Great response fredrikaa, I didn't know you guys were behind Steempress and have given your witness an upvote.

Howo and I had our differences in the past, because of my high levels of self voting for around a year and a half. I can certainly understand that no one's a fan of that. But those economic rules seriously punished good actors the most. It seriously made it near impossibly expensive to do anything other than join the bandwagon and exploit. Once you see the equivalence between self voting and vote selling, then by some counts around 75%+ of the active stake were participating in this, all the way to the top.

Fighting abuse was going to basically cost you hundreds if not thousands of dollars a day out of pocket to downvote a random target just so 75% of those rewards saved would go into the pockets of other abusers. The common knowledge of the futility here prevented the system from self correcting.

The only rational course of action were to sell out or to join the abuse. And in hindsight I made the incorrect choice of those two options. If we rule out all the people who were too wealthy to care or had a stake too small for vote selling/self voting to be appealing, not that many were left who truly did not compromise their integrity (I think maybe literally less than 5 on the entire platform, don't quote me on that, it's a guess).

I did fight for economic reform for pretty much as long as I had been self voting (it wasn't that much at the beginning but grew as the entire platform got worse). I really thought it was so obvious that Inc would implement econ reform within a couple of weeks, at most a couple of months, and had every intention to stop as soon as a sound set of economic rules were introduced (as I did).

Sigh, it took waayyy too long. Anyway, it's not really the best justification I know, but that's where I was coming from.

There's a few things I'd want to reply to you about the economics and explain my choices in more detail, but not in public. Most of it I've justified and you've fully understood and agree with a lot of it with the exception of the curve. And even there, we sort of just have different predictions on the cost/benefit aspect. While I stand by it, mostly for reasons I've revealed as well as reasons I'll tell you in private, ultimately we may never know the road not traveled. But when we get a chance, we'll have a chat and hear each other out in more detail.

There are MANY economic improvements I'd like to make. They only wanted to spare very limited resources on this aspect of the blockchain. Overall I think the numbers were fairly sound considering they were a fairly blind speculative guess, and that they were made with considerable constraints in development resources as well as the constraints of the initial design.