For purposes of the reverse auction, the "time" of voting matters. For purposes of the curation reward curve, the "order" of voting matters. What @biophil demonstrated, and I parroted here, is that when you combine those two factors the optimal time (on average) has to be some time before the reverse auction ends.

It's been a good clarifying conversation with @danmaruschak, and I'm glad that we had it, but most of that isn't really relevant to the argument about optimal voting time (and neither is the late voting time, which I also included). I only included the 2^nd section so that the rules would all be documented in the same place. (and I got it wrong at first, so maybe it would've been better to leave it out^😉.)