doesn't happen often, is just admitting to it. Yes, this could mean some damage to your reputation but this was definitely something done on purpose from a user of this age, activity and reputation on the platform, so you're just going to have to take it. So while this could mean less consistent support, maybe more downvotes over time depending on how much the downvoters want to bother or want to adjust on a case by case basis. Imagine for instance the perpetrator has reposted 10x and received 500 HP in rewards for "no effort", doesn't 10x downvotes on future posts make it even? Is even even fair with someone who tried to cheat their way to effortless rewards? Admitting at least gives you a chance to make up for it either through the hoops I mentioned earlier or by enough people still valuing your contributions and hoping you won't try the same thing again.
Instead we see some go full ballistic, trying to spread what happened to them (the downvotes as the main title of their hate for the platform) and basically giving up on their own account and their connections and everyone else here in the same go, a.k.a. burning all bridges. There's a lot more things I could say about some of these cases but don't wanna make it sound like I'm singling anyone out since a certain recent case made me think to post about this.
Anyway, don't wanna drag this post on for too long, I need to get better on making the prologue shorter in the future. If you see posting activity that goes against effort, you're safe to assume that there's something fishy going on there. Keep in mind of course quality, effort and even each account is subjective, but asking doesn't hurt to find out more and people should value those asking around to try and protect the network better than turn a blind eye on abuse that may be occurring. Being able to combat this is one of Hive's strengths, but at the same time it's also important to figure out and combat misuse of the tool that lets us combat this; downvotes.
Let's finish it with some Bitcoin comparison, somehow?
Hey Bitcoin, this time last year I used so much electricity to mine you and you didn't reward me a single block in forever, do you know how much time, sweat and tears I put into the money to buy those miners and pay for electricity? Here's the same hash guesses from then, maybe this time you'll reward me some more. No? Oh, okay, bitcoin sucks everyone! It just rewards the same miners over and over and the pools control everything!
Let me switch to Ethereum's staking instead since Bitcoin sucks! Oh, wtf is slashing? Okay nevermind then.
Guess I'll stick to steem and blurp where as long as I don't post illegal content and have stake or coins to buy votes with I'll be fine! Who is this Haejin guy and why is he getting so much rewards?
