Steem Voting from a Different Point of View
Those of us who see steemit as a social web site that happens to use steem to pay out rewards for content might be tempted to focus exclusively on the importance of rewarding high-quality authors, and that is important, but there's a different perspective to be had. This graph surprised me.
Source: SteemData - Blockchain Operations Distribution
This snapshot was from a couple days ago (when I saved this draft), but most days look similar. In terms of transaction volume, 92% of steem blockchain activity is about voting and rewarding voters.
The authors have the biggest "soap-boxes," so here at steemit we hear a lot about what makes them happy and sad, but as a community, we should not lose sight of all the different stakeholders. We should not let the squeaky wheel be the only one to get the grease. Even though voters don't have as much of a voice as authors, their prominent role as stakeholders should be remembered.
In terms of value, after the reverse auction for early voting, the author rewards are reportedly around 7 times the total value of curation rewards, but - conversely - in terms of distribution, the curation rewards are distributed to about 35 times as many recipients (not necessarily unique). Simply put: Comparing the two pools, a far smaller curation pool is being distributed in a much larger number of disbursements. It is clear from this data that curation rewards are far more efficient at creating steem transactions than author rewards (by a factor of about 245).
If your goal is decentralization, then it seems that curation rewards may be doing a better job than author rewards of meeting that goal - which should not surprise since there are more voters than there are authors. If your goal is to bootstrap the steem block chain, the transaction volume shows that curation rewards are accomplishing more than author rewards. If your goal is to incentivize holding steem, curation rewards incentivize voters infinitely more than author rewards incentivize authors - because aside from power-down constraints, the incentive for authors to hold steem is zero.
Personally, I don't see a need to adjust the curation reward pool at all at this point. I think it is far too early to judge how things will work in the long term, especially while we're still in the power-down window after Dec. 6. But if we're going to talk about adjusting it, the chart above seems to suggest that increasing the curation reward pool, not decreasing it, is more likely to create buying demand that will raise steem's value (and thereby raise payouts to both authors and voters).
Some interesting thoughts. That said, the reason there are so many curators (vs authors) is that you can curate on auto pilot.
That is to say, many of these curators getting rewards are people who have walked away from the platform.
If you look at where most of the curation rewards are actually going, youll see that they don't do much to combat decentralization.
Thanks for the feedback.
True, but at some point if the price goes up and/or the platform gains users, it will be worth their while to come back. They are still stakeholders as long as they don't power down, and by holding steem and providing a weak approximation for their preferences, they're still providing a small service. I look at it like mining bitcoin. In 2009, you could do it with a desktop cpu. If no one tampers with it too much, I expect curation rewards difficulty to follow a similar path.
Well, they sort-of can't do much to combat decentralization with the N2 curve and if they're only getting 12% of the new coins in total. HF17 may help. Of course, the increasing difficulty also favors centralization, so we'll have to see how that plays out.
It won't. they decided to keep the n^2 curve.
Oh, that's a surprise. I'll have to go read the github comments.
Update:
Found it:
https://github.com/steemit/steem/issues/913
So it looks like it's probably still coming, but not in hf17.
Either way, as long as there's a many--to-one relationship between voters and authors on a rewarded post, it seems that curation rewards should be be more effective than author rewards at decentralizing payouts (subject to the constraints imposed by the rewards curve, the pool size, and the reverse auction).