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RE: Shadow Token potentially coming!
I agree with you. Now that all these have been written, @shadowbot should look for a way out. I love @shadowbot idea better but @alphacore points are realistic and it is something we should look into seriously.
To all these points, this is why we are opening up the discussion before we even finalize a white paper. It is a concept that we may land up doing IF we can find a way that is fair and beneficial to all. We are considering a concept where the length of ownership of the token could also be used to weight shadow rank. So if you buy Shadow Tokens they are worth less for your Shadow Rank today than they would be in a year from now (pushing people to hold them).
I propose a hybrid system where the core ranking is based on average curation payouts of the shadow caster (for optimal passive growth of the pool), while tokens are distributed via contributions to the pool through voting and generally having more SP. Then tokens are consumed/burned for a temporary promotion-like effect or traded to other shadow casters in some market system. The promotions would not completely bury everything else but instead work similar to the way voting on individual authors works by a rate-limited mechanic such as only ever voting on X promoted posts per day, which can then be leveraged to create an auction mechanic surrounding the promotion itself where people are bidding shadow tokens for the promotion spots and dragging the value of the tokens up along the way. This would create a symbiotic relationship between gathering the tokens and buying them where contribution to the pool has the guaranteed benefit of either gaining some promotion or selling that promotion for some return based on demand of the promotion, while still allowing the overarching rank system to evolve for governing the primary incentives of powering up and increasing curation rewards for the pool.
This of course is a tall order because there are many moving parts that would need to work together, but the end result I think would be worth it as a good alternative to replacing the ranking entirely, and could even be safer in the sense that any damage done could be isolated by altering the promotion mechanics while leaving the core unscathed. Tokens being used as a temporary promotion utility through auctions also means any damage done from the buying of tokens on an account that otherwise would have very low rank is relatively minimal because the problem expires rather than having a lasting impact on the pool and potentially causing chain-reaction harm where people leave because the highest rank people bought their rank but don't deserve it. This also means high rank shadow casters can sell their shadow tokens without damaging their rank in the queue. (although if the strategy at that rank is linear they would always be selling and push down the value, so there would need to be an advantage even for rank #1 in buying tokens such as the promotional effect bypassing the author rate limiting as a separated thing, or the tokens could have some extra utility added.)
I think this kind of system would avoid most of the traps and make it easier to recover from unexpected problems. I hope I didn't ramble too much and detract from the important bits, but I am very confident you understand this kind of thing so I write it all ^_^