At this point, I think that the voting mechanism is an inefficient way for stakeholders to get their rewards, hence why I believe that the global rewards pool in this form isn't providing much value to HIVE.
I have to challenge the logic of your argument. When you say inefficient what do you mean? From where I see it it's very efficient, it allocates the rewards based on the rules ingrained in the code...those who receive votes by more stake get more rewards.
If by efficient you mean allocating rewards to the "most deserving" (aka more popular, higher quality, etc) the answer is no because it is not designed that way.
On the other hand if by efficient you mean the easiest way for "investors" to get their cut of the inflation then the answer is no. The most efficient way would be to just pay interest to staked coins.
The whole purpose of the reward pool is to distribute coins. In that sense it is no less efficient than a POW or a pure POS chain. The only true reason to remove it is to give coin holders a bigger piece of the pie.
A better question would be Does removing the reward pool make the coin more attractive or does it just turn it into a worst version of what is already out on the market? (I am thinking ETH 2.0 or even EOS).
Did the reward pool stop steem from going to 8.00 on the 2017 bull run?
To be fair I agree that the future is in 2nd layer apps that need RC and that therfore create organic demand for HIVE. However I do not see how having a reward pool stops that from happening.
I even disagree with this and think that it’s a fundamental flaw in @therealwolf’s basic premise. Right now investors are able to outperform Hive’s inflation rate due to inactive, unstaked, and inefficiently used tokens; with minimal effort such as staking & delegating to a reputable application or curation service on Hive.
As soon as you flip the switch to pure stake and earn, everyone is going to lose out equally to the inflation going to witnesses, DHF, etc. There is no way left to outperform inflation. Everyone hits optimal game theory together, thereby everyone loses.
It’s the equivalent of setting the wins of a lotto ticket or the spin of a slot machine to its long term ROI. It allows everyone to play the game perfectly... but that equates to scratch off lotto tickets that cost $1 always revealing a payout of 95 cents! Yay... where’s the fun or profit in that?
That is a very important point, if we were to switch my APR from curation would drop from 15% to around 10% (at the current ratio of vested hive).
And that's at the current ratio of vested Hive. This proposal also wants to make it easy for exchange accounts to vest. Combined with coexisting desires to shorten power downs and increase liquidity, there would be very little unstaked Hive. Everyone essentially becomes "dumb money." A new investor will earn tokens at the same rate as a 3 year old "dead" account that forgot its keys.