RE: Updated thoughts on 'the whale experiment'
I can sympathise with people's hurt feelings but this IMO is the key point here:
Since the experiment started, I have seen a new sense of excitement with the platform from regular users that has not been there since I joined back in July. I have seen many users buying more STEEM, so that they can power up their accounts and gain additional influence.
I have experienced that myself! My vote actually means something now and I know for a fact I am not the only one because I have talked to others who feel the same way.
As you mentioned before I think it may be better to give whale accounts "investor" status with a higher level of interest and automatically cap them against voting above the equivalent of say 250MV and we combine that with a more linear reward curve.
It may even be feasible to get rid of interest on regular accounts completely and use that to fund the investor interest rate.
My thoughts exactly :) I'm actually planning to run the numbers on it as soon as I get some time.
Cool I look forward to it - these are exciting times!
I did the math on setting up an investor class by taking the SP inflation and only giving it to the SP that users hold over 800 MV. Unfortunately, it is a dismal amount. For each 1 MV of SP above 800, the users would only get 28 STEEM per year. It is not enough to incentivize them to abstain from using their stake.
That is disappointing. Thank you for doing it though. What about taking the Steem generated by the mining account which is going to be removed? That would be a lot more. Give that to the investors instead?
That is going to an additional top witness. There will be "top 20" witnesses if/when it goes through.
Yes I know, but it might be better allocated to investors. It is worth considering I think. Make the high level investors the 20th witness since they have the biggest investment in the platform.
From a technical standpoint, it is actually a major change. The block production algorithm has a 'round' of 21 blocks, which consists of 19 top witnesses, 1 backup witness, and a miner. It isn't a major change to take away the miner and add one more top witness, but to change the number of blocks in a round would be.
If we were going to go down that path, then a more practical change from a technical perspective would be to just slightly reduce all of the witness pay by the amount that the one miner was getting, but I don't think that is a good idea either. After HF16, the witness pay is also not very much. Many of the witnesses are doing a lot of work for the platform (plus paying to run servers) and they are not getting paid very much.
Also, it wouldn't change the numbers much either. All of the witnesses pay combined is than the interest on SP (which ass I said above is dismal), so taking 1/21 of that and adding it to the investor class would not help much. I'm just doing fuzzy math in my head, but it would probably add 1-2 STEEM per year per MV.