WHAT DO YOU THINK? WOULD YOU HAVE SET UP THE STEEMIT MODEL DIFFERENTLY? CAN YOU SEE A USE FOR THIS MODEL BEYOND STEEMIT? LET ME KNOW BELOW!
Say you create 2 currencies for something like our use-case:
Currency A) 1 million people getting 10 coins each = 10mn coins
Currency B) 100 people getting 9.5mn coins and another 100 getting the rest 500k coins = 10mn coins
Starting from different ends, what will happen in case (A) is that wealth will start to consolidate in a few hands over time while in case (B) wealth will start to be distributed to more hands.
So (B) is initially worse, but because coins are spreading, it actually works as a model for distributing wealth, while (A) because it is constantly getting consolidated, isn't working to spread the wealth.
Nice way to put it, and you're dead right, the first way leads to a micropayment situation, whereby nobody is prepared to give away more than they're earning, and the system stagnates before it has even begun. The second path leads to the top 1% having to share the wealth around in order to keep the system alive, they care, whereas the masses won't, not without anything to hold their interest.
Cg
Yep... in a sense if you start with a perfect distribution it will only get worse (so users will have an ever-worsening experience). If you start with a bad distribution like steem had at the start, it was so bad that it could only get better (and thus it started trickling down to the users who came onboard). The system wouldn't work without this trickling down because there would be no incentives.
Kind of like matter in the early universe, there had to be inequality so that hydrogen could start clumping together, a perfect spread would have meant that nothing ever happened, as everything would have had an equal and opposite attraction to everything else.
Cg