I have seen a lot of speculation that seem to vastly underestimate the impact of moving from quadratic to linear. This is a gargantuan difference. Of course, there's nothing quite like a good old visualization. I have taken the blue whale vs man comparison from Wiki and shrunk them down by the square root of area.
As you can imagine, that mighty blue whale is our current whale. So what does the post-HF19 whale look like, in comparison? Look at that tiny speck in the bottom right. Yes, that's what a square root of a large object looks like. I have also shrunk the man (dolphin) accordingly.
Consider in this example that we have a whale with 400,000 SP and a dolphin with 40,000 SP. Assume that the man here is the dolphin.
The whale gets really, really small. The dolphin gets way smaller too, but much less so. I've left the man on top of the whale, had they shrunk a similar amount - it's barely visible. The man under the small whale is what a post-HF19 dolphin will look like. So that's how much dolphins grow with HF19.
Currently, the whale is 50 times bigger than the dolphin. After HF19, the whale will only be 7 times as large.
It gets even more extreme when it comes to minnows. Today, a minnow with 400 SP sees a vote that is a million times smaller than the whale. After HF19, the minnow vote would have 1,000 times greater impact. No, not 2x, not 10x, a full 1,000x relative to a whale.
Of course, in this example, the whole ocean has shrunk quadratically too, but hey - that'd have taken away the impact :) An important point to remember is that historically, few whales have been active curators. So, half a dozen whales or so could dominate 95% of the reward pool with less than 10% total stake before the experiment. Post the experiment, a hundred dolphins could dominate 90% of the reward pool. No longer. Whales, minnows and dolphins now have to play fair and square.
I have no idea what the final result would turn out like, but one can simulate it by looking at the current voting patterns. I'll leave that up to the developers out there, you just need to replace Vshares with Rshares and calculating proportions thereof.
Once again, do not underestimate this change - minnows will gain orders of magnitudes worth influence. One thing is sure, we'll see a very long tail, where the top earning posts earn dramatically less, and thousands of lower paying posts gain value. One challenge is minnows may continue piling on the votes on Trending posts, particularly casual curators*, but once Subcommunities are launched, I'm optimistic the reward pool will be distributed far and wide.
Bring on HF19 - this is the most exciting change in my 11 months on Steem!
*This is the increase in voting power cost by 4x, so those who curate less than 20 posts per day gain a lot more influence.
Bonus: Here's a quick and dirty estimation that compares apples to apples how a dolphin will gain relative to a whale. HF18 top, HF19 bottom.
