Can We Improve Steem's Future By Re-distributing Witness Rewards?
So, I originally made a post here that was based on incorrect maths.. Here's my correction.
I originally stated that the top 20 witnesses get paid around 1227 steem per day currently. This is incorrect. They DO get paid to process that many blocks per day, but the top 20 get paid LESS per block than the rest of the witnesses do. This is almost never spoken about and so I forgot.
So instead of the top 20 witnesses getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, they actually currently get paid about $90,000 at current prices. This can go up dramatically if the price of steem goes up or if the number of blocks being processed goes up.
My original post proposed the idea of redistributing the payout for top witnesses to have more going to ones lower down. This would be a great idea and can still work, even with the correct maths applied - but it is less attractive now that the truth is revealed!
The red line shows a rough idea of how the total rewards payouts for witnesses might be redistributed to allow those further down to dedicate more time to the platform. What do you think?
Wishing you well,
Ura Soul
Vote @ura-soul for Steem Witness!
(Witnesses are the computer servers that run the Steem Blockchain.
Without witnesses there is no Steem, Steemit, DTube, Utopian or
Busy... You can really help Steem by making your 30 witness votes count!)
I am an experimental app that attempts to do just that - incentivize witnesses outside top20 by shuffling witness votes:
Check out @shuffler and on github
I'll be honest, your constant voting and unvoting just fills my ginabot notification feed with distracting message. :/
Work in progress - with actual proxied votes it would rotate more evenly, currently it has no effect on your rank and you get picked as a good candidate every few rounds. I reduced the reshuffle time to 3 hours.
OK, I don't mean to criticize your creativity - but a lot of witnesses pay attention to witness votes using ginabot, so the less 'false alarms' the better!
Noted! Thanks
It’s a cool idea for sure! I think it sounds a bit more decentralized. There being a number of “VIP nodes” is something they shit on EOS for... I think it would be cool if it had the mathematical curve like you put. So people are motivated to not just get to the top 20, but to gradually do more things for the Blockchain to grow one spot at a time. This is why my family votes for you 😄💯
From what I understand, EOS uses nodes in institutions such as universities - which really is a significant departure from Dan's original (alleged) 'anarchistic' vision. It's really not too much to ask for to stick to a principle of decentralised non hierarchic structure - maybe this will have to come from another project further down the line.
Thanks so much for your continued voting support, it helps keep me active here and doing what I can to improve things for us all. <3
Great point about the the EOS nodes.
One thing I haven't seen much of is people naming the witnesses that they vote for and why. This would be helpful for all of us I think.
Sure ok, I've been thinking about making a post along those lines anyway. I'll make one soon.
I just made my post on this subject here. :)
i had no idea they were making so much... especially if they aren't competently responding to their job duties, it seems we need a reallocation of funds... especially since @freedom (ie @pumpkin) is able to vote 13/20 in (and the rest of us have no say about it...) (just learned this today here.)
this needs to be talked about more.
To be clear, my calculations here were wrong and I have corrected them. I forgot that the top 20 get paid less per block than the other witnesses. The data I was looking at was for block production and not for actual payout. Apologies for the incorrect data. That said, the priniciple of the gap between witnesses still applies, but at least is easier to justify with the correct maths.
ok good to know. thanks for updating and notifying. yet the amount they make still necessitates that they do a GOOD JOB at their job... and pay attention (not only doing the checks 2 days before the hard fork airs...) RESPECT us, respect steem, T20!
I would support changing the distribution so that the rewards currently going to the top 20 would go to a top 30. It would increase the "full time witnesses" by 1/3rd. A good increase while still insuring a nice payout for all the "full timers"
While I have no doubt, it would need a Hard Fork, the addition of a larger "buff zone" below the current top 20 would balance the lost in rewards, as an incentive for those top 20 to agree to the fork.
I have always been selective with my witness votes, only voting for people I am confident, are serious about the longterm growth of steem, and are not just in it for the short term money.
To be clear, my calculations here were wrong and I have corrected them. I forgot that the top 20 get paid less per block than the other witnesses. The data I was looking at was for block production and not for actual payout. Apologies for the incorrect data. That said, the priniciple of the gap between witnesses still applies, but at least is easier to justify with the correct maths.
I am pretty sure that it could be extended to the top 40 or even 50 without causing any real problems!
Thanks for the correction, and yeah 90,000 is a good amount of money but even if it would change a lot of peoples lives Its not earth shattering. I would imagine that even if you didn't do aggressive redistribution you could still find a good balance. Even if the distribution shift was to help everyone keep their servers online it would go a long way.
Yes I agree, absolutely.
I would favor a change along these lines. It seems highly unnatural to have this huge "cliff" between witness 20 and 21. Not to mention there are tons of competent developers that are not in the top 20.
Many of those at the top would of course oppose the change, but we've seen STEEM at prices nearly 10x where we are now. In a bull market there's no reason for top witnesses to make the equivalent of a half-million dollar salary unless they're using a significant portion of it to hire people to help them out with code.
If things were a little more "tight" for them I don't think we'd see as much complacency at the top, and the bottom 80 witnesses should also be a little more motivated to work. Not sure if it'd work that way en vivo, but I think it'd be a worthy experiment.
Just to clarify, incase you didn't refresh the page.. I have edited this post now. Since making this post I realised that the top 20 get paid less per block than other witnesses do. I forgot about that and so my calculations were very wrong! The current 'salary' for a top 20 witness at today's levels is around $90-100k USD annually - so still high enough, but not massive.
Yeah, I saw the update :-) The half-million figure I put out would be if STEEM was sitting around $5, which we've seen before (and I expect to see again) so I'm projecting forwards a bit.
Ah great, ok - I thought that might be the case, but wasn't sure. One of the issues we have here is the lack of experimentation, which is understandable - to be fair - but at the same time I do feel that significant optimisation is possible with a different approach being applied.
Thanks a lot for your witness vote btw, it means a lot. I still need millions more steem behind me to be anywhere near the top 20, but it all helps. :)
Followed!
To be honest not just you witnesses but with the platform as a whole. The gap is a bit too much
If your numbers are right that doesn't make any sense. So many of the witnesses are barely active and I would query how much coding and development knowledge they have between them. Apart from that I have heard about one person controlling a few of the top 20 witness accounts from multiple reliable sources which between all of these them starts to make the situation look a bit dodgy.
Now I am not involved in any of that side of things so I can stay that I would have the knowledge to back this up but anybody earning 1200 STEEM per day would want to be doing a lot to earn it.
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You can view the payout stats in realtime here.
Can't argue with that. I had no idea that they were getting so much out of it. Those numbers are ridiculous.
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To be clear, my calculations here were wrong and I have corrected them. I forgot that the top 20 get paid less per block than the other witnesses. The data I was looking at was for block production and not for actual payout. Apologies for the incorrect data. That said, the priniciple of the gap between witnesses still applies, but at least is easier to justify with the correct maths.
Things all ran much better with Jerry Banfield!
correlation is not causation :)
He said it is!
I really want to downvote this and hide it but i will leave it here as a warning to others.. like a head on a pike at the entrance to a city.
Certainly makes sense from this end of the chain.