RE: HF20 Update: Restoring Continuity
This. Lots of this.
ensures fair pricing of resources based on proportionate stake.
I don't think this is a necessary priority. In fact, I don't think it should be the implementation of RC at all. Rather than linear scaling, why not diminishing RC returns or a baseline level of interaction? For an example of how the former would work, perhaps, someone with 5 SP should be able to make 50 comments a day. Someone with one hundred 75, two hundred SP = 100 comments, 400SP=125 and so on. There's still an incentive to increase STEEM holdings because of voting power and/or some interaction bonus, but you give smaller stakeholders the capacity to actually interact only at the expense of large holders being able to do more than anyone needs to do.
Alternatively, give everyone a baseline RC budget of enough for 50 comments a day and scale linearly from there. That's probably simpler. And I know that the folks running the platform think the market can solve all problems, but it's so clear that it can't. We see free market capitalism failing to create livable circumstances for so many people around the world and cycles of poverty becoming inescapable by means of market forces. Why should we believe that an internal RC market will provide the means by which a feasible system will be born? It's great that it provides data, and that can help developers direct software implementations, but it doesn't work for everyday users, I don't think.
If you read my examples and think, "that won't work, he doesn't understand," Fine, but please don't dismiss the sentiment, which is that "fair market" doesn't work for the majority of users, especially not new users.
I agree with your way of seeing how RCs would work better. It's not the issue of counting them as they are spent, which is what's really needed for HF21. That can stay. It's the issue of how they're meted out in the first place.
Here's the thing I've come to: It isn't that they don't understand that these various methods are feasible for making this platform more hospitable to low SP people or new users unready to buy STEEM right off the bat. It's that they don't care about that.
This HF was a success to them because... well... it was a success for everything they care about.
Many years ago a Buddhist teacher responded to my criticisms of things I'd newly discovered about the community of teachers by saying, "The path of awakening is the path of disillusionment. You have to let go of all your illusions, especially your illusions about [buddhism]." Well I've been applying that to everything ever since.
In this case, the time has come for us to let go of our illusions about what this platform means to the company that created it, and realize that it's not what it means to us. The question then becomes, well how do you personally relate to that? That's a question each of us has to answer for ourselves.
Yes most definitely the free market does not work, except in limited circumstances, for instance when it's new and immature, not yet saturated. As it ages the benefits for middle and lower income brackets diminish, as money migrates to the top, and monopolies become the norm. It's a positive feedback loop impossible to break without outside interference. Same for any closed system, just human nature.