Unfortunately, both presented extremely difficult technical challenges. It is very hard to follow and unpick where all the stake is.
??? Just choose a reward mechanism, choose some way to initialize balances (0.001 SP at account creation?), and replay the blockchain. Done. Why is that hard?
Well you just made it sound extremely easy. If that is all it takes, I stand corrected. Perhaps the decision to change was more ideological than technical and I misunderstood.
Maybe I should chat with our low-rep friend about it, hehe.
I'm not sure that would help at this stage.....but who knows :)
Elfspice initially wanted to just remove the so called 'premined' accounts, which he thinks are immoral and illegal. he wanted to preserve other account stakes and rep. It became obvious, this was going to be very difficult to accomplish, so he proposed fixed stakes for those opting in. Then realised there was no easy way to prevent the faction he wanted to exclude from entering this way either. So concluded that just resetting balances was the way forward.
This in my mind reduced the likelihood of adoption, as it undermined the incentive for existing users to join the fork.
He also wanted to improve scalability, by moving the comments data out of the chain, into a more appropriate data store, and ultimately with a rewrite, but I think he realised this was a huge amount of work, so for expediency proposed curtailing transactions with a hard (stake-weighted) limit per user per day, but again this raised questions about how it would affect the user experience and distort economic incentives.
I could go on, but in short, I think choosing an appropriate reward mechanism is far from simple, and in my opinion, once the seed is planted, it's hard to change the type of plant that grows. Really I would like to see some kind of agent-based modelling be carried out in advance of changes. These aren't simple systems, and it reaffirms the genius of Dan Larimer, in going as far as he has in the right general direction.
Yeah, I read his writeup on the GitHub and it became clear pretty quickly that he was filling in old holes by digging new ones. I really hope he manages to get this off the ground for the sake of the natural experiment it would give us, but he's got a lot of work to do.