Testing the closing of gaps in distribution

Just for ease of calculation, I am going to round the numbers a lot.

311M Steem supply / 47K Steem held = 0.015%

14M PAL / 2600 PAL supply held = 0.018%

This means I own ~18% more of the PAL token supply than I do of the Steem supply. That is kind of interesting isn't it?

I am not sure how much of the 14M come from the airdrops claimed but with the max dropped being 2500 and claimants having to have been active in the last 2 months, I can't imagine that it adds up to 14M in the supply. This would mean that most of the supply has already been distributed out or, locked up into PAL accounts. This is a good thing of course as in the early days, having some large stake around the place means that it can distribute larger amounts and, stabilize the platform.

However, what this does do is level the playing board a little more between the larger and smaller staked players. For example, if a Whale with 500K Steem got 2500 PAL, An Orca with 100K Steem got 2500 PAL and me a Dolphin with 47K got about 2000 PAL, it means that at this point of the game, The Whale and the Orca are on a level peg and, a Dolphin is only about 20% behind, instead of over 50%.

What this means though is that because I have 2600, unless the whale and the orca bought some PAL, I have ~4% more ownership of the supply than they.

On a stake based platform, this is quite important and makes things very interesting as while it does give some advantage to larger accounts, it isn't that much advantage. One of the problems with Steem is that it couldn't distribute like this as at that point, it had no idea who is who. PAL has essentially used Steem as a "rough oracle" and said, the people who still have stake and the people who have still been active after all of this time get rewarded, but not that much more than the people who are here and active and have been working their way up.

If we make some more rough assumptions, we could predict that those with stake and those who have been active are likely to know more about Steem, be more invested into the Steem blockchain and therefore, be able to make a move to PAL quite seamlessly. It is a kind of hijack of the community in some way and still is an opt-in system - which sounds very familiar to some conversations had about 5 months ago.

Regardless though, this is an opportunity for a platform to have a better distribution from the get-go and allow active and somewhat "proven" users a chance to build up at the beginning of a project without having to build up from scratch. It is quite a clever way to get off to a running start and providing a 50/50 curation return mans that the larger accounts, much like now, are unlikely to post much but instead curate. Because it doesn't really matter if they curate on Steem interfaces, it means that they can go about their day as they do and still earn on their PAL stake, which means that contributors get rewarded in both Steem and PAL, as do curators except currently, they will get more PAL than Steem back.

This all makes for a complication in the game for users but it also allows for testing of conditions and the resulting behaviors. One of the benefits of decentralized environments is that there can be a lot of trial and error coupled with failures without the entire ecosystem failing. A bushfire may decimate one region, while another is getting tropical rain and lush green growth.

For me, I have very little idea about where all of these things will lead and I am quite certain there are going to be some pretty major negative discoveries along the way as, people are people and behaviors follow various patterns that are slow to change. However, there will be positive discoveries made too and if for the most part people get their ducks in a row and musketeer some of this development and put greed and ego on the back burner, some pretty great leaps can be made in the best interest of the Steem community, *and that includes all the application communities running upon it.

Maybe this is not a great opportunity to earn in the long run, I can't say. But, it is a great opportunity to learn, and those who learn the most about the environment they operate in usually do the best operating.

We are all on the same ride, how we cope with the experience is up to each of us.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]