but is it true that it only pays out when you make a transaction to or from that account?
Payout of interest is on a 30 day rotation, you can get paid every 30 days, but it takes a transaction to trigger it.
You could go infinite days without a payout if there were no transactions.
Does the reward pool grow as the network grows?
The reward pool varies with the price.
When you vote, rshares are given.
Rshares represent the variable of your hp, voting percentage, and number of other rshares active in the pool.
When curation gangs vote, your vote loses value.
When payout occurs the rshare value is calculated as htu and the htu are calculated to become hp and liquid hbd, or hive, depending on the debt ratio, or if you powered up 100%.
Powering up 100% has proven to be the best bet for maximizers.
Many, many moving parts to the math.
And over what time period is this figure? 7 days? 24 hours? 3 seconds?
There is a moving calculation that determines the value of the rshares in the pool.
I'm not certain of all the inputs.
Maybe 
Who is Ned?
Oh man, I have been waiting to hear that question for 4 years.
Ned Scott cofounded steem, and was ceo of steemit, inc.
Stinc, under ned's direction, ran off Dan Larimer, the guy that rode herd on the code being created.
You may remember him from EOS fame, if not bitshares.
He created the graphene blockchain and dpos.
Him and ned had a falling out over control of parameters on the pool, ned won, and Dan created EOS.
Dan abhorred vote selling and ned wanted the cash, as I understand it.
From what I have seen out of eos, we dodged a bullet thanks to ned.
KYC is a deal breaker for most of us.
Between the two of them, they put the hive into motion.
So the 15 HTU limit you speak of would be a maximum limit on the value of a vote?
The 15htu vote limit has to be voluntary on the part of the whales.
As we currently have linear rewards, not a fan, it doesn't matter how many votes stack up, so it would have to be a limit on the rshares cast in each vote.
At one time we had the n2.
It doubled the rshares of each successive vote, stacking votes could, and did, go to 10's of thousands of htu's in payouts for individual posts.
You can imagine what that did for the long tail of the commons.
Mandating a vote limit would break certain aspects of the chain and will never be approved by the witnesses.
The whales could force it again as smooth and abit did, but the pr looks bad when they do it that way.
In the second(?) year of steem the hive there was a 'whale experiment', smooth and abit were the ringleaders.
They flagged all votes over 800mv.
1mv is ~530hp, now, back then it was closer to 250, iirc.
This action was to spread the inflation farther than what the 'bad' whales were allowing.
The n2 reward curve was taking the long tail and chopping it off.
We have linear rewards now, and the long tail is onboarding newbs.
By the whales limiting their votes to 10 15htu votes a day or less, the long tail will extend, and make posting here possible for more people.
75usd a day, in hp, may not be a lot to them, but it is a fortune to alot of us.
The pool is a commons, what I take out, you can't have.
When I dump to btc the value of your stake goes down.
Paula's post explains what happens when the whales take all they can.
And, the price shows you what happens when folks dump, or don't.
.07usd hive wasn't much to look at, but you got many more hive per htu.
Now that we are at .48, and while we were at 8usd, the math is lowering how many hive your htu equates to.
Higher price, lower payouts in hive.
As you say, there was a time before delegations were coded into the blockchain. So, during that earlier time in the chain's history, was Steemit a Proof of Stake chain instead of a Delegated Proof of Stake chain?
The delegated of dpos refers to the ability to vote witnesses by stake.
Delegation for other purposes was added later.
Is there any way to code out the possibility of this centralising tendency without altering the DPOS nature of the chain?
Absent the ninjamine's blowing out of the math, our distribution would have played out much more equitably.
Each individual account would have had a chance at a more level playing field.
So, unless the top accounts agree to stop reaping the rest of us, or enough little fish band together to flag them, this is what we get.
Imo, every post on trending should have 20+ htu's worth of flags on it.
Anything less is capitulation by the crowd.
The crab bucket is failing.
If making rewards here were easy, everybody would be doing it, and it wouldn't be cool.
There's at least one benefit to DPOS I can think of: delegating to newbies so they don't run out of RCs too quickly. Are there any others?
Yes, that is a helpful function.
Buying in to play is a hurdle many folks won't jump.
Lowering the bar to get going can only add more folks to the bag hodling.
More bag hodlers, more ability to cash out without starving the rest of us.
I'd really, really like to see a custom developed by which we require newbs to hit a certain target of hp before cashing out, or we stop voting rewards to them.
If every daily author held 500hp, we would soon run the price up.
This might be high for our friends in other countries, we should discuss it more broadly to come to a consensus that folks will observe.
Perhaps a hard coding of 100hp before the 50/50 is available as an option.
Is it a cooperative, social convention that you're after?
More or less.
This book paints a nice picture.
As this one illustrates where we are, and did so in 1908.
This short story gives depth to our options.
What I would most like to see is an end to rule by force.
In the hive, that will only be if those with power leave it idle.
The defi aspects of the chain are beginning to open the door to the possibility of staying ahead of the inflation without having to get that roi from the newb attraction pool.
In the first 3 years we were dominated by folks trying to stay ahead of the inflation, and in the last 2 years, have seen the greediest of them leave.
Things are much better today for average newbs than when I got here.
The brown nosers still do better, but the corporate speak muzzle is coming off.
I can't wait for the next 5 years to play out, personally.
I only see things getting better once our slave chains come off with the end of the fed.
At that point money becomes a very different influence in the culture.
Cheers for your time, this reply is getting ridiculously long...
Yes, I will probably have to make a post out of it.
Ask all the questions you need to, we are both better served by good information being available to all.
Open source, yes?
The cooperative is coming, communism is inevitable.
The manufacturers of consent have painted the concept with a very broad brush in order to hide the exit door from their control grid behind the egress sign.
No need to burn books when nobody reads them.
RE: The Daily Meme #174!