RE: 💁 Answering Common Questions about Voting and Curation 💡

[sykochica]

To some degree you're right...there aren't going to be any 'full' curation rewards. But that's kind of the wrong way to look at it since it's impossible. The goal is purely to maximize that you can get by voting in that sweet spot. Often, you'd achieve this by being hit somewhat by the 30 minute penalty, but that still ends up being a better reward for you than voting later. The first voters are allocated a larger portion of the curation reward, but is also scaled by your Steem Power.

But you'll find in the [Top Curator List] that the leaders aren't always the biggest SP accounts. So there is an aspect of 'knowing good/popular content when you see it.'

Comments

[vitkolesnik]

Thanks Sykochica, now it's clearer to me. Do I get right that the precise mathematics of this voting system is to be found in the source code only?

[sykochica]

While there's no doubt in the source code (which I'm really not the one to pick through it grab the lines,) this is the original algorithm from last year. This was pulled from one of Steemit's founders blog post here.

let steem_power               = the total Steem Power of the vote
let current_total_steem_power = the combined Steem power of all past votes
let new_total_steem_power     = current_total_steem_power + steem_power;
let vote_payout_weight        = steem_power * (steem_power/new_total_steem_power)^2
let total_vote_payout_weight  = sum vote_payout_weight for all votes on the post

let vote_payout = total_vote_reward * vote_payout_weight / total_vote_payout_weight

Now, while I can't give a list of changes that have taken place in there one of bigger things to know is that the total portion for (all) curators on a post is 25% (versus the 50% shown above) minus any amount that was forfeited back to the author from the 30 minute penalty.

The other big up coming change is for the vote_payout_weight where the square will be becoming linear instead.

If anyone did want to dig into the code, it is available on Steem's Github.

Is that sort of what you were looking for?

[vitkolesnik]

Thanks a lot for the detailed answer and for the link, Sykochica! This is very useful.

One striking thing I noticed in cryptonomics in general is the prominent role of mathematics in it. Not what a mere mortal is used to :) Am going back to school)

[sykochica]

Happy to help out.

Yea, there's always going to be the 'Mathy' parts when delving deep enough in these things..it's rather inevitable. I tend to just give the general ideas to people, focusing on the concepts going on versus the specific numbers. Most the time it accomplishes what they're looking for.