If you are a minnow or dolphin then you will find that your vote when you vote on posts with no votes will be worth a lot less, that's because of the n^2 curve. But if you vote for posts that are doing well it should be about the same as it is today because by then the curve has turned linear.

As usual the devil is in the details.

If the reward curve for a post turns linear only when the post has 100,000 SP voting for it at full power, I will not vote for anything else but Trending while doing my best to time my vote perfectly. To do otherwise would be an exercise in futility both for me as a curator in possession of about 6,000 SP and the author of any post not going to receive anything less than a large Orca's full power vote worth of votes.

Is the math in this post a mere example or is there any definitive info on where Steemit Inc intends to have the linearity start?

If the linearity is supposed to start at 100,000 SP, then that will truly be the death of organic curation on Steem. Sure, you could use bid bots to get your post above the hurdle, but the risk would be substantial with free downvotes. I'm a regular user of @ocdb and theoretically stand to directly benefit a lot from this. There are only 380 accounts with more than 50,000 SP on Steem. There are about 7,500 active accounts. If each puts out a post a day, that means that each curator with enough SP to amount to anything would have to read 20 posts a day on average. Would they bother to read posts written by the smaller accounts or would the circle jerk for guaranteed profit? We already KNOW the answer to that. It's no longer a matter of guesswork.

Steem will become a big circle jerk again if linearity starts at 100,000 SP worth of votes on a post. That's a certainty. It will be extremely hard for any new author to grow their account here. That means no new authors.

Of course, rewarding users for posting and curating is not the only use case for the chain. There is JSON data storage, which can be used for gaming and digital assets. But by setting the start of linearity at 100k SP will be the death of Steemit and all blogging applications. It will be a very, very quiet chain.

Because I haven't seen any definitive numbers out there, I'm beginning to lean against EIP. I would be very pissed off if my over two years of content creation came to nothing financially. There is a good chance the price of STEEM will come to nothing if 95% of the user base stops posting and is content with auto-voting posts guaranteed to reach the linear part of the curve. I'm sure much of that content would be shitty to boot.

The non-linearity cut off should be at something like 100 SP at most. Anything in Minnow territory or higher would be a total disaster.