Steem Basic Income
Steem Basic Income is a social experiment to bring a basic income to as many Steemians as possible. Members join by sponsoring others into the program. Steem Basic Income is delivered through providing regular upvotes to member content.
Introduction
Where does the value of your vote come from in Steem Basic Income? The purpose of this series is to break things down with as little math as possible. To make it easy for everyone to better understand how value moves within the SBI system. To let everyone make the best decisions about how to use SBI to help you reach your Steem goals.
Series Roadmap
As a subscription upvote service that utilizes Steem blockchain to deliver a sustainable basic income, we are completely dependent on Steem blockchain reward mechanism.
In Part One, we explored what drives value on Steem.
Vote Values in Steem Basic Income - Part One: Blockchain
In Part Two, we explained each of the factors that determine how we allocate value within the SBI system, and how those four factors are handled under our current system.
Vote Values in Steem Basic Income - Part Two: The Way We Were
Today we will explore how the four factors are handled in the new system that will be released soon.
Next time, we will recap the changes and explore the expected impact. We don't want you to make big financial decisions to maximize your reward under the old system, only to have your value outcome dramatically change when the new system is released.
Future Value Mechanisms
You may have noticed in Part Two that the value factors are interconnected in the current system. This has the unfortunate effect of making the value very hard to track without a full understanding of the system. Most members throw up their hands and hope that things work as intended. Some members make decisions based on incorrect understanding and then get very upset when the outcomes are different then they anticipate. A few members take the time to fully understanding the complexities.
One of our key design objectives in the new system was to make value more transparent. Not only does this make the numbers easier to understand, but it also makes it possible for us to eventually build better tools that will show exactly where the value breakdown came from for each member.
In the new system, we will be tracking detailed rshares balances for each member, and they will be tracked separately for each value factor. The overall accrued balance will be used to determine how much upvote will be delivered to each member post or comment.
SBI Levels
Each level, or unit, of SBI will earn a daily accrual of 800M rshares. This is very close to the actual level that is currently votable with the target ratio of 2 SP per unit. Enrollments will be processed automatically every 2.4 hours, and will immediately begin earning rshares once processed. In rare cases where an enrollment does not follow the appropriate syntax, the accrual might not begin until manual intervention is made, but it will still be much faster processing than occurs under the current system.
Delegation Bonuses
Each delegation will receive bonus units at a rate of one bonus unit for every 2 SP delegation. This is 5x better than the current reward, and it makes delegation to Steem Basic Income one of the most rewarding delegation choices for people that actively post. These bonus units will also receive a daily accrual of 800M rshares. You still have to be enrolled in @steembasicincome to receive this benefit.
Upvoting Bonuses
The new reward system for upvoting bonuses is the most dramatic change in the new system. Instead of it creating a multiplier on your unit counts, it will be a completely separate value factor. Each time we receive author rewards for a post or comment, on any official SBI account, we will identify the rshares that each member added to that reward using their upvotes. Those rshares will be added to the member balance, with a multiplier of 1.25x.
Essentially, if you upvote us by 800M rshares, you will receive 1000M rshares to your balance when that post pays out. This separates your upvoting bonuses from your unit counts and instead ties them directly to your upvote value. You are rewarded directly for your contribution to the long-term sustainability of the program! You still have to be enrolled in @steembasicincome to receive this benefit.
Redistribution
Accounts that have not posted or commented in at least 100 days will have their rshares balance reduced by 1% each day. The total rshares balance removed from these inactive accounts will be redistributed to the rest of the member base. We will design the redistribution system in a way that gives us the flexibility to experiment and select the best redistribution algorithms. Some of the algos that we are considering:
- A Steem Basic Income curation league. Members would be scored for their curation and receive a share of the redistribution based on their ranking in the SBI curation league.
- Community Support Initiatives. Criteria would be established for communities to be officially recognized as SBI Community Support Initiatives. A blend of quantitative and qualitative factors would determine the level of additional support these initiatives receive.
- SBI - User Authority. A custom User Authority calculation would be given to each SBI member and members would receive upvote value based on those rankings. Instead of using Witness rankings as the initial seed, we would use SBI levels for our top 100 members. The algorithm would only consider the follow-graph of approved SBI members, instead of the entire active Steem user-base (naturally excluding bot-nets controlled by blacklisted Steemians and scammers from the calculations). This method would allocate more value to members that are actively networking and supporting each other, but in a way that removes some of the more controversial aspects of @steem-ua.
- Pro Rata. Value would be redistributed pro rata to the active members, based on their SBI levels.
- Flat redistribution. Value would be redistributed evenly, with every member getting the same amount, independent of other performance factors or SBI levels.
There are benefits and drawbacks to each potential approach, and I expect our choices here to be hotly debated. Most likely, we will attach some weight to each of them. As we release these algorithms, it's important to remember that you are already receiving your subscribed upvotes through the first three value factors. This fourth factor is not something members are entitled to, and we could just as easily remove this factor entirely now that the SP levels we need to maintain will not be directly linked to any of the factors.
What About Pools?
Members will not be assigned to a particular pool anymore. Instead, our system will dynamically identify the best account to deliver your upvote - each time you post. Broadly speaking, each upvote will be delivered by the account with the highest VP% that has enough SP to deliver it. We expect to reach an equilibrium where members that post with consistency will usually get their upvotes from the same voting account, but it will respond dynamically to changes in member behavior.
What Do You Think?
Did we knock these factors out of the park, or did we strike out and then round the bases anyway? In the next post, we will recap the changes and their expected impact.
Enrollment
If you want to get involved, or to increase the share of basic income that you receive, enrollment is pretty straightforward:
Just send 1 STEEM to @steembasicincome. Include the name of a Steemian to sponsor in the transaction memo (preceded by @). You and the person you sponsor will each receive 1 share in the program. You can sponsor any active Steemian, it does not have to be a current member.
If you're unclear, please check out our full transaction memo guidelines and then let us know if you have any questions.
@steembasicincome/steem-basic-income-updated-transaction-memo-guidelines
The official currency for enrollment is STEEM. Please allow up to 7 days for your enrollment to be processed.
Questions?
Please read our recently published FAQ. Most questions are addressed in our FAQ or in the additional resources that it suggests. If you still have questions, ask in the comments section or join us in our discord channel. To review your share counts, we recently introduced our new SBI Member Lookup Tool.
