RE: Locking stake for 100% passive income, improving content, helping apps
I had read the post earlier, now rereading it actually is making me more convinced that it might indeed be a good way forward. Along other changes.
So here are some of the sidenotes I was writing down whilst reading the article:
If it's more interesting to just sit passive and I would get rewarded higher as opposed to actively engaging, with my vote, more accounts might sit passive. Bidbots are still seen as immoral, this solution wouldn't be, so you might have more than 30% going in there.
In my opinion big investors should be pushed to commit to improving the platform by voting / delegating content / projects that add value to the Steem blockchain. Long term this is the way to let the price of Steem rise and their own investment.
Than again if they're not willing to do that, I do prefer the passive system suggested here over bidbots.
I do think an idea like this should be implemented together with more incentives to ACTIVELY engage in content curation as a whale as well.
One part I really liked is where you said that if big accounts would lock up part of their stake, the wealth-inequality within Steem has less influence on the content curation. Which might cause smaller players to feel like they matter on the platform, this of course is a huge step forward in my opinion and one of the biggest advantages to this proposed solution!
There would be more than 30 indeed. At least at first.
Let's say that there is 100 in the pool and there are 100 vests drawing from it. Say, 50 is passive locking up that 50 percent. Then, some large delegations go to 20 new application adding 20 new vest draws. Now there is 120 vests drawing from the 100 and instead of the passive getting 50% the active take ~65%. Active users target the applications to earn and power up and they will continually grow larger and draw on the pool. Introduce SMTs and oracles and they might only be earnable through active usage and decent behaviour meaning that it could be possible that the passive stake turns active again. What this does though is take the people who truly want to be passive out of visibility and influence over the content on the platform.
While it is a beautiful idea that everyone on the platform actively involves in improving it, that's just not the reality. We already see it with people who are here, and outside there will be a lot more investors who are just not interested in engaging in this kind of, or even any kind of, social media activity.
There's no other investments which force investors to work for their ROI (well, real estate, but that's a very different market). Usually investors want their "money to work for them".
Any kind of work in a system like this can be automated, and over time that automation improves and becomes accessible for more and more people (often through middlemen, we even see middlemen between the middlemen on steem already, a bot usage service).
The social stigma doesn't hold off everyone, and the more users do something considered bad behavior the less pressure it creates.
Of course the "interest" here is higher than for most other investments you can get, but we're still early on and inflation will drop over the years.
So in the end, by expecting participation, we limit our possible investors to a subset of social media users, software developers, people who use the platform in ways it wasn't intended for, and some real heavy risk takers who believe the idea will outprice the inflation. Offering something to non techy investors who don't want to curate or even self vote 2 or more times a day seems absolutely necessary to me if we want to be successful in the market.
Well from an investment point of view, you're mostly looking for some kind of dividend and hopefully a price increase. At the current time I think it's fair to say that the bidbots provide this kind of dividend to investors, but are definitely putting downward pressure on the price long term.
Again, I do like the passive approach proposed here, but I strongly believe active investors should be getting more out of the platform than passive ones. How to make this a reality is a different matter and likely not easy to solve.
If we look at the whales on Steem for example, we have a lot of them who are very talented developers / community managers / etc. etc., but a lot have stopped doing any of that on Steem as the work vs reward just makes it way more tempting to use bid bots. Even though long term if bid bots remain around, they could very well be the end of growth for Steem.
Making it passive, as proposed here, won't get those people to do more again for Steem in my opinion, where they did have the motivation to do it before bid bots came along. But it would at least likely eliminate most bid bots, which is something I am really looking forward to.
I do think that the proposed solution here is a lot better compared to what we have now with the bid bots, but at the same time I think more incentives for active participation would not be a bad thing either.