@wang is apparently the most successful bot relative to SP and is making 2K/week while powering down 4K/week.
That's probably the best example, which proves it is can be true. Just because @wang is the only one who can accomplish this right now (that we know of), doesn't mean everyone won't be able to in the future. How does that make the statement false?
The entire reason I mentioned bots is that if we went to a 50:50 split, it would make it even more possible to power down and completely regenerate that value simply by running a bot. @wang as an example would jump immediately from making 2k/week to 4k/week, which is what he powers down.
I feel like you and I both play the "devils advocate" roll a lot ;)
That wasn't the original claim:
The original claim was off by power of two in the case of @wang. Also, a lot of this is natural, even structural, early-adopter dynamics. Ignoring competitive factors (see @owdy's reply), the reward pool is fixed in STEEM/day but SP inflates by about 5% per week. The two are inevitably diverging.
This is not devil's advocate, it is simply false (as far as I know) that people are currently making as much from curation as they are powering down. @wang, so far the tightest ratio so far identified is lagging by a factor of two, and others are lagging even more.
Finally even if it were true, would it matter? Imagine that power down were extended from 104 to 208 weeks (both arbitrary numbers). In that case curation would indeed currently match power down for @wang, but so what? How about 1040 weeks? 52 weeks? All these comparisons are arbitrary and meaningless.
Let me make one last point. Any linear change in curation does not change the balance between larger, smaller, dumber, smarter, human, or bot curators, it simply affects everyone's rewards proportionately. When we cut @wang's rewards in half we also cut in half the rewards for every modest-SP user on the site (which is most of them), and likewise for doubling them. This particular change is entirely neutral to whether these rewards are too top heavy or bot-friendly.
I would also guess that content rewards are probably as top-heavy as curation rewards, if not more so. Clearly people like @dollarvigilante, @charlieshrem, etc. are earning faster from content rewards than they are powering down. Why is it considered acceptable for them but not for curators? Again I would say the comparison between the two rates is arbitrary and meaningless.
THIS^^^^
@jesta
The ratios do not change significantly over a short time period (only about 5% divergence per week) and not at all if you measure both rewards and power down using the same units.
Come on, that's completely silly! He voluntarily reduced his powering down rate to match his reward rate. Every single user who ever earns a reward at whatever rate whatsoever can do that!
It is also seriously cherry-picked BTW. Depending on which particular time period you choose on that chart you can get the result to increase, decrease, or stay the same!
I think the most important point you are missing is that rewards denominated in VESTS decrease single every day. Everyone here now, including @wang, is an "early miner" in a sense and we are all benefiting from the rewards being much larger than they will be in the future. That short-term fact shouldn't be used as a basis for system design.
@jesta
Likewise!
You're talking about SP, I'm talking about VESTS. That 2.5k SP he powered down this week is the equivalent to 7.8125 million VEST. That's exactly what my original claim was about. I still don't see where the statement was false, maybe I'm just dense. Where's this power of two you speak of?
It's true if you look at it from a monthly perspective. Here's wang's ~30 days history, the red line is VESTS:
3 power downs, 1 week of no power downs, and only curation. It's pretty much even. If you want to run the numbers yourself, here's an API endpoint with every day's snapshot:
https://steemdb.com/api/account/wang/snapshots
My entire point was that if we went from 75/25, to 50/50, that the red line in the chart above would be increasing faster. I am not against early adopters making some profit, we're all early adopters here. I'm also not against bots, but I do think they should be kept in check.
In my opinion - yes, it would. As I learn more about the subject, it may not matter to me anymore, but currently my perception (and others) feel this is a problem.
Thanks for the good discussions on the topic :)
@smooth - Points taken, and thank you again for engaging in this topic so far with me. Regardless of the point by point back and forth we're having, I also think that fundamentally you and I are seeing this from different perspectives.
But you're right. I drove this comment thread by starting to talk about bots and curation, which is a totally separate topic from the actual rewards structure itself. They play off one another, but ultimately shouldn't dictate the direction of one another.
Just a note on this - It's just the timeframe I have currently since I've started recording. I don't have more complete data, and I doubt anyone else does either. I'm not cherry picking on purpose, I'm just using what I have as an example.
Can the bots be a positive for the indirect distribution of SP. What if the Whales use bots to follow volunteers that find new users with good content. The Whales can't do it all by themselves. They set their power to vote the same as the volunteer at a certain percentage. (Slide Scale) Maybe they can even divide the SP to their own secondary account to follow more volunteers. They are keeping their own SP but just voting with the volunteer.
These volunteers would have some stipulations for votes. Don't vote for themselves, don't vote for users over a certain amount of up votes or dollars already awarded in a post, look for new users with quality content.
Say a Whale had two volunteers doing the searching and voting for 20 posts, meeting their criteria, with what ever percent on the sliding scale they want. That's 40 votes a day and spreading their power by their bot just voting the same as their volunteers.
I'm just trying to think of ways to help. And I try and think, If I had this kind of power, I would want to spread it out as far as I can to benefit the community. From what I understand the bots could do this....
Anyway .... Just an idea. :)
Pk
There are all sorts of things going on in this system, bots being used in different ways, humans voting for all sorts of reasons, comments being made to attract votes to themselves or to the post, etc. I don't think we really have a full grasp of it all, and our understanding will likely decrease going forward. Large complex systems with complex interactions, feedback loops, and competition quickly become impossible to fully understand.
@smooth Exactly and that is just taking account of conscious human motivations. It is hard to know the unconscious motivations and behaviours that people will engage in.