The reward system of steemit was designed to give 75% of the payout to the author, and 25% to the curators. However, there is a difference in the payment method: The author can select 50/50 in his payment (50% SBD, 50% steem power), but the curators don't, they always receive 100% steem power, my question is why.

I think this is not fair, since the huge prices of SBD have give an advantage to authors over the curators. Let's clarify that using maths.

Different prices

We have two type of prices: The internal price (steem blockchain), and the external price (exchanges).

The internal price

Internally the blockchain believes that 1 SBD is exactly 1 USD. The relation between SBD and STEEM can be seen at steemd.com

Lets call pi the quantity of STEEM per SBD internally (internal price):

The external price

We know that externally the price is very different. Lets call pe the quantity of STEEM per SBD:

Payout for authors and curators

The payout of a post is measured in SBD. Looking the 50/50 mode, when the author receives his payout the blockchain transforms half of the money in STEEM using the internal price, the rest is SBD. Then the author can transform that money into STEEM using the external price. Knowing that the payout is 75% of the total payout P, then:

Now, lets define a constant k which is the ratio between pe and pi:

In this order, the payout of the author is:

On the other hand, the curators receive 25% of the payout, but all of them is transformed into steem using the internal price, then:

Real distribution of the payout

Lets see the real percentage of money that goes to the author:

Finally we found the formula:

The above figure is a representation of this equation. As you can see, while k is bigger it will be closer to 100%. In this moment pe = 1.22, and pi = 1/5.81 = 0.172, meaning that the actual k = 1.22*5.81 = 7.088. This is a huge value, and represents 92% of the payout to the author, and only 8% to the curators.

Please note that the internal price of steem will go to $8 in the next days (it grows slowly because the blockchain takes the median in 3.5 days), meaning that the value of k will grow to 9.76... wow!! in this case, the author will receive 94% and the curators 6%. This is unfair.

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Edit : The moderator of utopian-io asks me for some updates on this post in order to be approved. However, this change is late, and there is no option to review it again. By the way, I will post my update.

Steem source code

The file of the source code that is responsible for the distribution of the payment is database.cpp. Over there we found the function database::pay_curators, and the specific line that create new VESTS for the curators:

auto reward = create_vesting( voter, asset( claim, STEEM_SYMBOL ), true );

asset(claim,STEEM_SYMBOL) means the amount of money, measured in steem, that goes to the voter. All the money is transformed in VESTS, for this reason the function says create_vesting, and remember that VESTS is an internal measure of the STEEM POWER.

On the other hand, let's see what happens to the author:

auto sbd_steem = ( author_tokens * comment.percent_steem_dollars ) / ( 2 * STEEMIT_100_PERCENT ) ;

auto vesting_steem = author_tokens - sbd_steem;

const auto& author = get_account( comment.author );

auto vest_created = create_vesting( author, vesting_steem, true );

auto sbd_payout = create_sbd( author, sbd_steem, true );

As you can see, the first 2 lines checks the percentage of steem dollars, and divides the total amount in vesting_steem and sbd_steem. Finally, it uses 2 functions: create_vesting and create_sbd. With the first one the blockchain create new STEEM POWER to the author, and with the second it creates new SBD using the calculated amounts.

Note that this code is not related with the front-end Steemit.com (the condenser), but the core itself of the blockchain.

Steem proposal

My proposal is to modify the pay_curators part in the same way as the authors is done. In this way the curators could ask a 50/50 payment and they will be able to enjoy the aforementioned SBD advantages, which will bring everything back to a balance of 75%-25% payment distribution for authors and curators.

How to do that? each post (in the code it is called comment) has a list of voters, and each voter has the attributes rshares, weight, reputation, etc. We need to add another attribute here called percent_steem_dollars to define that split.

I know that this is not as simple as changing 2 lines of code but it requires a careful review of the code to avoid leaving any bug, and finally the different front-end should adapt to these changes. But as I mentioned earlier I think it would be a good change for Steemit.

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Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors

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