Great stuff arhag! I have a thought on the buying of rshares for curation: you suggest one might do this for curation rewards, but I don't know if this will work. If it were possible to get larger curation rewards than one had paid for the shares, then a whale could potentially buy the cheap shares first, then upvote for an even larger curation reward? Correct me if I am wrong on that.
On the other hand, the concept is still cool even if it is much more expensive to buy the rshares than the reward would give. In this case, you might see people paying (expensively) to boost their own content, as they maybe believe their content will get extra attention afterwards. This then becomes an "official" channel to buy votes, kind of like advertising.
The whole idea is that whales would be selling their excess rshares because they don't have the time to find good undervalued content to upvote it. If the whale finds the time (and it's worth their time) to already do that to extent that they are running low on voting power, then yes it would likely be smarter to just keep all their rshares to themselves and use it vote. But a whale is a single individual with a limited amount of time and probably a lot more rshares generated each day relative to minnows or even dolphins (because of the huge SP balance) than they have time to spend wisely. So what will likely tend to happen is arrangements like what @smooth already has with the curators he has hired. He pays them money and they spend the time finding good content to upvote under his account (so he gets the curation rewards).
This rshares market effectively allows anyone to do that on the blockchain without having to form contracts with individual people (and with the added bonus that the votes are under the name of the person actually doing the voting), except instead of the curators getting paid money (e.g. SD) for putting in the work that earns the whale SP curation rewards (in which if the whale is doing it right, the curation reward value they receive in SP would be greater than the value spent paying the curators), it is the other way around: the curator puts in the work to find good undervalued content to upvote and pays the rshares seller SD so that they can get the opportunity to earn a lot more SP curation rewards than would normally be possible with the amount of SP they personally own (and if the curator is doing it right, the value of the SP curation reward earned would be more than the value of the SD spent for the rshares boost that made it possible and the opportunity cost of their time spent curating). Of course it is a risk for the curator, because their gamble might not pay off and the post for which they spent a lot of SD to get a powerful upvote on may end up being a dud in terms of final payout. But the market price of rshares should adjust to account for the risk curators take by spending their money on rshares for a boosted vote that may or may not provide more value in curation rewards at the end as well to account for the opportunity cost to rshares seller (or perhaps lack thereof for a whale with limited time to spend curating) of selling their rshares that may perhaps have been used for voting directly.
Very cool, I think this is a great idea as it allows a secondary market for attaining vote power. Hope this goes forward!
Yes, I thing something like that is just a nessesery.
I understand it's for 19 witnesses to decide about? Do you know who of them disagree and for what reasons ?