What is the Target Votes 5 per Day change, anyway?
In the middle of the 0.14RC patch notes, one change caught my eye:
Target Votes of 5 per Day instead of 40
Since I've been studying and documenting this logic recently, I decided to go back to the source and check what was changed.
Looking back in my previous post, I wrote that:
Each vote decreases this value (exactly by how much in a bit), and it would regenerate from zero to full over the course of five days. In practice, you recover 20% voting power in one day or 0.833% in an hour.
And:
Now we have all the information to calculate the Reward Shares for our vote, like this:
Used Power = ((((Voting Power * Voting Percent) / 10000)) / 200) + 1
First, it determines how much of your VP you are spending on this vote. I'm not sure how the scaling factor 200 was chosen, but ultimately it's a linear correlation between them.
The change was to the factor of how much voting power is spent on each vote, while the voting regeneration speed is untouched.
The (Voting Power * Voting Percent) / 10000) factor is unchanged, so I'll call it Effective Voting Power. The amount of voting power used in a vote went from:
Used Power = (Effective Voting Power / 200) + 1
to
Used Power = (Effective Voting Power + 20 - 1) / 20
where the scaling factor was calculated to represent 1/4 of how much Voting Power would be regenerated in a day, which is 20.
Comparing the Power Spent per vote, before (red) and after (blue):
An interesting visualization is how your voting power gets spend after a certain amount of votes. Again, before (red) and after (blue):
Some observations: before this change, your voting power would drop to 79.81% when casting 44 votes, now it would drop to 81.41% after 4 votes, as expected. In the new model, it would drop below 1% after 86 votes, when it took 703 votes beforehand.
In both cases, it still regenerates 20% after a day and fully after five.
I'm wondering, though, can't bots just cast votes at a reduced weight to spend less voting power to mimic old behavior? Here's a comparison when casting votes at 12% at the new model:
In fact, at 10%, both lines overlap almost exactly. Maybe I'm missing something, but in effect that change seems to imply that new votes are the equivalent of voting ten times in a post in the previous model (and you can override it selecting the vote weight, if you can).
I think it's a bit too early to understand the impact of this change and whether it's positive or negative, or even if it's effective. Still, I think these kind of changes should be openly discussed more openly in the community before being implemented.