Is lazy curation a new Mining ?

About a month ago I wrote a well-received post about curation.

I also announced an upcoming experiment using curation bots in December. Well, after my traditional annual meditation course, now it’s time to summarize.

Before I stepped offline, I was in eighth place on the monthly curation score charts.

As a result of my abstinence I sunk to 26th place at the two-week score.

I was expecting better performance because I joined @biophil’s curation trail, choosing so because of his occupying the number one slot for curation score. However, it seems that his bot was down for maintenance for a few days; the consequence was that for those days, there were little to no rewards coming in.

Apart from that, I used SteemVoter to guarantee that a dozen people from my core feed would always get an upvote from me. In the end, the rewards from that made about 25% of total rewards.

So, now back to the original question.

I don't know much about mining. Most of my knowledge is based on posts series written by @oleg326756 where he describes his mining experiment using a second hand miner bought for about $300. It looks like that after 6-7 months he might have mined enough to pay for that purchase.

Let's compare it to how a passive curator on Steemit could perform. Can a Steemit curator just have his Masala Tea on the beach, just as I'm doing it now, letting bots do all the work?

Right now, there's about 200 million Steem locked up as Steem Power and just about 70 thousand SP distributed as curation rewards weekly. After the hardfork this rate will sink down rather slow (compared to the pace of its sinking before the hardfork ).

This would suggest that an average Steemit curator could expect to get just a bit over 1.5% annually on his investment in SP.

However, in my case it was about 20 SP "lazy" curation rewards in two weeks. My having about 4000 SP, this being just less than a half of my "full-time" results , but still it's 13% annually, which is still much higher than average.

There are two reasons why this is possible. One is, the many low SP holders won’t bother to optimize their curation behavior for a few pennies withdrawn from competition for rewards. The other is that whales are not able to get high curation score by design. To get a high score, one has to vote earlier for something many voters with much higher SP would vote afterwards, and those voters with higher SP are just not available for a whale. Thereby the current situation: a whale usually should be happy with just 2-3% annually no matter how hard she is trying.

For someone willing to invest $500+ to have some little passive income curation on Steemit, this could be an alternative to traditional mining indeed. In fact, I think it would be appealing to same group of people, because this choosing between some different voting trails and strategies would be very similar to choosing between some mining pools, providing the same touch of gameplay.

However. I think that the community would realize one day how beneficial it would be to attract miners to invest in SP (especially if those from no "free electricity" regions could be attracted) and that 1.5% rewards annually is in fact too low a price to be paid for those benefits of withdrawing Steem from circulation.

There was a discussion some time ago about returning to the initial 50% author and 50% curator payout scheme, and it seems to be that there are not many who are really in opposition to that.

However, I might suggest a compromise solution: to allow authors to choose between two options, the current 75/25 distribution and a newly implemented 50/50 distribution (similarly to choosing between 100% SP and default option now). An icon showing "50/50" could be visible then on these posts.

Right now, competition for curator rewards incentivizes curators to vote earlier, this making the total curation reward pool more like 15% instead of the supposed 25%.

It would be interesting to implement this competition for authors too. Some would choose the 50% reward option, hoping for more attention from curators, resulting at the end in more rewards. This makes the whole competition game symmetrical. As a result I hope that the total curation rewards would at least reach the initial proposed 25%, or maybe even a bit more.

As for me, in the future I'm not going to follow any trails. It was an interesting experiment, but making my own seems to be more interesting for me right now ;)

I definitely will continue to use SteemVoter though.

Well, I see that once again I failed to write an amusing little article, but believe me, I could easily make it even longer and even more boring. Hope you'll appreciate that I didn't ;)

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Discussion about implementing 50/50 author/curators split:

https://steemit.com/steemit/@calaber24p/revamping-curation-is-the-way-to-increase-steem-power-demand

Mining adventure of @oleg326756:

https://steemit.com/mining/@oleg326756/mining-bitcoin-at-home-week-8-update

For those who want to join @biophile's curation bot trail:

https://steemit.com/curation/@biophil/want-to-join-my-voting-bot-and-earn-some-curation-rewards

To learn more about SteemVoter:

https://steemit.com/steemit/@cryptomancer/steem-voter-review-bringing-bot-power-to-the-masses