RE: "Losing 20%" : Low cost for high gain?
The reason is that essentially three of those groups, curation, interest and witness all require investment into the platform, which is risk.
You're saying this like there's no investment from 'authors'. Authors, ideally, invest a considerable amount of time, thought, and energy into the various ways they contribute to the blockchain -- yourself included, no doubt, with this quite lengthy post. I would imagine that you didn't just happen to find this well thought out and well written argument just laying on the ground, and decided to toss it up for shits and giggles.
In fact, I believe I've seen you write numerous times about the consistency of frequency and quality that you try to contribute. This is an investment as well, which places risk on you of not having your investment rewarded. In fact, I'd say it's more difficult to invest time, thought, and energy such as this, than it is to invest money and passively let it gain in value due to the fact that you happened to have a large chunk of capital laying around.
The Steem Proposal System, as far as I understand it, is being created to improve and add value to the blockchain. Ideally, this would have the effect of increasing the value of each STEEM token available, which has the effect of producing drastically higher benefits to large stake holders and witnesses (their 11%, while smaller than the 50% author pool, is divided up amongst a significantly smaller group of people).
The proposal to fund the SPS pool solely from a reduction in author rewards seems to me like people wanting to have their cake and eat it too -- or build a wall and have Mexico pay for it -- or increase ones own reward while placing the entirety of risk on someone else. I understand why it's being proposed that way, but I don't think it's equitable.
If one places value on the idea of "proof of brain", then there must be some form of investment from using your brain to create something, which is an "active investment" -- leading to risk if there's no return on your investment. Why is passive investment such as stake or capital always valued in higher standing than an active investment like labour or 'proof of brain'? If anything, labour is in much more limited supply than stake and capital.
What does this mean? I have written many much longer than this and taken zeroes on the reward. If one posts for the reward alone, they better be bloody good at it.
It depends how one comes by that money in the first place, isn't it? not everyone is a pre-miner, some actually have jobs they work hard at. I have two full-time jobs now to make ends meet and create here so yes, I know the investment it takes to write after 2500+ posts similar to this one in length over 2 years.
I think that the witness spread should go deeper into the witness pool. keep the top 20 getting more but, reward further down to the top 50 more heavily. This is also because the cost of running nodes is coming down and hopefully more run full nodes.
It can seem that way I know, it seemed like it to me too but, I live in both worlds as a content producer and, someone who has never sold any crypto. Two years work, not one benefit other than what is in my wallet unused. However, having it there and using it has benefited hundreds if not thousands of people who have sold. I am not the only one who has done similar. There is a large risk in holding Steem and if it fails, I lose every bit of work put in from a financial standpoint.
As said, I would prefer it get taken equally across the group by sectioning off part of the pool and distributing the rest as normal but, that would only be for social ease reasons, not fairness.
Again, this proof of brain thing people have on steem is weird as they apply one side as only to Steem while they want to take the value off Steem into the real world. What about proof of brain off of Steem? Even after all the complaints about how unfair it is that people pre-mined, how many people given the opportunity right now would have the knowhow to premine? I don't. opportunity is useless without skills and skills go across borders and aren't contained in only Steem. Proof of brain is understanding how to connect Steem successfully to the world for usage.
I would predict that the final pool division is not set in stone yet.