I found an interesting article I’d like to share with Steemians with a reason. Vote selling was a well known practice already in the ancient Rome:

Since most voters saw elections as irrelevant to their own lives, many candidates resorted to bribery to convince the people to cast their votes. Bribery became such a commonplace practice in the later Republic that it was seen as a normal part of the political process, and ranged anywhere from the blatant promising of money to simply hosting games and entertaining the people.

Vote selling and war

Sometime during the mid-second century, Polybius noted the prohibition of bribery, but this proved to be useless as it continued to be prominent in elections and was very difficult to differentiate between bribery and the patronage system. … the consequences of such corruption caused a lack of faith in the constitution and the political process, which led, in part, to civil war.
(Source: Wikipedia)

Vote selling causes crisis

I think if there was some sort of voting in prehistoric times, like in the stone age, vote selling also existed. Seems to be part of human nature.

(Photo: Roman Forum, Wikimedia Commons)

Seemingly, the vote selling had an important part in the fall of the Roman republic and the rise of the new tyrants, the emperors (caesars). And I think, the same vote selling – with other practices like self-upvoting, bots and circle yer… I mean, circle upvoting – has an important part in the crisis of Steemit, too.

Principle and reality

Why? Because the wonderful ground principle of “rewarding the valuable content”, “proof of brain”, “we pay you for your content” etc. gets hurt in a great extent. The reward pool isn’t rewarding the good content, it’s rewarding mostly investments (wealth), money, vote selling-and-buying activity.

Many people are wasting more time with this activities than with post writing. Some sort of mixture of proof of brain and proof of stake is the reality now.

OK, but there’s nothing new in this – can you add with a reason. This reality was described already by many authors with other words. I have an idea, which I’d like to discuss in one of my next posts.