A cute idea for curation rewards
I originally posted this in the discussion on @timcliff's recent post here: https://steemit.com/steem/@timcliff/whales-can-the-community-buy-out-a-portion-of-your-influence I'm posting it here now because it's getting pretty far off-topic from the original post and I thought it was deserving of a separate discussion.
The discussion on @timcliff's post is about limiting the curation capabilities of larger accounts (with more than 250 MVests), and essentially paying them not to vote. The big question is "where do these payments come from," and one proposal is to eliminate curation rewards. Here's an alternative idea that accomplishes a handful of similar things:
What if you paid people for unspent voting power? Right now, when an account's voting power is at 100%, they have this trickle of voting power that's just going to waste. If you paid them for it (the network "buying back" the potential curation rewards they could be earning), each person would be able to choose whether they wanted to earn curation or just sit there and let their balance grow.
I haven't thought through it at all, but it's a quick-and-dirty way to let whales individually opt-in to something like your 250Mvest proposal. AND, because of the sub-linearity of curation rewards, large accounts would see a bigger bang for their buck by not voting than smaller accounts would.
This might raise some implementation issues, but it would be interesting to do this and eliminate the interest/dilution that's currently paid on SP balances. Accounts selling back their voting power would be earning interest, and accounts voting would be earning curation rewards. Like I said, it's not obvious to me how to implement this in the current framework - but I suspect it could be worked out.
I would particularly value the opinions of some of the people who were most involved in the discussion on @timcliff's post; so I'll call a few of you out: @ats-david, @snowflake, @smooth, @dennygalindo, @abit.
So are both the curation rewards, and the non curation rewards going to come out of whats currently the curation reward pool? If so, how do you determine how much of the current pool goes to curation reward buyback? Is it a fixed amount (in which case it will go down if more people are getting paid for not voting) or is it scaleable (the more people who opt in and get paid for not voting, the less available rewards for curation.
If its not coming out of the curation reward pool, then how are we going to handle the extra inflation? Cause we kind of just switched things around to get inflation under control. With the new SP incentives model, i don't think there's enough in just SP incentives to just fund it out of that.
My hope would be to pay for the buyback using the current inflation. But as you point out elsewhere, it's not clear that this would be enough money.
yeah realized that on the reread. I actually have no idea what the current rate of SP incentive inflation is.
Also a big part of the problem with incentivizing whale inactivity is that it might not be possible to exclude the steemit account, which would eat up almost half of the rewards.
It looks like there's right around 200 GV (besides the steemit account) above the 250MV mark. By my guesstimation in my other post, if you got rid of curation rewards entirely, and used all of the proceeds to fund inactivity incentives, you would be able to offer around a 2.6% APR non compounding return. Which is a worse deal than powering down and buying into SBD.
Yeah, that's kind of terrible.
Mixed feelings on first read. I'm eager to read peoples' feedback.
Interesting! Still sorting out all the information and my thoughts on the subject.
@smooth actually brought up this exact idea in @snowflake's post. It is a good idea and I'm not opposed.
Two arguments against it are: