leveling-the-playing-field-leo-is-switching-to-a-linear-curation-curve

As most of you already know, in a week LEO will be switching to a flat curation model that essentially turns 'curation' from a zero-sum competitive game into a self-upvoting kickback mechanic. This means that instead of curation rewards trickling down into the pockets of accounts that upvote first (autovote bot) everyone will simply get 50% of their upvote returned to their own wallet. It's a "good" change.

Bad for many reasons.

This change shows us how centralized the network is. The founder and dev team can make any decisions they want and they don't have to answer to the community yet. This is due to the fact that the network is not decentralized in any way except that all of the transfers, account balances, and upvotes are stored on the Hive blockchain. The only way that LEO is decentralized is if other people start running nodes (servers) that are in consensus with the network. It doesn't matter if our data is secured on Hive if there is only one server around to parse that data and distribute it to the community.

Two heads better than one.

Luckily we actually do have more than one server, we have two. At this point @khaleelkazi is running such a server... in fact he's broken away from Condenser which is great because Condenser is garbage. The other server that confirms the network is HiveEngine.

The problem here is that HiveEngine and Leofinance.io are not necessarily in consensus. If one side breaks the rules there is no on-chain way for the other side to call them out. Anyone can post any custom JSON operation to the Hive blockchain, this means that fake transactions are allowed, and it's up to the individual nodes to determine they are fake and ignore them. On Hive, when a transaction is fake the witnesses refuse to post it to the blockchain at all.

This is why native tokens on the Hive blockchain are so important. We need to get our witnesses to come into consensus with these token protocols so the entire network can rely much more certainly on the information contained directly on the blockchain. After all, that's what the blockchain is there for, so we can be certain that the information is true, correct, and immutable.

The good.

Being centralized is not a bad thing IF you can trust the centralized entity in charge. It allows us to make these quick changes without having to play the politics game. It makes our network agile and able to adapt a hundred times faster than other more decentralized protocols.

The nice thing is that these centralized cryptocurrencies become more decentralized over time, increasing trust & stability but decreasing agile development and quick changes/decisions. Even Bitcoin was only owned by one person in the beginning. All crypto starts out centralized, decentralization is a journey and a spectrum.

Stepping stone to no-curation.

Truth be told, curation doesn't make a lot of sense. I talk about this a lot. It makes no sense for the backend protocol to ASSUME that frontends are going to order posts solely by how much that post is paying out. In fact, it makes even less sense that we have no smart-contracts in play that allow users to monetize their ability to re-blog.

Re-blog curation

Reposting someone's work is the absolute definition of curation, yet there is currently no way to monetize that action. Sometimes I'll read something knowing that if I repost it, it will end up getting $10 worth of upvotes just because I brought it to the attention of the Orca's & Whales that upvote my account. So why isn't the network incentivizing this kind of behavior? Where's my cut as the middle-man?

You might be thinking, "I thought crypto was supposed to eliminate the middle-man," and you'd be right. Unfortunately, we don't have an AI that runs around curating content better than humans. Until then it's a human job that should also be a paying job. Networks need to incentivize the behavior they want to see.

The kickback

So now we see (at least on LEO) that curation is no longer curation at all, but simply a kickback to the upvoter (stake-holder). This was actually @theycallmedan's idea (at least he's the first person I heard talking about it). Once again, we see that HiveEngine tokens can make these changes on a whim while Hive requires consensus to do so (so many politics). This is exactly what happened with 4 week powerdowns. PAL/LEO did it instantly right out of the gate and Hive is still at 13 weeks. I actually prefer it this way. HiveEngine is a great way to prototype and test the Hive network. They also did 50/50 curation first.

This kickback is a great way to incentivize upvoting other accounts. Without curation or a kickback many people feel like they are throwing away money when they upvote others. By getting something back (especially half) it becomes much more psychologically viable to consistently upvote other accounts that one values.

Removing the zero-sum game of first-come-first-serve curation mechanics isn't going to have any kind of negative effect on the platform. It made sense when Steem first began, but it did not take long for that game to be corrupted into the dirt by bots. To date it's been nothing but a way to leech money from users who are actually doing what the network wants: upvoting content that they value by hand using the human brain (proof-of-brain). Therefore, this is a great change by the LEO network that can only create more value on average. It incentivizes the behavior that we want to see, and that is the primary objective.

Conclusion

There's a lot of info to parse here, but essentially LEO is signaling to the network that upvoting oneself for 50% is acceptable without having to worry about downvotes. That might sound like a lot, but in reality how many other networks can afford to dish out decentralization in this manner? The big boys like Bitcoin and Ethereum have to spend ONE HUNDRED PERCENT of their inflation on network security. LEO spends 0% inflation on network security and piggybacks off of Hive's 10%. It's not a good solution, but it is "good enough", and that's what crypto is all about.

Return from LEO: Flat "Curation" Curve Incoming to edicted's Web3 Blog