If you can get curation from a 20hour post that has $500 on it already, then curation no longer even exists. People would stop voting on anything but what already has the most payout so the distribution of rewards would become increasingly centralized onto the people that already have the most rewards, and nobody will vote on something that isn't already trending from a whale if they want any reward. Your idea for 24h curation window is fundamentally flawed in that it completely invalidates what curation is made to do - give incentive to vote on good posts that have little to no rewards in anticipation that they will end up gaining more rewards from their quality and from you boosting it up the chart a little bit. It would be completely trivial to have a bot go around voting on all the highest paying posts to take a share of their reward, at least right now it is a bit more complicated than that. It doesn't matter if you gain some perceived advantage against bots the reality is you still have none because when it becomes so mindlessly obvious how to gain maximum reward suddenly EVERYONE will have a bot that does it and the end result is every trending post summoning 90% of the votes into one big pile trying to grab curation reward, that's a terrible scenario.

One good thing you mention though, is that reward payouts could happen indefinitely, I can agree with this idea because there are old posts that gather tens of thousands of views over time but only ever earned some tiny amount in the 7 day payout period where it ends and no value comes from the apparently amazing SEO they had to generate so much traffic from search engines. Adding types of reward mechanics would be a positive change, but taking away curation in favor of snowballing bandwagon incentives is the opposite of that.

I think you are very smart in the way you describe things, otherwise I would have just passed along, so don't take offense to my stance on this it is just some food for thought (and thinking is something I get the impression you like to do)

also this responding to month old post is silly anyway, so... (end necro)