The Solution To What Ails Steem

We read a lot about what is wrong with Hive. I am obviously overlooking the gripe sessions and referring to the serious

that are pointing to specific problems to stimulate discussions which, hopefully, move us towards resolution.

One such post was made by @ura-soul yesterday. This covered how the

" model is broken. Specifically, the theme was that bidbots eliminate the ability to see POB evolve. Instead, the trending page is bought and paid for. The belief is that the most interesting content would move to the top under a POB scenario.

This could well be the case. I cannot dispute it. The question is "what is interesting"? Even without bid bots, couldn't a large

upvote a post to the trending page? Sure it could. Plus, what is quality? Or best? These are subjective terms.

The truth is the POB concept is built upon a

. The core essence of the is . POB cannot get around this.

So what is the solution to this?

It is rather simple. Volume.

Consider this. We have 40K

transacting a day; picture that being 1M or 25 times the amount. What do you think happens to that daily ? It gets diluted a great deal. Obviously, with DPOS, it is not a linear trade off, so we will not see posts payout go down by a factor of 25. Nevertheless, is it unreasonable to figure they will be slashed by a factor or 5-10? I do not believe so.

Under this scenario, we have a $10 post being worth a buck or two. The trending page will show payout of $10-$20.

Let us go one step further. What if we find 2M daily active users on here? Think that is outrageous? MySpace, which is a platform that basically died in the eyes of most, still have tens of millions of users. The truth is having a few million people on the

is nothing.

At that point, we see a 50 fold increase in users on a daily basis. Again, if this doubles what we were dealing with before, we see the trending page equal to $5-$10. At that point, a 50 cent payout is very good.

Will this eliminate the use of bid bots? Maybe not but the incentive is decreased. We are also going to see many of these users attracted by the Communities feature which could also help to lesson the impact of the bots.

Ultimately, it all gets down to a numbers game. When there are a couple million people active and earning

, that means the number of votes can increase a great deal. Sure, most of them have votes not worth much but it all adds up. Imagine having a post that get 15,000 upvotes. Even all their votes were worth $.0005 apiece (if that is even possible) that is still $75 when $10 might be considered a huge payout.

As an aside, bear in mind the $ here means S.T.U, not USD.

While we are at it, what about

?

That is hard to tell since we know

are their own animal. Logic would dictate that the of $HIVE would increase under this scenario. At what rate would it do that is impossible to figure. A 50x the number of daily users might result in a 100x in the price of $HIVE; or it might net a 25X. Who knows?

Thus we cannot really focus upon the

. Besides, by the time Hive has that many users, the will be such that on here will be priced in HIVE/. There will come a time when our mindset will move away from pricing everything in fiat. Sure, we will have many things that still must be paid in such. However, that will diminish over time.

As was pointed out in the post, there are already interfaces that are blocking out the trending page and removing those that used the bots. There might come a time when paying for exposure is not getting the return desired. If the eyeballs are not there, it is tough to justify the cost.

Another thing that we are going to see happen is the influence of blogging on this blockchain will diminish. We will not have 1M or 2M bloggers on here. Instead, we will have people who are using the different applications, many that have nothing to do with blogging. Hence, we will see a lot of upvotes going to those in the communities on the different

. That changes things greatly. Those people are not concerned about the Trending page or what is on it.

It is time to seriously consider what this place will be like with a million posts a day on it. Based upon the numbers put out by @penguinpablo, it looks like we average a post/comment per transacting account. How much different will these "problems" be with a million or more posts/

being done a day?

Everything will be diluted to such a point that earning a lot of $HIVE is not going to take place. We might see the average post get .01 or .02. There will be a lot with less than that. It is impossible to be any other way since the reward pool is fairly constant (actually it is shrinking with the

rate) and the number of users exploding.

Of course, this is where the SMTs enter the picture as a means to provide incentive to users. Nevertheless, if the price of $HIVE follows logic, people with even a couple hundred

will be very happy.

With activity comes changes. While they are probably not related at the moment, although I think more accounts are being claimed these days than before (I am at 73 myself). Let us look at the

numbers as put together by @holger80.

Over the last few weeks, the cost of doing things on the blockchain has dropped some. This is something I believe we will see continue as more activity takes place on the blockchain.

One thing I learned being on here, give things some time. Change does not happen as quickly as we like but it is taking place and we are moving in the right direction.

I do not believe POB is dead, in hibernation perhaps, but not dead. It is pre-mature to call that.

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