is a fairly heated debate going on now about a change in the forum voting system, two changes are being proposed. I am making this post to telegraph my position on the matter as a Witness operator.

One is the cutting of the normal post rewards pool by 38% - which largely goes to the original posts, and reallocating it to comments only.

The second is the elimination of curation rewards in this new rewards pool.

There is a pretty big split about this amongst the Witnesses, and I am writing this to offer a possible methodology for creating a solution.

Distribution of Newly Minted Steem

First of all, the debate is about how new Steem is distributed. I am not sure of the exact proportions, but it's something like 10% goes to miners, 40% goes to rewards, 40% goes to witnesses, and about 10% remaining pays interest payments on Steem Power and Steem Backed Dollars.

So in essence the new proposal in HF17 changes this so that the share taken by rewards is split 62% reduction of post rewards and 38% then goes to comment pool instead.

Some people think splitting it is the bad thing. Some people think that eliminating curation rewards is a bad thing. I'm inclined to agree with the elimination of curation rewards, but I have another idea about the splitting.

Another way to decide the splitting of the pools:

The issue is that this proposal has two aspects about it that diminish the value of the most hotly competed part of the Steem ecosystem - the voting and curation system. Because of the way that rewards are calculated by scaling steem power using and exponential formula, curation serves as a way to moderate self-interested voting by paying people to spend a lot of time looking at stuff. Curation is not for minnows, and as a dolphin I am seeing maybe at best 30-50 cents a day worth of rewards.

Without curation rewards, whales will be able to help their mates, and probably directly after that, a counter-selfish-comment-reward group will form and start whale flagging whale comment upvotes. Really, this has already happened before so I don't see why it won't happen again and it will be worse.

So how do you make a 'fair' split?

Easy. Don't talk about taking money off Paul to pay Peter. Instead, take money off everyone!

In the above example I had a 10:40:40:10 estimation of split, so that adds to 100. It is much easier for people to decide to cut all others by 20% to create a new pool. The mining pool is going in HF17, so right there is a part that can be repurposed without anyone crying.

This additive strategy for calculating the pool split has a big advantage as an operational policy for the future. In my opinion, Q&A websites and wikipedia type websites have to have completely different voting structure and payout system needed. Adding these as separate modules and calculating their cost by taking it out of the rest means that no single other group who has a big interest in one of the ways of getting new Steem has lost versus the rest.

The share of new Steem that goes to Witnesses can be reduced some, for sure, also. At least as far as 50% before at current prices they start to get paid less than covers ongoing costs. And let's face it, does any Steem user really have a valid future claim on new Steem that does not yet exist?

There needs to be an agreeable scheme for re-proportioning the allocation of new Steem, because in the near future, there will have to be more changes to this allocation. A set of rules for deciding who gets the chop and by how much, and how much proportionally do we want to dilute the system with the new scheme.

With such a conceptual framework in place, we can end this silly debate and have more useful discussions about what results came from a new reward pool created by a new post type (questions, for example). No socially driven framework for a group decision about who gets the money at any given moment, has any superiority to any other, especially when as it stands we only have concrete data on one format and one scheme.

There is also the question of pools

The question about pre-allocating proportions that daily (even 3-secondly) paid out of the pool of new Steem is another one. Just like the problem we saw with a flat supply rate at the beginning of Steem, it created massive instability in the system. If you don't split the pools, but effectively divide the payouts to different social reward systems from the same pool... This is something that some also talk about. A big change, and unnecessary, that will cause a lot of howls of complaint (or sales, as the case may be).

The vote weight has generally gone to original posts up to now, and I think that Steemit Inc is thinking about this pool splitting to bring more social connection between users. Why the existing and functional messaging system has not been exposed in this case? I am sure the looming bloom of blockchain size is part of the reason. Currently all messaging and transactions are immutable, this means that the cost basically lands on witnesses, for everything.

There are advantages and disadvantages to partitioning the pool differently, but I am inclined towards the idea that it doesn't matter - more users using one element of the social functions of the blockchain means more users using the money element of the blockchain. The expectations are what make people unhappy. They get used to x, and get x/2 later on, and they are crying. They get used to x, and now get 2x, and they are happy, and if anyone else lost half, they will probably be blaming the second group. If the second group is new, then maybe even people will try to stop this group even getting a slot.

I think to not partition the pool for different applications will require a serious thinking about how to make sure that the two applications do not unduly interfere with each other. Really I think that is impossible. So that's why I say, we all just agree that everything now is 100%, and we decide how much we want to dilute the pool with the new scheme, and take the proportion out equally.

There needs to be more of these schemes competing with each other, and for the reason that they enable interface types that have a different audience and a different value to their users. It would bring a lot of interest and inevitably more money if people used the blockchain to find answers to technical problems or provided them, or if they could help compile a truly consensus based wikipedia, or scientific peer review system.

We are just waiting for a way that everyone agrees on about how to add them, because fundamentally, the new potential users will take rewards away from the current, existing users.

Nobody disagrees that we need to allow different schemes for allocation.

I just want to take this opportunity to again reinforce that especially with the HF17 eliminating PoW mining, effectively Steem has become at least partly now Subjective Proof of Work blockchain. Authors and curators in Steem get for their work what miners get for their work in other cryptos, and the decision is made by those with the greatest amount of Steem Power invested. It is a great system, and I just think people need to realise that just because one scheme works, doesn't mean we can't try others, and to eliminate the blockage caused by peoples sense of incumbency.

When you realise that fundamentally it only has to be better than chance at giving the new Steem to those who promote Steem, to be worth running, any and all schemes are acceptable, and that of course some people are going to get upset because it literally means slicing the pie smaller. But that wouldn't matter with more Steem users with more money and a bigger (in trade value) pool. So if everyone understood that, we could find ways to capture more market share.

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We can't code here! This is Whale country!

Vote #1 l0k1

_{Go to steemit.com/~witnesses to cast your vote by typing l0k1 into the text entry at the bottom of the leaderboard.}

_{(note, my username is spelled El Zero Kay One or Lima Zero Kilo One, all lower case)}