Users can continue to simply upvote-at-will because a vote only consumes a percentage of the remaining voting power, not the total.
That means there are still no limits on how much you can vote.
Thanks for including these points. Voting power is widely misunderstood, and it's important for users to know that they can still vote as much as they want.
This will reduce the degree of inequality within the ecosystem while preserving the incentive to accumulate STEEM and disincentivizing sybil-attacks.
Can someone explain how a linear reward curve disincentivizes sybil attacks? I thought the purpose of the ^2 reward curve was to disincentize sybil, and that sybil attacks were precicely the perceived problem with a linear or near-linear curve.
Don't get me wrong, I strongly favor this change, but I'm not sure I understand how it would disincentivize sybil attacks.
Good question @shenanigator. There were multiple reasons for the n^2 curve only one of which was discouraging sybil attacks. The statement to which you are referring is only meant to highlight the point that despite these changes it will remain advantageous to accumulate Steem and disadvantageous to launch sybil attacks.
Currently, it's too easy for whales to dominate and abuse the system. The central fallacy of the original whitepaper / n^2 was that whales would act in the best interests of the community, but evidently people will only ever act in their own self interest. As they have the right to, of course. By distributing influence more evenly, the impact of whale abuse is significantly diminished.
For the most part, I would say that it "does not incentivize" sybil attacks. I think "disincentivizes" overstates it.
Although, one way that it actually may slightly disincentivize sybil attacks is that other users can vote between two sybil accounts, say sybil-1 and sybil-2, which would reduce the curation rewards of (sybil-1 + sybil-2) as compared to a single account voting the full weight all at once.
Yup, I don't understand how it makes it fairer; I'm just taking their word for it; however it would be nice having it explained.
Cg