Welcome back to the Game Theory of Steem! As always, if you haven't voted for previous articles, payouts are still open for all of them and I'd be grateful for any votes you throw my way: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, and Part 6.
In the last installment, we asked this question: how many minnows would it take to have the same voting power as a whale? We arrived at the unsettling answer that it would take more minnows than currently exist. Not really the answer you'd hope for, but the numbers are what they are.
Today, I'll play around with the concept of a class war on Steem; basically, we'll imagine that all the poor folks on Steem band together to "fight" the rich folks, and we'll take a look at what might happen in that scenario.
As always, the analysis will be pretty "stylized," which is engineer-speak for "not realistic, but at least it tells a story."
Image Credit: Domain-of-the-public on deviantart.
The Setup
Picture this: all Steem accounts get mad at one another, and they split into two factions. To fit in with the rest of the story that I've been telling, I'll call the factions "team whale" and "team minnow," though as you'll see in a moment, more appropriate names might be "team big whales" and "everybody else."
What's the right split? Well, obviously there is a huge number of ways to split the accounts into two groups, so let's focus on adding two constraints that make the problem easier. First, I'll require that the two groups control roughly equal amounts of SP. When I pulled the data that I'm using (actually, @heimindanger pulled the data I'm using - again, I'm indebted to him), there were something like 54.4 Million SP excluding what's controlled by the @steemit account. This means that we have the following constraint:
Each of the two factions needs to control roughly 27.2 Million SP.
Even with that constraint, there are many many ways to split up the accounts, so I'll add one more constraint that guarantees we have a unique split. This one is simple; I'll just require that every account in the first faction is richer than everybody in the second faction. Constraint 2:
Every account in Faction 1 needs to have more SP than any account in Faction 2.
This second constraint is actually a lot less ad hoc than the first; I'll explore this fully in later articles, but there is actually a pretty reasonable argument for why factions would "bunch up" like this. The basic idea is that you can think of a faction as a voting cartel in which everybody votes for each other's articles. A faction should reach a theoretical maximum size, because if it has too many members, each person will have to cast too many votes. On the other hand, a faction in which everybody is rich doesn't wouldn't want to swap one of their members for a poorer one because the new member's vote wouldn't be worth as much as the original member's vote.
Anyway, it's easy to show that only one split satisfies both of my constraints, and we can find it quite simply by writing out a list of all accounts ordered from richest to poorest, and then adding up SP as we move down the list until we hit about 27.2 Million SP. I've done this in this Google spreadsheet. Note that I'm excluding the @steemit account in all the calculations; this is because it tips the scales so much that it's not even funny.
The Results
The results are, let's just say, not pretty. The "rich" faction has only 19 accounts in it. The poorest member of the rich faction is @blackjack, and the richest member of the poor faction is @cloop1. That means if the minnows wanted to team up against the whales, they would need to recruit all but 19 accounts to do it. What makes this look even worse is that several of the accounts in the rich faction are actually owned by the same person: I'm guessing that @val-a and @val-b are the same person, and probably the same goes for @michael-a and @michael-b . So fewer than 20 individuals essentially have complete control over all content on Steemit.
Of course, everybody has experienced this in one way or another; if you're a little minnow/trout/tuna like me, you really don't have any shot at a successful article unless a whale votes for you. In fact, you really need one of those top-20 accounts in the rich faction to vote for you.
Based on the last few articles I've written, I should probably re-name my series to something like "The Impotence of Minnows." But the reality is that I'm just telling the true story of the system that's been built here. It seems to me that there are signs of the inequality lessening, and I'm absolutely sure that the biggest of the whales see this as an absolute imperative and are working towards grooming a new crop of dolphins.
Discussion Question: Is a 2-faction split like I've described above "stable" in any way? That is, do members of either faction have an incentive to defect to the other one, or split off and form their own?