토큰 이코노미 기반 블록체인 미디어의 실패요인:스팀잇의 보팅봇 사례를 중심으로 (Success and Failure of Blockchain’s Token Economy: A Case of Steemit)

서지정보

· 발행기관 : 한국정보사회학회
· 수록지 정보 : 정보사회와 미디어 / 22권 / 2호 / 1 ~ 24페이지
· 저자명 : 조재우

초록

최초의 블록체인 기반 소셜 미디어인 스팀잇은 쉽고 접근성이 높은 토큰 이코노미를 토대로 대중에게 빠르게 확산되었다. 모든 컨텐츠 제작자들에게 블록체인 토큰으로 보상을 주는 스팀잇의 Proof of Brain이라는 독특한 토큰 이코노미는 스팀잇의 성장에 크게 기여하였으나, 암호화폐 시장의 침체와 함께 그 한계도 나타나기 시작했다. 본 연구에서는 스팀잇의 토큰 이코노미 실패 요인으로 논란이 되어온 셀프보팅, 보팅풀, 보팅봇 등의 문제를 살펴보고 그 중 가장 대표적이면서도 명확하게 드러나는 보팅봇에 초점을 맞추어 그 활동이 스팀잇 토큰 이코노미에 미치는 영향을 실증적으로 분석하였다. 스팀잇 블록체인 데이터와 시장 데이터를 토대로 분석한 결과 스팀잇의 전체 큐레이션 보상에서 보팅봇이 차지하는 비중이 증가할 때 시장에서의 스팀 가격 경쟁력은 하락하는 것으로 나타났다. 이 결과는 시장에서 형성된 가치보다 훨씬 낮은 비용을 들여 토큰보상을 받는 것이 토큰 이코노미 성장을 저해한다는 본 연구의 주장을 뒷받침한다.

영어초록

Blockchain technology has been experiencing dramatic changes since the beginning. From the perspective of consensus algorithm, blockchain expanded its boundary from Proof of Work(PoW), to other various algorithms such as Proof of Stake(PoS), Delegated Proof of Stake(DPoS), and Byzantium Fault Tolerance(BFT) (Mingxiao et al., 2017; Lim et al., 2018). Regarding use cases, blockchain started from simple peer-to-peer electronic cash, but has added revolutionary features, for example, smart contracts, token economy, stable coins, initial coin offering, security token offering, and so on.
Amid those various of changes, a notable one is an emergence of Steemit, which is blockchain-based social media service that distributes rewards to contents creators on the platform. The two importance aspects of Steemit are: (1) Steemit gives rewards based on human’s creative activities, the so-called Proof of Brain(PoB) compared to precedent blockchain that employs reward distribution rules based on computing power(PoW) or capital(PoS); (2) Steemit provides token economy to laypeople with incentives and accessibility.
With the bear market of cryptocurrency in 2018, however, Steemit is losing its attractiveness and vitality. Some critics regard Steemit’s token economy as a failure of experiment. But to my best knowledge, there is no in-depth study on the Steemit’s problem, especially from the perspective of token economy. In this vein, the present study investigates the core principle of token economy and the condition of its success and failure. Further, this study conducts empirical analysis on the Steemit’s cases that are regarded to cause detrimental effects on the token economy system.
Token economy in blockchain have several distinct characteristics. First, a token economy system’s total value is a sum of the token’s value. Therefore, all token holders share value changes in accordance with token economy ecosystem’s growth and shrinking. Second, mining new tokens for distributing rewards dilutes existing token’s value. Third, shareholders or users of token economy invest tangible or intangible values in order to obtain token rewards. Conceptually, this investment is transfer of value from the economic system outside of token economy system into the token economy system. In sum, the condition for token economy’s growth is as below: If costs of creation for a unit of token is significantly below than the token’s market price, participants who are rewarded in tokens will sell them for immediate gains by the differences between the costs and the market price. Consequently, this will lead decreases of token economy’s total value and harms token stakeholders.
In Steemit, there are some contentious activities that can create Steem tokens with lower costs. For instance, self-voting is an intentional activity that an author votes for his/her own posts regardless of the quality of contents and earns overvalued reward. This action can be committed in a group, the so-called “circle-jerking”. A group of authors who own lots of voting power write posts daily and vote only for themselves for earning much more rewards than the efforts for contents creation. Moreover, vote buying (or voting-bot) services sells voting, that is anyone who send Steem tokens to voting-bots can earn rewards by voting bots. These activities effectively reduce curation costs nearly to zero.
The figure below presents the effect of voting bot in Steem’s curation system. Since June 2017, the effect has increased to 25% in August 2018. This means that one fourth of all rewards are determined by voting bots. According to the principle of token economy growth, this is undesirable because low curation costs of voting bot will decrease costs of Steem token minting.
This study’s empirical analysis estimates voting bot’s effect on relative competitiveness of Steem token in the market. Specifically, multiple regression analysis using the below equation is conducted.
The results indicate that increased share of voting bot’s effect in Steemit’s curation system is harmful to Steem token’s market growth compared to other cryptocurrencies. As expected, it is observed that earned rewards by voting bots are more likely to sold and hence add more pressure to downwards on Steem price, specificically 1% increase of VotingBotShare leads 5.98% decrease of Steem price in the market. Moreover, low quality posts on Steemit’s front page due to their high rewards thanks to voting bots can give negative impressions to readers and investors and disappoint other contents creators investing much energy in their posts.
To turn failure into success in the future, Steemit has to build better reward system that sophisticatedly evaluates contents and fairly distributes rewards based on the quality of contents. Hence, Steemit’s token economy system ought to attract more values from the outside of the token economy system and increase costs for minting the tokens.
There are many kinds of token economy and each has distinct characteristics. But it is commonly required that a token economy system precisely estimates invested values for rewards, then provides corresponding amount of rewards. Moreover, token economy system should be designed to increase invested values as the system grows.

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