I don't think donations alone will be enough to sustain the Steem Proposal System for the long term. Inflation pulls from the funds of the entire blockchain (everyone holding Steem is essentially paying in proportion to their Steem holdings), whereas donations rely on individuals.
My concern is that basing the system on donations only will lead to a situation where a few people don't feel they should shoulder the costs of proposals that benefit all Steem holders.
It would be possible to design the SPS to initially only take from donations, then later add code to take from inflation if donations are insufficient. But this would require a second hardfork, so it will increase the cost and put more burden on exchanges to update their wallets twice, rather than once.
You gotta consider there is at least 2 realities i steem.
Investors (be it early, ninja, small, huge)
Content creators
Content creators struggle as it is and they are key for having a healthy steem enviroment, without contect creators this place is doomed. (Unless we are not a content drive blockchain anymore and no one told us)
Most of the decisions lately have been made in the interest of the investors, I am a small one so I should not complain one can tell me... Well the way I see it, if we dont start paying attention to those willing to join and stay as content creators what are we going to do? Buy and sell upvotes between us?
Or just play Steem monsters?
Steem seems to be straying outside of its initial path... Is that evolution..?
Agreed,
Donations are no good foundation to implement structural changes for the totality of the steem blockchain.
We are all in it together, the only fair and sane way to achieve this is 1% of inflation.
There is no free lunch, not for the many and not for the few.
Donations might not sustain us for the long term...but it's a start. We don't even know how much we need really right now. We should really get things started and get a better idea of how much we need. This thread is full of great ideas on how to get money for rewards. It might even be possible to roll any proposed changes into other hard forks, or together with updates.
But...it might not even be necessary to do a hard fork to get started. There's a lot of stuff that we need to do anyway.
It wouldn't...unless the system plans on facing what Eth Classic had to deal with: lack of funding.