There was a lot of interesting discussion this week regarding many different aspect of steem. One thing that really caught my attention is that it seems a lot of users are not trying to increase the value of steem but they are trying to increase the number of steem in their wallet.
Apparently I am not the only one. Here is a quote from 
One thing this debate has revealed to me... is that lots of people seem to think the best way to increase the value of their account... is by behaving in ways that earn them more STEEM rather than by behaving in ways that raise the price of STEEM.
It's nothing new really, I remember before hard fork 16 a lot of users were complaining that after the fork they wouldn't receive their 'interest' anymore eventhough the proposal was a no brainer to move steem forward.
We have an environment where many users are not acting for the benefit of the whole platform but for their own personal interests.
If we want steem to succeed we will have to get rid of this mentality.
Like I said in the intro, the ultimate goal is to increase the value of steem. Steem can only scale if the value of the token increases. I often hear that we need more users, that more users equal success. This is absolutely no true. More users right now would be really bad for steem because all new users would just drain the reward pool without increasing demand for steem( I know some of you hate this term but its effectively what they will be doing). What makes a crypto successful is its ability to maintain its price not the number of users using it. ( dogecoin to me is a successful crypto, I know it sounds stupid but it's true) Dogecoin doesn't have a lot of new users but it's price is steady because those already using the currency keep trading it. It doesn't need more users to stay afloat.
Currently most of the inflation is distributed to those who create the least demand, authors.
Authors earn steem from blogging, their goal is to make money. The large majority of them have no interest in buying steem because like I said they already earn it.
Users who create demand are investors, curators and users who power up to gain influence ( not yet a use case).
A lot of the inflation should be strategically allocated to those users.
In my proposal I have suggested completely removing curation rewards. The reason is that it was the most obvious and easy way to make the proposal practical ( more specifically removing these rewards would make a stronger case for moderators to stay moderators )
I didn't really expect the whole debate to shift focus on curation rewards. I think these rewards creates bad incentives and I would prefer to remove them entirely but they are not the main problem. The real issue is the huge power/influence disparity between whales and the average user. The problems created by curation rewards are enhanced by this disparity.
I'll admit that curation rewards are also an incentive to buy steem for some people. In my previous post I suggested removing them because I believe these rewards will create very little demand compared to users buying steem to gain more influence. So to me it was a good trade off to remove them in order to introduce a new system that will create a lot more demand. I still think curation rewards are too complexe and will definetely not be the main driver for demand in the future but my primary desire is not to remove them it is to solve the influence disparity issue.
Over the last few days I have been thinking how my proposal could work with curation rewards .
The solution is to reduce author rewards and use this inflation to reward curators and moderators. Like I said earlier most authors are not buying steem so it make sense to reduce funds allocated to authors and give it back to people who actually create demand.
So the proposal would be slightly modified https://steemit.com/steem/@snowflake/guardian-of-the-steem-universe-a-different-perspective-on-the-role-of-whales-within-steem-ecosystem-part-2
50% will be allocated to authors, 15% to curators and 35% to moderators.
Curators will receive approximately the same reward that they do today, the percentage will go from 25% down to 15% but all accounts above 250MV won't curate which is why the curation rewards won't actually go down.
Moderators will have a strong enough incentive to moderate.
The difference between moderators and curators is big enough to discourage moderators from curating.
This will align incentives with people who create demand:
I think this is a good compromise to keep curation reward. I still think the benefits of removing curation rewards outweight the benefits of keeping them unless incentives are modified in a way that makes manual curation more attractive than bots curation. ( For example if authors could specify the % that goes to curation before publishing, it would give an advantage to manual curators over robots because this parameter will be unpredictable and ever changing. I also think that the incentive to vote fast ( 30 min rule) is really the most terrible one as it forces even manual curators to blindly vote for content.
The discussion has also been focused a lot on the current reward curve and on the comment pool so I wanted to give my opinion on those 2.
Regarding n^2 curve, I think it should be removed. I don't really see the point of this curve aside from reducing payout for a lot of good unpopular content on the platform and maximizing the effects of power disparity. I also don't see how this discourage self voting, because someone who want to vote for himself is by definition not going to vote for anyone else. The curve could be a lot steeper than it is today and that person will still be voting for himself. However I don't think removing it will improve the power distribution issue, it may spread out rewards a bit more but it won't incentivize people to buy more steem power, whales have so much steem compared to everyone else that it wouldn't matter. The vote of 99.8% of users will still be worth $0.
Regarding the comment reward pool, I think it's a bad idea. It will exacerbate the current flaws in the design and turn the site even more fake than it already is. Basically it will reproduce the same broken system that we have in the comment section.
Some comments will have huge payouts while others will have pennies, even more confusion for newbies. People will be fighting over this comment and that comment,etc...it will also create a lot of spam and fake comments
And if curation rewards were removed from comment pool it would also be bad as you would reduce reward for curators which is currently the only incentive to buy steem.
