Are the upper rank whales just a bunch of scammers? I got involved in a debate yesterday with a user who believes they are.
Let me break down just why he thinks they are, and how easy it is to assume this when following his logic.
Statement 1: Having multiple accounts is considered scammy.
"Big whales have created many alt accounts to suck the rewards away from the system"
In fact, having multiple accounts was a requirement in the beginning of Steem. Way before the majority of us even knew what steem was. Most of the upper ranks have multiple accounts for obvious reasons; A witness account, a miner account, a blog account, and maybe some more accounts for whatever purposes.
Did they create multiple accounts for fraudulent purposes? Simply put: No.
Statement 2: Stealing rewards from the platform.
"Upvoting your own alt account with super whale powers is stealing money from steemit"
We need to stop for a moment and look at what makes someone a whale. Those users are the very same users who invested their own time, money and resources in making steemit as we know today. Their investment is what most of us are chasing, the monetary reward by their huge balances. There is no such thing as stealing on steemit. Most of us joined here to make some rewards, just like the early investors did. Sure, having millions of SP on your account may be impressive, but it won't pay your bills.
Yet we assume whales are only here to share the rewards with any john doe making some introduction on steemit, however, if they upvote themselves, we start screaming it has to be a scam! Don't we all check the 'upvote post' check box upon submitting? Don't we all pray for a big whale to vote our content?
How do you justify the expectation of those guys investing everything they had, pouring money in a new platform, sharing everything with us, yet not receiving anything in return themselves but greed and envy? If some day, an anonymous person builds you a castle, just like that, for free, would you close the door on him if he asks you to have a coffee with you ?
From my perspective, if a whale upvotes his own alt account, they are only rewarding themselves instead of you.
Statement 3: Voting patterns reveal scammy accounts.
"Account X upvotes a post and within seconds 40 others do! SCAAAAAAAMMMMMM!!!"
Steem is a wonderful platform and blockchain. It even has this cool thing called "proxified voting." Let me explain you some of the basics.
Every user can authorize another user to cast votes using his keys. We have a main curator, lets just call him @maincurator. All that @maincurator does, is scan steemit for new and good content. Now i don't have the time to scan 24/7 on new potential trending content, for whatever reasons. But i really like what @maincurator is doing, and his upvotes are mostly inline with what i like. I can authorize @maincurator to vote with my account using nothing but our own blockchain. Nothing scammy, no hocus-pocus. Just code.
Now let's extend this, and 50 other users love what @maincurator does. This would mean, by every vote @maincurator makes, a total of 50 other users will cast their vote within the same second. What if @maincurator follows me, loves my posts, and upvotes every single post I make? It would show that all my posts are getting the same votes within the same time span.
Does this imply my account is a 'fake, scammy' account? No. Does this mean many of those accounts got created just to suck away rewards and upvoting my own posts? No.
It is my belief this community is being poisoned by greed, hatred and envy from the new userbase towards the old userbase.
People are actually accusing and investigating such simple actions like proxified voting because they rather believe in conspiracy theories and assumptions than taking a look at steemd and acting with knowledge. Even worse is that those users are assuming they have the knowledge.
At a slow pace, we'll see the intellect and childish behavior of bitcointalk appearing on steemit.
If anyone ever has doubts about anything, talk to this community instead of spreading rumors around.