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RE: Proposing A Worker Proposal System For Steem
I would be in favor of reducing witness rewards proportionally with any other reward decreases, but keep in mind that the witness rewards are pretty small in the scheme of things.
Even if witness rewards were not decreased, I would likely donate funds on a regular basis to the pool and I'm guessing many of the other top witnesses and projects on the Steem platform would do the same.
Witness rewards are already likely on a trajectory to be much too small in Steem unfortunately. The way the system was set up, total inflation declines and witness rewards remain a fixed percentage of the total. So in the end state (18-ish years from now), witness rewards will be 0.09% which is a tiny security budget by the standards of most cryptocurrencies (excluding the ones with fixed supply but there continues to be more and more skepticism about that model working, for example see recent BIS Bitcoin paper).
For now, trimming off a bit of the roughly 0.85% witness rewards might be okay but as you said they're still pretty small in the scheme of things (and this is true both an absolute and percentage terms). I would not support a long term reduction in witness rewards though, as I think long term they are already on a path that is too low.
What about witness rewards being paid in SBD instead? The witnesses would prob like it under these conditions, but would be against it if steem ever went to $8+ again.
I don't think a fixed witness pay makes sense.
Part of witness pay (arguably the bulk of it) is for faithfully serving and securing the chain. If you have (hypothetically) $10 billion chain and witnesses being paid say $30K/year, that is a recipe for disaster not only in terms of scaling costs but also security. It may be fine when the value is only $100 million. But as the amounts of value at stake scales up, witnesses can easily be corrupted by outside influences worth more than their $30K/year position, but with significant negative costs for the success of the chain. You really want witnesses to be very well paid if the chain is worth a lot, ideally with more to lose from losing their witness position than to gain by acting against the interests of the chain/stakeholders.
I think a reasonable percentage per year makes sense, something likely in the 0.5% to 1% range, although the exact numbers may be up for debate in the future when we have more understanding of blockchains being used and critical to a rich, mature, economy.
i would also be interested (as said in my main reply) that post_rewards might automatically fund this worker fund :)
Maybe there would be a way to cohesively integrate witness rewards into the proposal and steem rewards economy. Witness rewards were always an incentive to for the infrastructure donation that witness have to make just to be witnesses on the blockchain. Maybe those rewards could serve more than one purpose that can be used to offset inflation.
It could possibly address the stale voting issue of witness votes by replacing the top X witness system with rewarding witnesses through funding appropriations instead. Without getting too specific, witnesses would be rewarded through successful projects that they fund through steemit appropriations. This would basically turn witnesses into angels. The more projects you lead to success, the better witness you are, and the more you will be rewarded.
I actually meant the opposite. Keep witness rewards out of the mix. As long as it is a small change I think most will be ok with it. I would suggest a 5-to-4 move is to big. Something like 5-to-4.75 would be a decrease in rewards by 5% and seems not drastic in either direction.