Here is a formula that takes into account the annual decrease at 0.5%:
0.75 * (0.095 - 0.005 * (CurrentYear - 2017)) / (1.095 - 0.005 * (CurrentYear - 2017))
InflationTax(2018) = 6.19%
It comes down to 6.19% instead of 6.5%.
I don't have any problems with the payments to the witnesses or steem power holders.
It's a decentralized system and someone has to power the system. Witnesses do that.
If you think that the witnesses don't deserve their 10% cut and if you explain me why, I'm willing to listen.
15% payment for the Steem Power holders is just a dividend for holding an illiquid asset, which takes three months to liquidate.
At the end of the day, that 15% only provides an advantage over regular Steem holders, who have the advantage of holding an liquid asset that can be sold immediately.
By the way, even if we consider 9% inflation, it's corresponding tax would be calculated as the following:
0.09 / 1.09 = 8.26%
PS: All results rounded for simplicity.
Of course the witnesses deserve the 10% but it is nevertheless part of the tax you calculate. And the mayority of them are authors and authors have steempower. If you take away the reward pool for curators and authors, you take away the essence of steemit. What will be left is just another crypocurency pumped and dumped by investors. There will be no more incentive to write good stuff, now there is, enough people make a living here, you may not see them at the trending page but if you make a grand per week with a couple of posts, compared to nothing on other platforms, that's pretty good too, don't you think? The real problem is that the quality diminishes, I heard from a, to me, big fish that she wrote better articles at the beginning, the more power you get, the lazier you can be. And let's be honest, for that kind of money, every trending post Is a piece of garbage, @neilstrauss being the exception, but he reuses finished material, albeit uncut. I can get a lot more value for my brain from a 10$ book than reading through the trending posts :)
So In that reapect you are right, the posts are overvalued. Instead of creating new technologies like SMT's to bring even more people to the platform, how about implementing a decent search, to find those who are already there. Growth is important but growth with frustrated people is not that good. Seriously, a company with a webpage that uses custom google search? I understand that it's additional revenue though.
I didn’t know @neilstrauss was on steemit. Thank you for the tip.
Since all the data is publicly available on blockchain, any developer can build a website on it.
Some examples like busy.org exist, but they don’t add too much on top of steemit.com.
A decent relevant posts and authors functionality is my top feature request as I explained in a post called You've Got the Power, Steemit User!
I contacted a developer about that and waiting for his reply. Let’s see who will come up with this feature first.