I’m skeptical. The system of “tipping” your staking rewards that you describe is very much akin to our current voting system, only much more laborious and unintuitive. I would only be in favor if there was a simple option switch akin to what is seen in a project like the Brave browser where the tipping can be handled automatically. I vote just like I do currently and the blockchain mathematically divides my staking rewards proportionally among my voting activities.

I also think arguments stating that voting & curation don’t work at scale are flawed, as our scale amounts to 10,000~ users. A big post currently gets a few hundred votes. I’m sure curation would look very different with popular posts getting a few million upvotes.

With any call to ditch the “proof of brain” and rewards pool structure, I’m always left wondering what Hive’s unique ability and selling point is beyond that. To phrase it in the most despicable way possible given the current climate... the system you describe could probably be quickly implemented and do very well on Tron. 😬 Yeah, I used the T word.

In my mind, the rewards pool has always existed with the goal of spreading the token as broadly as possible to give it value. That organic outward growth is slow going, but it is happening. Making it so that pretty much the only way to get Hive is to buy Hive will mash the brakes on that. And that is what would happen in terms of content production at least. There’s no way someone is going to browse a social feed, read a random post they enjoy, “like” it, and then pop over to their settings tab and say... “That person seems interesting, I think I’ll direct a max percentage cap of 0.5% of my staking rewards to him/her; with a daily-cap of 4 HIVE, a total cap of 25 HIVE and a max duration of 2 weeks”... and then repeat that process 50-100 times a week. The current system just does all that “under the hood!” So any new content producer will be largely frozen out. Getting any traction & earnings will be infinitely worse for content producers.

I wouldn’t see myself continuing to participate in Hive under a pure staking system. It simply wouldn’t make sense to allocate attention and time here versus traditional social media and websites, at least until Hive had more activity and eyeballs than they do.

Do we want the Hive token to represent the value of the “attention economy” we build, or the value of the blockchain server costs? I think the former has more room to run than the latter, and relies heavily on a content driven rewards pool and the concept of mining via participation.