A good rule of thumb when takling a problem is to attack the 20% that causes 80% of the effects. The biggest source of inflation is not curation, it's not author rewards nor is it any of the other buckets where new tokens are allocated to...it is HBD conversions.
Framing the proposal as a way to reduce inflation like the title suggests is totally misguided. The real annualized inflation rate from 3/25 to 9/15 is 13.96% which is about 75% higher than the 8% that we should have and it is all due to the HBD conversions.
If we want to reduce inflation we need to change the pegging mechanism and aligned it with the industry standard...mainly create HBD by collateralizing Hive instead of having a dinamic system where all of the stakeholders pay the price of maintaning the peg.
It's easy to read too much into the title. The primary issue I was examining was auto-voting, especially potential negative effects of it. Note that in the actual post, I mention the decreased inflation as a side-benefit.
People are often confused on the HBD issue. HBD can both lower and increase overall inflation. It all depends on the timing of when the HBD is converted to Hive versus when it was created.
Fair enough.
Regarding the effects of HBD on the inflation rate: although in theory it can go either way the 4+ year history of steem/hive shows that it leans heavily on the negative side. The average annual inflation has been between 14% and 16% (not counting the period before the December 2016 hardfork which reduced it from 100% to 10%).
In my view any conversation about reducing the inflation (even if it is only a side note to the main topic) that does not address the major contributor to the deviation from what is programmatically supposed to happen kind of misses the point.
I am not trying to be hostile but you have to admit that the title is somewhat clickbaitty.
Yes, I'm sure that's true. Unfortunately, it's a natural consequence of the coin going down more often than going up.
Thinking about it, the tendency of HBD conversion to create inflation rather that reduce it is probably exacerbated by the other components of inflation in the system, which tend to drive the individual token price down. Even though holders themselves are compensated for that inflation via rewards paid out by it, this inflation still affects conversion rate of HBD.
It wasn't meant to be. I was just looking for a short title that accurately described the mechanism proposed. To indicate that removed curation reward would be burnt, rather than redistributed.