I have gotten a lot of questions from people about the potential impacts of HF 19 on payments. I would like to clarify as best I can.
I want to make one thing clear though - I have tried to understand this as much as I can, but there is still a lot of uncertainty with how this will all play out. There is complex math that is over my head, and there are unpredictable changes in user behavior that could make things go either way. Nothing in this post is 100% for certain.
The hardfork is not resetting the rewards pool again. Payouts are not going to go down to zero again, like they did after HF 17/18.
At the time of the hardfork, all active posts (posts that have not received payout yet) will be switched over to the new linear rewards curve formula. Potential payouts will change. Most likely what we will see (this is not known for sure) is that posts that have received a lot of larger votes will likely go down in value, and posts with lots of smaller/medium sized votes will likely go up in value.
The total amount that is paid out in the days/weeks right after the hardfork may fluctuate as the blockchain re-calibrates the voting averages using the new curve. It is possible that there may be a dip in reward payouts, but nothing as extreme as HF 17/18.
The whale voting experiment will be ending once the HF occurs, so whales may start voting with full voting power again. This also may affect the total amount that is paid out as the blockchain re-calibrates to the increase in voting power being used.
After the HF occurs and payouts are on a linear formula, a user with 1,000 MV of voting power will now only have 1,000 times as much voting power as a user with 1 MV (instead of 1,000 * 1,000 = 1,000,000 times as much). Users who do not have hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of SP are likely going to see a boost in the amount of influence that they have on the site.
Casual users (who vote less than 40 times per day) are going to get additional influence, as they will be able to consume all of their voting power in 10 votes per day. The trade-off for this is that the users who take the time to find 40 good posts in a day will see a drop in influence.
My personal view is that this HF will be a big improvement for the long-term health of the platform. New users want to feel empowered and that they can increase their influence on the site by buying/earning more SP. This is key for growth.
See you all on the other side :)
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