RE: HF-21: The Question of Untouchability of Witness Share from Reward Pool
I don't understand much of technicalities
Yet you have no problem implying that technical improvements have reduced the costs for witnesses.
The change in rewards structures reflects a gradual shift away from content rewards as the only use case for Steem. The importance of content creation may have decreased, but the importance of witnessing securing the blockchain most certainly has not.
Do you want your community to have less security in order to spend a similar budget on community improvements? The types of things the SPS supports are already coming out of content rewards, they just have to do funding drives and raise upvotes now.
This will make it more explicit... and could potentially increase content rewards granted to normal content creators, as projects attempting to self-fund via upvotes will be met with skepticism for asking for upvote funding instead of using SPS system...
Yesss! And I've also quoted the source in my post which helps me infer that.
This is what this SPS is doing ....decreasing the importance of author & curation rewards over witness rewards. There is no doubt that securing blockchain is important but that has always been important and there is no reason to believe that its importance has increased. How do you assume that decreasing the proportionate witness reward share in favour of SPS will make blockchain less secure? Do you know how many witness servers are functional at this moment? Is there been an increase in number of witnesses or decrease with time? I don't think there will be a dearth of witnesses because of this decrease in witness reward share.
Neither has this issue of lack of witness rewards been debated when considering SPS funding sources. May be, you can reason that even after SPS, 10% witness reward isn't sufficient to secure the blockchain. Everyone will assign / expect a different value. But when there won't be sufficient witnesses to run a witness server, this issue will become more important.
Rewarding content creators and curators has been a unique proposition of Steem blockchain that differentiates it with other blockchains. So its importance can never be undermined. All other use cases are just incidental to it and not the focus of this blockchian. Core vision of Steem should not be confused with. @bobinson too has pointed out that the direction of the platform is changing a bit. We all are seeing that. But we need to protect its core value to protect the USP of this blockchian while simultaneously supporting other use cases to some extent. Is there any denying that Steem is a social media experiment? Are we done with it?
I can understand that witness servers are receiving increased traffic because of several dapps. But as per white paper, more acceptance and usage of STEEM will result in increase in its value. Thus reduction in witness reward share doesn't imply reduction in witness reward per se.
Not only increased transactions will bring more value to STEEM but successful completion of several projects from SPS too will bring value to STEEM. And everyone is going to benefit from this value addition, including witnesses.