...after a STEEM post. Yeah, sorry, it's not going to be a fictional story, but hey... I'm convinced the title's the start of a fun free-write.

So I've read a lot about the 30 minute reverse auction period that was introduced about 2 years ago, but I wasn't sure what exactly the current state was. There are a few posts that lined up and I essentially just assumed that it was how it worked, but due to historical changes and previous forks it was hard to tell if the older posts were out of date or not.

I was able to identify the parts of the STEEM code that verify the following claims:

1. If you vote in the first 30 minutes, your curation reward is reduced by a particular percentage, and that remaining percentage goes to the author.
2. That percentage is linear. Voting immediately at 0 minutes means all of the vote value goes to the author. Voting at 15 minutes means that 87.5% goes to the author. Voting at 30 minutes means 75% goes to the author.

Beyond these two points there is a lot more information for curators that I will not go into. I will focus on the implications for the author.

Code Walkthrough For the Reverse Auction Vote Mechanism

Here is the section of code that adjusts the weight of a comment on a vote:

/// discount weight by time
uint128_t w(max_vote_weight);
uint64_t delta_t = std::min( uint64_t((cv.last_update - comment.created).to_seconds()), 
                             uint64_t(STEEMIT_REVERSE_AUCTION_WINDOW_SECONDS) );

w *= delta_t;
w /= STEEMIT_REVERSE_AUCTION_WINDOW_SECONDS;
cv.weight = w.to_uint64();

(This may not be rendering properly in certain front ends, but works on steemit.com)

Above, you'll see that it takes proportion of time before and discounts the weight in a linear fashion. If the vote time was 30 minutes after, then delta_t is 30 minutes, and w remains unchanged.

For reference, the constant for the reverse auction window is 30 minutes: STEEMIT_REVERSE_AUCTION_WINDOW_SECONDS

#define STEEMIT_REVERSE_AUCTION_WINDOW_SECONDS  (60*30) /// 30 minutes

Note that while the vote weight has been decreased for that individual vote, it preserves the original vote value when tallying the total vote weights for the comment, which you can see here:

c.total_vote_weight += max_vote_weight;

Paying Author and Curators

The payment code is in another section here. Here we can tie together why the portion that doesn't go to the curator goes to the author instead.

author_tokens += pay_curators( comment, curation_tokens );

Here curation_tokens is already 75% of the comment's total value. As we'll see later, pay_curators assigns each voter a proportion of that curator's reward portion, and returns any amount that is left over. Remember that weight that got tweaked above? The individual voter's weight was decreased but the amount added to the comment was not.

Here we dive into the pay_curators code:

share_type unclaimed_rewards = max_rewards;
...
auto claim = ( ( max_rewards.value * weight ) / total_weight ).to_uint64();
...
unclaimed_rewards -= claim;

I extracted the relevant parts that compute the weight of the voter's vote using weight (which was possibly discounted) over the total_weight (which was not). As the code subtracts from unclaimed_rewards, by the end what's remaining is returned and added back to author_tokens here, as mentioned at the start of this section.

Tada!

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