On Vote Buying
What is vote buying?
Vote buying is a term being thrown around the ICX community a lot lately. Vote buying is defined as giving individuals monetary incentive to vote for your node. This practice has been long shunned by the ICX community and until recently has been threatened with P-rep delistment. However recently, many P-reps have come online that are offering stakers extra incentive to vote for them in the form of IRC2 Tokens or even ICX. These tokens are given to stakers, in addition to their normal staking rewards, for voting for a specific node. Voters have flocked to these nodes as they see it as getting even more return on their investment. But this isn’t a new development.
History of vote buying in the ICX community
Vote buying has been going on inside the ICX community since the beginning. Behind closed doors, and sometimes seeping out into the light, causing a controversy. But saying that these situations that have come to light are isolated incidents is naïve. I have messages in my inbox from a team offering to buy votes, I’ve heard second hand from people inside other P-reps that it is a common practice, and I believe this practice is even more wide spread than even I am aware of. But is vote buying bad?
Is it bad?
In my opinion, yes and no. By that I mean that not everything that is called “vote buying” is indeed vote buying. There should be a distinction made between rewarding stakers of a working, building, contributing P-rep team, and running a node that’s sole function is to give away rewards in order to gain a higher placement while building nothing, contributing nothing, and simply being a “whale farm”.
Giving an extra incentive to voters on top of building on ICX, supporting the community and being an active P-rep member rewards the community with a bump in their investment while at the same time bringing eyes to a node that is making ICX a better place in my opinion is a win/win for both staker and node. If a successful P-rep wants to give back to the community, who are we to tell them what to do with their money?
On the other hand, simply giving out rewards for votes, while not giving anything else back to the community, not building on ICX, not giving stakers a voice in voting, or not giving out rewards to all stakers, is a negative to the community and in the end only serves to enrich the non-contributing node owners while throwing a few peanuts to whales to back their node. Being a giveaway node while doing nothing for the community is a shady business model.
In the end it’s up to the individual voter to decide if this type of activity is “good” or “bad”. It has gone on since the beginning and will continue until the end of time, behind closed doors and in plain site.
Spartan Node 4 lyfe
What we’re doing at Spartan Node is a movement. We want to give the ICX community back to you, the community. We build, we give back, and we work 24/7 to make ICX into a better place. We don’t want to make money off of anonymous stakers, we want to make money WITH all of our team members. Our purpose is not to enrich ourselves, our purpose is to enrich the entire community. Not just monetarily, but with a voice, a vote and a position at the P-rep table. By giving our rewards to the community we are giving them power, both in voting voice and monetary rewards. When you stake with Spartan Node, you are a member of the team.
I am Spartan Node, You are Spartan Node, WE are Spartan Node.
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