Interesting post! This idea feels a bit out of my league, but I'll wager a guess. It seems to me that removing the rewards pool takes the carrot away from the witnesses leaving little to no incentive to keep the chain afloat. Even if the witnesses kept receiving the rewards; Who will want to buy their HIVE and why? I think the HIVE would likely drop in value, and that again leaves no incentive to keep it puttering along like the overly-zealous one-legged man in an ass-kicking competition that HIVE is. In all seriousness, though, perhaps HIVE stems from a social psychology experiment in behavioralism that analyzes the effects of dopamine hits in contrast with cortisol hits.
GPT-3 + chain data + Skinnerism + optimization = the hellscape of your choosing. Take your pick: 1984 or Brave New World? Perhaps a bit of both? Whatever the deal is, you can bet your keister that some form of general AI has already gobbled up and collated all the data from the various chains. And this means when they roll it out on the world stage, we will both love and hate it just enough so that we cannot escape our marionette strings. You can bet your bottom dollar that many will come to love their servitude. Those who do not will either get feared into it or exterminated because ideas like freedom are infectious AF and have plagued the ruling class since the beginning of time.
Great post! I look forward to reading all the comments!
"A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced because they love their servitude." ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World.
The future of HIVE if we keep opinion flagging. Yeah, laugh it up chuckleheads in your private rooms and "special" servers. Bill Gates downvotes his own first. Just look around you. HE. ALREADY. IS.
Witnesses are not paid from the reward pool, they're paid from inflation that's allocated specifically to signing blocks. Removing rewards from the first layer and rewarding people with second layer tokens does change incentives though, and would make staking and attracting new users different.
Great Work