Recently, I saw the founder and former CEO of steemit still considers quadratic ("n2" in his words) rewards as a solution to some problems.
Quadratic rewards were in tact before Hard Fork 18 ("Equality") and this way, if user a has n times effective voting power (Steem Power multiplied by his voting quota use) of user b, then his vote has n*n the effect of user b, whereas under linear rewarding system his vote has n times the effect of user b.
Advantages of quadratic rewards over linear rewards are:
- Its being bullish for STEEM, since it enforces people to buy into it, due to it escalating an arms-race that is in tact under linear rewards anyway
- Strongly discourages use of multiple accounts by individuals and makes shared accounts more rewarding, since n times the power of one account, translates to n*n times the power of one account using the STEEM of all n accounts.
This reduces some of the multiple account load on the blockchain
Disadvantage of quadratic rewarding compared to linear rewarding are:
- Further empowerment of big abusers while for the same reason renders most users negligible.
This way, if a collective of people will want to achieve a certain goal which requires voting power, they would be pushed to delegate their STEEM to a common account.
To clarify it, if 10 accounts have 10 STEEM POWER each, together they count like 100 SP, but 1 account having 50SP, is in effect like 250SP, which is 2.5 times the effect of a collective having 2 times his stake combined.
Due to increased need of delegation, a load of other type is added to the blockchain, negates part of the benefit of bigger actions by fewer accounts.