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RE: Sample of "nothing at stake" peoples, empowered on 6th day by voting bots!
I don't understand why the value of our content has to expire after seven days in the first place. You can post evergreen content on your website and enjoy the value of it for years. I guess there's a reason for this, but I haven't wrapped my head around it.
It's entirely a technical limitation. A good way of thinking of it is the difference between your computers memory and hard drive. Basically, as the reward pool/consensus mechanism is making its calculations for reward distribution, all eligible posts (under 7 days) are essentially held in memory. After that they can go into more of a "blockchain storage" type setup like your hard drive. In order to payout posts in perpetuity, everything would have to remain in active memory which makes it basically impossible to run a Steem node server due to the extreme and perhaps impossible technical specs that system would need.
I do think we'll eventually see systems or workarounds that allow good quality content to be evergreen or rediscovered and achieve new payouts. But like most social media, the vast majority of content (selfies and pics of people dinner) doesn't need to be hogging RAM on a server in the hopes it might get an upvote a few years after it's posted.