RE: Improving the Economics of Steem: A Community Proposal
While I like those technical approach, I don't think changing the current reward dynamics on STEEM is a good idea. Because there are diverse opinions on this issue, as we can see many people's comments here, moving towards in favor of one side of them would make the other sides dissatisfied.
Rather, I argue for removing contents rewards, i.e. author rewards and curation rewards, from STEEM and shifting the role to sub-community tokens, a.k.a. SMTs. Steemit also can issue STEEMIT SMT that has similar or suggested (by @vanderberg) PoB economics to the current STEEM. Others like @trafalgar can issue alternative SMT that meets his EIP. This approach has several merits.
Given the approach, we can focus on SMT development and don't need waste time for debates and following code changes about the economic model.
Market models will work. Various approaches can be experimented and be proven their values in the market as a token price. This survival of the fittness environment will strengthen Steem's ecosystem.
By removing PoB rewards from STEEM, its inflation can be dramatically reduced, hence investors can be more attracted to the base currency STEEM. Also, investors don't need to compete with contents creators by self-vote, etc. to ensure higher ROI.
Given decreased inflation, we have more room for ecosystem-level experiments like Steem Proposal System by @blocktrades.
This change make STEEM as a base currency and investor-friendly token; they can earn identical ROI without doing 10 self-votes per day. For comparison, in the current system investors who don't self vote have much less ROI than those do 10 times per day. It will also reduce meaningless votes from investors' purposes.
Some SMTs can be built on the investors return. Good-will (or smart) investors, or Steemit inc. may launch SMTs which value and inflation speed are pegged to STEEM. I am sure there will be much more creative ideas for Steem's growth.
I wish the dev team solely focus on SMT and redeveloment the whole thing with the new paradigm, rather than band-aiding the current things.
The short answer to this is I don't think we'll survive long enough for any SMT to come into being on their own given where steem is right now.
I don't believe we can compete if we completely convert to a bandwidth token as our system doesn't support turing complete smart contracts, nor is it as robust and fast as many of the DPOS competition.
If we pivot to a general purpose bandwidth token and rely on the abilities to make Steem alts to carry us through this while our base token is cmc rank 60 and dropping, we'll be competing directly with better tech and bigger wallets and we'll lose. We'll be behind in everything and have nothing to compensate for that.
Our competitive edge is that our core token focused around a social media platform, and I believe we'll see immense growth with a fixed economy if we do so quickly. We have maybe 10k-50k active users, and more would return if we fix the economy based around steem. Our alexa rank is fallen but it was as high as 800 at one point. Focus on our initial mission, that's our strength. I'm confident we can fix the economy and turn this shit show around and light a fire to bring real users and engagement back on here. That's where the real value is, we do this correctly and it'll magnify the value of SMTs and Communities and marketing efforts. Fail at this and everything else is futile.
On my scenario, STEEM isn't only bandwidth token but also reserve token for many SMTs. Also there can exist other methods in favor of investors, such as LPoS scheme.
I agree fixing economy is desperate. But we already have a wide spectrum of economies from curation guilds to voting bots. Changes of parameters can fix some of them but not for some others. And these groups will continue their own economies with a new broken economy. I think we need to find more prudent and wise approach, and thanks for initiating this topic :)
Whatever economic remedies we have at the moment are completely impotent against a system that actively rewards content indifferent voting behavior the most. It further just shows how useless it is to try to organize around dysfunctional economic incentives rather than fixing the incentives directly.
I think @clayboyn had another strong point wrt SMTs over our broken base platform: choosing to build a second layer which will attempt to do what the first layer failed to do and hoping it'll somehow take off and succeed to the point where the first layer can replicate its success is a fool's errand.
For the record, I agree that if things continue as they are, then any use of the inflation other than to pay witnesses is a waste. But I much prefer trying to fix the economics to align with the original vision than pivoting. At least let's make one serious attempt at this, we deserve one serious attempt.
So far our attempts have been:
100% hyperinfaltion - total currency increases 1,000,000 times in 30 years
n^2 - someone with 1000x your stake has a vote that's worth 1,000,000 times your weight
current - voting rewards are now seen as staking returns in a way that forces everyone to litter all over the platform just to claim back redundant inflation while we bleed value overall.
Maybe the current problem was a little bit more subtle but these were all bad. Ironically, most of those who came up with the first 2 problems actually foresaw the current one.
Let's give it one serious attempt before giving up and pivoting. Please. I really think we can stick the landing if we're smart. Or at least not super stupid. This really is the best play, we can't compete otherwise. We have still a pretty big community and as long as we can get the basic economy to function relatively well, I think our popularity will explode.
Made this facet contract sugestion a while back as partial solution for the TTP problem. Might be part of a bigger picture as well if STINC were to give it serious consideration instead of looking to take yet an other potentially disruptive gamble by cutting author revenues by one third or adding a likely futile flag pool without addressing the false reputation problem first.
I would support this approach as well. But as you say there are diverse opinions on things and I'm not sure there is clear consensus to separate the curation and rewarding function from the base token.
this is what i think as well, remove it entirely from steem, less inflation and no need for bidbots. the steemit_smt can then do whatever it wants...