The distribution issue is a perpetual one and impossible to solve
The price per steem is not going to stay at these levels for long, many of you think that after the changes the price will go down, I actually think that it won't as steem will be scarce after the changes so only people who don't believe in steem will sell ( which is a tiny minority). If it does go lower it's only going to be temporary anyway.
My point is that the price is going to gradually go up in the future which is necessary to pay for the rewards/growing user base.
But this means that early adopters will have a lot more power than the late comers. Basically everyone who buys under $1 per steem or even $10 is going to be an early adopter. The bulk of the new mainstream users ( 99% of total users) is going to come when the price is already very high, look at bitcoin it is at 700$ and isn't even mainstream yet.
This means that most people will never be able to be as big as us early adopters unless they are millionaires.
This is also why the idea that advertisers will buy a lot of steem power to be able to curate up their posts is flawed imo. Because you would need a huge amount of money to be guaranteed visibility.
Look at the biggest whales, when they upvotes they only give a few dollars/posts, no advertisers is going to lock their money and buy millions of steem power just to upvote a post to a couple dollars.
The way i see advertisement is exactly how the promoted feature works, advertisers are going to burn some steem to get visibility and by burning steem its going to benefit everyone in the community but they are not going to buy steem power, it's just not going to happen.
No influence? Why buy steem power then?
I'm sure you ask, what will be the incentives for them to buy steem and power up then if late adopters ( 99% of the users) will never be able to gain huge influence within the system? Well, the incentives are and will continue to be the same as they are today which is financials.
- The first incentive is that the more SP you have the more the blockchain will redistribute new steem to you. 15% of the daily new steem redistributed to SP holders doesn't sound much but when the price is going up too and the currency is scarce every bit counts.
Imagine if you could power up your bitcoins and receive a small amount of the new issued coins every day would you do it? I would of course since i am holding anyway.
Also I want to add that the 3 months withdraw period means there will be a lot more liquid steem and a lot less steem powered which means that if you are powered up you are going to receive a larger percentage than what you receive now, which is also one of the reason I think the price is only going to go up from there ( even with the changes)
- The second incentive is that SP holders even if they have little influence can make money with curation. They will earn rewards proportionally to the amount of SP they have, this in itself is an incentive to want more SP.
Basically what we see here is that as the platform grows and the steem price increase the financial incentives will work but the ideological one ( gaining influence) will not.
Why curation guilds are essential for the future of steem ?
As I have described above late comers will have a very hard time to gain the same influence as early adopters, this issue is going to increase exponentially as the price of steem grows.
This means that the upvoting power is going to stay within a handful of hands who mainly upvote the same things using robots , this is very bad for the platform as many good content will never be seen and there will be a lack of diversity.
Steemit can only be succesfull if a very large amount of people participate in curation and that these people actually have a lot of upvoting power.
I know this is going to sound controversial but if I was a devs for steemit I would give everyone on this platform equal upvoting power ( with some safety measure in place to prevent abuse) because this is how you are sure the best content have the best rewards.
You may think that people will stop buying steem power because of this , they are NOT because the 2 financial incentives above will still work, people would still be rewarded in proportion of the steem power that they have from curation and new issued steem.
Above to me is the ideal solution to solve the problem imo, however this issue can also be solved by curation guilds.
I was looking at steemwhales.com and noticed that there is a lot of accounts with a lot of steem power in them that have been inactive for a while, these people could "lend" their power to the community and earn a percentage of the curation rewards.
And many users could use this power to curate and earn more rewards, in a way people are hired to curate contents. This will allow everyone to have higher upvoting power, there will be more content diversity and more human curators than bots. Curation guilds means that the 99% that have 1% of the voting power will finally be able to own a much larger percentage.
However I don't know how they are going to creates these guild in an easy way so that the average joe doesn't have to do some confusing things to enter a guild, it should be integrated seamlessly within the interface.
As I said I think giving everyone an equal amount of voting power is the best and easiest solution to solve this problem, i understand it is very controversial especially for the whales who enjoy their power but it shouldn't be because whales already earn more than minnows from curation rewards and new issued steem, this in itself is enough to want to be and keep being a whale. Alternatively we could also have a system with different levels
- 1000 SP and under own 30%of the total voting power
- 5000 SP and above own 25% of the total voting power
- 25 000 SP and above own 20% of the total voting power
- 50 000 SP and above own 15% of the total voting power
- 75 000 SP ...own 10%
It would make sense to allocate the voting power to the category with highest number of users as that's where the more curators are and will be in the future.
Anyway this post is just food for thought, no proposal or anything concrete. Let me know what you think in the comments below