I want to thank you for the lively discussion. I want to just round up my position regarding SPS.
I strongly believe such a system is necessary for more decentralised development of the platform. The extent of the valued added is uncertain, we will get a better idea once proposals are made.
Funding appears to be the biggest challenge. Adding inflation is a likely deterrent for investors considering Steem has relatively high inflation as it is. Donations will be unreliable. I expect we can see them drop off once users donating realise many are not contributing.
That leaves us with existing inflation. Cutting witness rewards at the moment when prices are this low will strongly discourage anyone becoming a witness. Many good existing witnesses may drop out. This puts the whole blockchain at risk. Curation rewards are very low compared to passive income such as vote selling and delegating bots. Barely 15% of inflation goes to curation. I would like that closer to 40%. Curation rewards are an essential incentive for investor engagement. Curation is also essential for authors.
Interest is also important for encouraging holding Steem Power. It is less important than curation rewards but some form of passive income is still necessary. It would be risky to reduce it.
That leaves us with just authors. I have argued many times that author rewards should be reduced in favour of curation rewards. Reducing author rewards in favour of SPS partly achieves this. Based on the figures above author and curation rewards are about 22/78 split. After accounting for SPS, it will be about 30/70, which is still strongly in favour of authors. I believe 50/50 split would be fairer but quite possibly still not sufficient to encourage active curating (I proposed an algorithm which could make this possible). Otherwise, a split as drastic as 25/75 would most likely be necessary.
As it stands, funding through donations is winning the poll. Looks like some of larger stakeholders are volunteering donations. If this is implemented, we will see how long it lasts.
I also appreciate the discussion we have undertaken. It seems that we are unable to reconcile, and I accept that: I expected it.
Last word from me are that the poll is basically on whether to tax author rewards, as initially donations are a certainty, and no one expects voluntary donations to provide a long term solution to SPS funding IMHO. So, the failure of taxing rewards is essentially a plebiscite to reject that offshoring of development expenses from the present source, which is large stakeholders (Stinc, to date).
Given that this is a stakeweighted poll, I consider that a significant statement by actual investors, who care enough to spend the tiny VP required to decide the issue, unlike profiteers, who are so short sighted that they are unwilling to invest that practically infinitesimal expense to prevail in the poll.
That is a very telling statement indeed!
Thanks!