My understanding, and someone please correct me if wrong...
The DAO can spend 1% of its balance daily. So much like content voting, it’s impossible for it to ever spend itself empty, especially since it’s replenished with inflation, donations, and now this slow release of the Steemit stake earmarked for funding.
It’s also of note that the better the price of HIVE, the more funding the DAO gets, since it earns a % of the inflation pool, but always in Hive dollars. For instance, if the pool earns 1000 Hive a day via inflation, if Hive is .20 and Hive dollars are at the 1.00 peg, then the pool would get 200 Hive dollars. If Hive climbs to 2.00, then that same 1,000 Hive are now depositing 2,000 Hive dollars daily in the pool instead of 200. Better Hive price equals more DAO funding.
Proposals are voted on similar to witnesses, stake weighted, but vote on as many as you want. So the highest weight voted proposal gets funded first, then the second, third, and so on. If all of the daily funding is allocated, the last proposal may only get partial payment of the remaining balance.
The reason the entire 1% of the pool isn’t spent daily is because of the “return” proposal. This proposal is structured as a proposal that gets 240 million Hive dollars a day... with the beneficiary being the DAO account, essentially returning it to the fund and not spending it. Voting on the return proposal sets the threshold that every other project must cross in order to see any funding, since if the return proposal is #1, there’s no remainder in the daily budget to be spent. As is, the return proposal currently gobbles up that “remainder” since we’re not maxing our spending with our approved projects at the moment. So yes, one project can take all the funding... but it’d either be the will of the community, or a Steemit Inc. style takeover.
RE: Hive: Hundreds Of Millions Of Dollars In Development Funding And How It Works