Can Less Be More?

When I first came to BLURT, the year was 2021 and I had bought in around 5,000 BLURT and powered it up. At that time, it was enough to give roughly a 1 BLURT vote.

Today, with around 10,000 BLURT, that same vote is closer to 0.3 BLURT. This got me to thinking immediately about what was happening beneath the hood of the entire process of the reward pool.

I have been here for 10 years across the three chains and have learned more than I cared to know. Granted, I didn't participate as much in commenting or making posts, but I was only doing what came natural to me, which is to observe first, analyze, and search for patterns in the structure of the chain, incentives, code, results, human behavior, and more.

I viewed these chains like a tool and nothing more.

Today I feel the need to explain the issue laid out at the beginning of this post because I see risks that need to be pointed out. Risks that seem to be overlooked but are quietly resting on every stakeholder's shoulders.

The reward pool.

Before I get into it, I must also make one point clear. You can confirm this for yourself:

The reward pool does not look at the market price and decide how much your vote is worth.

So the argument cannot be made that the reward pool is directly changing your vote weight because the price changed. A BLURT vote is not smaller because someone decided the token is worth less on an exchange, but rather about the relationship between voting power and the reward pool itself.

I bought my slice of the pie yesterday. Why do I need twice as much pie today to get a smaller piece of that same slice?

That is the part that made me start looking deeper into the reward pool. From the outside, someone might see the smaller vote and immediately assume it is because the value of BLURT changed. But that is looking at the wrong measurement.

The reward pool is not looking at the exchange price and deciding how much influence a vote should have. The price can change, but the relationship between your voting power and the reward distribution is a separate mechanism.

The thing that changed is happening inside the system itself. When more voting power is competing for the same rewards, the weight of each individual vote naturally changes. That does not require anyone to be acting maliciously. It does not require anyone to be doing anything wrong. It is simply what happens when the environment around everyone changes.

This is something I have noticed repeatedly while observing these chains over the years. The code creates the rules, but the incentives created by those rules shape the behavior of the people using them. Thus, everyone is simply responding to the system in front of them.

A person powering up more BLURT is doing what they believe is beneficial.

A person building a larger and larger stake like the machine goes brrrrr on every account, then account is doing what they believe is beneficial because the machine is actually good brrrrrrr

A person voting more is doing what the system rewards them for doing, but when everyone follows the same incentives, the combined result can sometimes create effects that were not obvious when each individual decision was made. That is the part worth examining. Not the actions of one rich person, but the structure that connects all those actions together.

Everyone can be making what appears to be the rational choice from their own perspective, while the combined outcome creates a problem nobody individually intended.

The person accumulating more stake is not necessarily wrong for wanting more influence. The person voting more is not necessarily wrong for using the tools available to them.

The person with a smaller account is not necessarily wrong for wondering why the distance toward meaningful participation keeps increasing. Everyone is simply playing the game according to the rules that exist, but sometimes the rules themselves create questions. This is where I started thinking about the difference between ownership and influence, because those two ideas are often treated as if they are exactly the same thing.

If someone owns more, naturally they have more power. That makes sense, but does every unit of ownership need to translate into more active competition for the same reward pool?

That is the part I started questioning, and not because ownership should be limited or because someone should be punished for building a large position, but because a social blockchain has another resource that is just as important as tokens. Participation. A different and completely relatable variable to this issue.

A system can have a lot of value stored inside it, but if the average person looking in sees the mountain getting higher every time they start climbing, eventually they may stop trying to climb .

And that is where the question becomes bigger than one vote or one reward. It becomes a question about what kind of environment creates long-term participation.

This is why I found the old Steemit experiment interesting.

The Whale Experiment

For a period of time, on Steemit way before blurt was even a concept on paper, some of the largest stakeholders stopped voting. Nothing about the blockchain itself changed. The rules were the same. The reward pool was the same. The only thing that changed was the amount of large voting influence actively participating in the distribution. The result of that experiment was something worth paying attention to even today on blurt. 

Locations may change but principal stays the same.

When the largest votes stepped back, smaller accounts naturally gained more relative influence. The little guy didn't suddenly became stronger, nor was it because the protocol started to reward them differently. This was because there was less competing influence occupying the same space.

That experiment stayed in my mind because it showed something simple but important. The amount of stake that exists and the amount of stake actively competing for rewards are not always the same thing. Those two things can overlap, but they are not identical.

A person can hold a large amount of a token, but that does not automatically mean every unit of that token has to be used in the same way at every moment.

This is where the conversation becomes difficult because people often hear this type of discussion and immediately think it is an attack on large stakeholders.

It is not.

Large stakeholders are part of these ecosystems. They provide stability. They provide support. They often take risks when others are unwilling to. The question is not whether large stakeholders should exist. The question is what happens to the ecosystem when the balance between ownership, influence, and participation changes over time.

Because those are three different things that happen to interact with each other.

Ownership answers:

"How much do you have?"

Influence answers:

"How much does your action affect the system?"

Participation answers:

"How many people still feel like their actions matter?"

And if those three things move too far apart, the system can begin sending signals that are very different from the intentions of the people inside it. Someone may simply be trying to grow their stake. Someone else may simply be trying to participate. But the combined result can still change the experience for everyone else.

That is the part worth observing. 

What happens when the incentives push everyone toward the same behavior?

That is where the lobster bucket analogy comes into my mind. 

It's A Crabby World

A man shaped by its environment for influence is like crab in a bucket. Can't even walk straight. They are shell bent on bringing each other down. They're like, if I'm going to die. We all gonna die. The bucket is don't need someone standing there with a lid keeping everything inside. The environment itself creates the outcome.

Now imagine the bucket itself changing over time. Maybe the lobsters are getting bigger. Maybe more lobsters are being added. Maybe there is less food being thrown in. Maybe it is some combination of all of it.

Who would do such a thing?

God dayum...

The result is that the experience inside the bucket changes, even if every lobster is simply doing what it has always done.

That is the part that interests me when looking at these systems. Not finding a single lobster to blame.

Not pointing at one person and saying "you are the problem", but by looking at the bucket... because the environment says a lot more than individual intentions.

A person with a large stake is responding to the incentives in front of them. A person with a small stake is responding to the incentives in front of them. Everyone is trying to climb. Everyone is trying to find their place. Everyone is trying to crab each other down, via maximalust voting with maximalust staking. 

If my vote sinks to the bottom of the bucket, then by crab law everyone else must crawl down here with me.

But if the structure changes, the climb itself changes. And that brings me back to the original thought.

What happens when the path upward becomes harder, not because someone moved the goalpost intentionally, but because the environment around everyone changed? What if the buckets rim just keeps getting higher?

That is where a system reaches a point where it has to look beyond individual actions and start looking at the incentives it creates.

So this brings me back to the original thought that started all of this.

What happens if the system changes one variable and we simply observe the result?

What if the largest stakeholders on BLURT decided to run an experiment for a period of time? Say two months.

Imagine then, if someone with a large amount of BLURT decided that only a certain amount of their stake would actively vote, while the rest simply remained powered up. A person could still own the stake. The blockchain would still recognize the stake. The value would still exist.

The only thing changing would be how much voting influence enters the reward pool at one time. For example, what would happen if people treated 10,000 BLURT as their active voting account?

Would the smaller accounts see a difference?

Would the reward pool feel less diluted?

Would participation change?

Would nothing happen?

Any result would tell us something.

That is the interesting part.

Because sometimes the best way to understand a system is not by arguing about what should happen. It is by observing what actually happens when one part of the system changes. The Steemit experiment gave us one example of this.

A temporary change in large voting participation created different results. 

The question is whether BLURT would show a similar pattern or something completely different. Maybe the answer would surprise everyone. Maybe the system is already balanced in ways we do not see. Maybe there are other variables affecting the outcome but without testing, we are left with assumptions, and assumptions are how systems continue running without anyone stopping to ask why they work the way they do.

The goal is not to remove people from the table. The goal is not to take away someone's slice. The goal is to understand whether there is still room for more people to sit down and believe their participation matters.

Is the climb worth gaining influence?

And maybe that is the real question hidden inside the reward pool.

Not:

"How much can one person take?"

But:

"How do we make sure there is still a reason for the next person to join?"

Can less be more?