I'm happy to see communication and discussion from the founders on the economics of Steem.
Reducing the Steem Power holding period to a minimum of three months.
Since this is such a drastic change, can you elaborate on the rationale for 90 days specifically? Versus a month, or 6 months.
As for the rest,
Set a fixed instantaneous annual creation rate of 9.5% from all sources (except Steem Dollars conversion)
I support a reduction in the inflation. Why 9.5%? And how much will it change daily post rewards?
- 75% to rewards, 15% to interest in SP, 10% to witnesses
- Witness rewards would be rebalanced
- All votes for witnesses would expire after 3 months
- the mining algorithm would be updated to use Equihash
- no longer a need to perform a reverse split every 3 years
I think these are good changes.
- Witnesses and miners would be paid in STEEM
I'm not sure about this one. The payment in SP has so far made witnesses want to stick around. Witness and miner pay in liquid STEEM would create a constant selling pressure on the market.
90 days is about the minimum time period that prevents moving stake between accounts voting again on the same posts for significantly higher payouts. Other ways of preventing this carry a lot of overhead or other undesirable effects. This could be an issue again if the voting period for posts is ever extended beyond 30 days which many authors would like, but in that case other solutions will need to be found.
I agree about rewards in SP/STEEM. I don't think it is necessary with only a 3 month power down period. IMO that change could be dropped to make this simpler. Witnesses/miners would still have much faster access to pay to use for expenses.
Spot on comment - in particular, I would love to see the rational for going immediately from 2 years to 3 months for power down.
Moving to 1 year or 6 months instead of 3 months makes far more intuitive sense to me, particularly as some people may have invested in SP on the premise that the 2 year time frame was designed to ensure long-term support for the project. But I wouldn't be at all opposed to going all the way to 3 months if someone could walk me through the rationale behind it.
I think witnesses are already creating selling pressure because they are forced into a long term positioning / exit strategy right now. This can create panic if you are locked in for an extremely long time, or locked in at all. A liquid payout would surely put miners at ease and make them carefully consider how much they really want to hold and not sell for themselves. Also, miners are the life blood of any cryptocurrency, you have to make them happy before anybody else, period...or you are asking for trouble.
I would prefer have witnesses, which are doing great job not only because it is beneficial and something keeps them close to project, but because they just love steemit as a platform, and they are doing great job for recognition and for good of whole community.
This is a good idea, in theory. However, as any system scales up, various key roles become more professionalized (and expensive) and the economics have to make good sense as a business. You can't rely on altruism and hobbyists at a large scale, especially for something meant to be sustainable over time.
I don't think we should rule out witnesses serving because they are interested in the project, nor is there any real danger of that happening any time soon, but ultimately resources aren't free. The best case are witnesses who are personally committed, but not required to make unrealistic personal sacrifices to keep the system running.