Hello beautiful humans, and welcome to another post diving into some parts of Hive that most people know nothing about.
In my last post, I pointed out how there is one account, making 10 spam comments a day, and receiving TONS of upvotes from some of the platform's largest whales, while the main excuse given for malicious downvoting is that content is "over-rewarded."
Of course, many came out to defend the project (not seeing the underlying problems of centralization and mis-use of the rewards pool), so I decided to do a much deeper dive into things...
How Much Per Day?
Here are all of the comments by HBD.Funder, day by day, since it started.
You'll notice the rewards peaking at over 20k HIVE per day, currently bouncing between 10 and 15 thousand HIVE per day...
Curious How Much of the Rewards Pool that is?
Spam Comments Make WHAT percent?
According to @themarkymark - the current rewards pool is currently something like 64,000 Hive per day. (see comment)
Now, obviously that number is always changing, just like everything else to do with upvotes & rewards... but let's think about that for just a moment.
That means that these 10 comments every day, are making anywhere from 10-33% (or more) of THE ENTIRE REWARDS POOL.
8-12 accounts up-voting, no content, no interaction, just an automated comment 10x per day.
Hive's Top "Curators"
I pulled the "top curator" chart from dalz's earnings reports from March to December... Wanna guess how much of these curation rewards is just for those comments?
Luckily, we can actually see pretty easily just how much of these rewards came from spam comments...
HBD.Funder Comment Rewards By Month
The first spam comment from this account was made on March 21, 2021.
Since then, it has averaged 10 of the same comment, every day.
Here's the breakdown month-by-month.
The Questions
So, these comments make upwards of 10% of the entire rewards pool, peaking at over 30% sometimes, with the curators getting 50% of those rewards... For auto-voting spam.
Does this sound like Proof of Brain at work?
How many people don't even know this is happening? Seems like it might affect potential investors' opinions to know how centralized the flow of inflation is.
Why is it that when journalists and other content creators get downvoted maliciously, we are told by top 20 witnesses to just "Quietly accept our down-votes, because the rewards aren't ours until payout," but when I started downvoting these spam comments, I was immediately accused of being against development, and stealing from Blocktrades' budget?
The Point
Does anyone actually think that stake on Hive will ever get decentralized enough to actually use the term "decentralized" as long as the top $$ holders come up with ways to beat the decentralizing-by-design-inflation, and keep themselves on the top of the pile forever....
They downvote those who disagree with them (cutting both authors & curators out of the inflation...)
They spend massive amounts of upvotes on spam comments, that leave them in control of the author rewards (through the DHF) and give them all the curator rewards...
Stabilizing HBD
It seems pretty clear that the justification of "stabilizing HBD" doesn't really explain the plays that are happening here, not to mention there are TONS of other means to stabilize HBD, like the use of liquidity pools, making it an algorithmic stable coin (currently it has nothing besides the Hive conversion to actually peg it), and the hbdstabilizer project only applies downward pressure, hence it almost always being under a dollar.