RE: Steem Basic Income - Member Upvotes Drive Sustainability

I've read the explanation posts (may even have understood them) and have a couple of questions.

Are you making a decent profit from this, that scales with the size of the program? I'm asking this not because I think you shouldn't be, but because I'm hoping you do. Because this is a very long-term project, I'm concerned that you might not have sufficient motivation to continue it as it scales up.
Upvoting rewards seem to be scaled by percentage upvote rather than by upvote value, which seems strange to me. Could you elaborate on the reasoning for that? It seems like I would get the same bonus per upvote now when it's worth $.01 as I would once my delegation expires and it's worth $.70 again. I'm not necessarily against that but I'd like to know more about why you chose to do it that way.

Thanks.

Thanks for stopping by. It sounds like you do understand the program.

The program manager receives bonus shares equivalent to 5% of the total shares (so for every 1000 shares in the program, 50 bonus shares are assigned) receives some income from the upvotes allocated to those bonus shares. It's not much right now, but it will scale. At a specified threshold, the number of management bonus shares will cap until it drops to 1%, and then it will scale again for as long as the program keeps growing.
That was a contingency that was based on the limitations of manually managing the upvote weights for the vote delivery system we use. We are working on a complete overhaul of the back-end systems to fully automate everything. As part of that new system, we will announce a new reward structure for the upvotes we receive, to make their actual value an important factor. Right now most of the upvotes we receive are from small members and don't add up to much; the new system will make it much more interesting for bigger fish to show their support.