You will need to get buy-in /agreement from the major stake holders in order for this to go anywhere
You mean the witnesses? I think the community needs to be more vocal about this, because it really would benefit everyone. Like I said we need to think about the bigger picture. Whales are the biggest stake holders and would benefit the most with a proposal like this because it will increase the value of their stake.
Having the limit in MV instead of dollars would be better for scalability
If the limit is in MV, the limit would have to be reajusted every time the price of steem increase. Why do you think it would be better for scalability?
What would stop people from just splitting their SP across lots of littler accounts?
Because all those small accounts will not receive any financial benefit from doing so. The inflation will only be allocated to account > $8000 and it will be higher than it currently is because it would include all current curation rewards . Also the more accounts decides to split the more inflation will be allocated to the one who don't. Basically you would increase your power by only using it to moderate. Another incentive for whales to not split their account is that by letting other users vote they will increase the demand for steem and so the value of their account.
Would the benefit of being a moderator outweigh the benefit of being a regular user?
Yes, I believe so. Money is really what matters to most people at the end of the day, and the fact that moderators will still have their power to moderate makes it a more attractive option.
Well, while this could be done without a HF - to do it right, a HF would probably be required. So witness buy-in is required.
They are not the only stake-holders though. You would also have to convince a majority of the whales, as well as the dev team to take it on.
Just because it is a good idea is not a guarantee that you will get everyone to buy into it. Getting the consensus of the community will be half the battle. (There is still a lot of convincing that needs to be done.)
I think having it as a percentage of stake makes more sense than a dollar amount. If STEEM is worth the same as BTC one day, would that mean everyone with more than 8 STEEM would be a moderator?
Having it as an adjustable witness parameter might not be a bad idea either.
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The rest makes sense.
I will say, I do really like the idea. If you would be able to get buy-in from the community (mainly the whales and devs) I would support it as long as there aren't any major objections to the idea that someone brings up (which I am not able to think of myself).
One last thing though - you have two completely separate proposals here mixed together. There is the moderator part, and then the hiding of payments. I'm actually against the hiding of payments part.
I'm not sure how I could convince people... If people can't see for themselves that the system is broken then I can't really help them. I guess we will have to wait until the current design shows its limitation. People need to see it to believe it kinda thinking.. maybe when the price hit $0.001 they will start wondering why..
This is why the number that seperates users and moderators should be in USD, if it was in SP you would have to change it as the price of steem increases. It would be very inconvenient unless you could do it without forking the code.
The hiding payments part is actually an integral part of the proposal.
If you don't hide payouts during the voting period users would see their posts go from say $1 to $8 back to $2 and back up to $6, users would just be totally confused and it would be playing with their emotions, no good.
I think people tend to think that moderators won't really vote much, they would just check for overpaid content. This is not true, moderators will vote a lot. If they want the rewards to go the right place the will have to.
bait and switch.
Oh buy this SP and power up. Youll b e able to vote to reward content you like.
SIKE! you can only downvote now. You just got steemed!
I've mentioned this elsewhere, but I would not be in support of this unless there was support / buy-in from the majority of the stakeholders. If the whales do feel that this is what it does, then I guess we are back to the drawing board.
I've talked to a few whales, and there doesn't seem to be major opposition that part (at least from the people I've talked to.) Plus, if it really bothers them that much - they can still split their SP into multiple accounts :)
The idea is that hopefully the ability to actually influence rewards by investing in SP will encourage a lot more users to get involved in the platform and invest in moderate amounts of SP in order to be more influential.
This is a laudable goal. But this seems like a very complicated and very exploitable way to try to achieve it.
If giving smaller accounts more influence in rewards is your goal, then IMO step one is to get rid of n^2. Thats certainly less exploitable in terms of self-upvoting than what youre proposing (and the only reason we have it is to prevent self-upvote abuse), and it would probably be way more effective at actually producing a measurable increase in the actual effect a regular user could have on reward distribution.