Steem Basic Income

Steem Basic Income is a social experiment to bring a basic income to as many Steemians as possible. Members join by sponsoring others into the program. Steem Basic Income is delivered through providing regular upvotes to member content.

Some of our members have started using the #steembasicincome tag for their contests, so check there for contests that we might not have resteemed!

Support from Members

Thank you all for your support! The upvotes that we receive from our members are an essential component to keep delivering a sustainable basic income! We can also see upvotes from fixed return services like @smartmarket that we use to boost our long-term sustainability. I didn't count all the individual slivers in the pie, but since the 'Others' segment represents 698 voters, it looks like we have received upvote support from close to 800 accounts in the past four weeks.

img source: http://www.steemreports.com/top-voters/@steembasicincome

All members that upvote consistently are rewarded with a bonus increase in their voting weight. To get the best benefit, we recommend using @steemvoter or @steemauto. As we move into full automation, we will be refining the way this works, to improve the incentives around supporting with your upvotes. I will explain the new system in more detail when we get closer to switching over.

You've seen the chart of upvotes received, but how does that drive sustainability? Here are our SP rewards received over the last 28 days:

With the trend somewhat flat over the last month (even with rapid membership growth), we've had to return to the delegation markets to maintain our target ratios. In spite of that, we still have extra SP that we can power up. If we didn't have the rewards shown on this chart, we would be relying much more heavily on leased delegation. Instead, we can invest in long-term sustainability!

The big dips underscore the importance of publishing regular updates, as the SP reward from curation alone is not as good as the SP reward from member support. It's my responsibility to provide regular updates, not only to keep members informed about the program, and about basic income in general, but to make it easier for members to provide regular support through upvotes and receive their associated rewards. Moving the other processes will free up a lot of time for things like publishing regular upvotes, optimizing curation rewards, and establishing synergistic partnerships with other programs on Steem...

To that end, we need to make a small change to the management fees. This may come as a surprise to newer members, but the managing member (@josephsavage) does not get paid directly. Instead, bonus shares are created relative to the number of outstanding shares, and the only compensation comes from the upvotes granted to those bonus shares. We think this is a great system (and ties in directly to support long-term sustainability), especially since it doesn't actually cost the members anything. We lease delegation to a target multiple of effective shares outstanding, so these bonus shares increase the amount of delegation we have to lease, but they don't decrease the value of the upvotes that members are receiving.

Unfortunately, the value of upvotes received on those bonus shares is not enough to pay for the development of fully automated systems. Rather than changing this reward system to something that would negatively impact the members immediately, we are going to keep the same system in place but increase the ratio of management bonus shares to actual shares. To this end, the management fee will increase from 1 bonus share per 100 actual shares to 5 bonus shares per 100 actual shares. When the program grows enough for this to equal 25000 bonus shares, we will cap it at 25k and let it drop from 5 per 100 back toward 1 per 100, until 1 per 100 exceeds 25k bonus shares. At that point the bonus shares granted will equal 25k again.

Since we will continue to lease delegation to target multiples, this does not immediately cost the members any rewards. The long-term impact of leasing more delegation instead of powering up the extra STEEM for permanent SP base will be more than offset by the benefits of automating. In addition, we will gradually move from the current bonus share level to the new target, to ensure that it does not negatively affect our ability to maintain the SP ratios we target.

Imagine near automatic enrollment processing, dynamic adjustment to changes in posting frequency, optimization of upvote times to maximize curation rewards without any decrease to value earned by members from their upvotes, more direct reward for upvoting @steembasicincome, better returns from delegating to @steembasicincome, ability to receive your basic income on comments when your posting frequency goes down (reducing the pressure to post every week), and full analysis of your income received already to catch you up if your basic income has lagged where it should be. These are all benefits that will come from the new system design, but... first we have to know that we can pay for it.

If anybody has development experience that is willing to work in collaboration (for an assigned portion of the management bonus shares) please reach out to me on the Discord. I know some have offered already, but we get a lot of comments and I couldn't find their offers again.

Steem Basic Income Enrollment

If you want to join Steem Basic Income... Send 1 STEEM to @steembasicincome. Include in the transaction memo the name of a Steemian that you would like to sponsor. You and the person you sponsor will each receive 1 share in the program and receive regular Upvotes on your posts.

Questions?

We broke down the mechanics for how the program works in the complete overview. You can check your share counts and upvoting weight in our spreadsheet explained here. If you have any questions, ask away in the comments section or join us in our discord channel.