This post aims to address some concerns about what the FVL's (Fractional Voting Level) purpose is and why we have it. We designed ShadowBot based on the Steem White paper. This means every last feature and design has taken into account how Steem actually works. One of the lesser known aspects of Steem is bandwidth, vests, and rewards..

How Rewards Actually Work

Rewards have a lot of complexity built into them very few understand. We are going to attempt to make it really simple.

How are rewards paid?

When a post expires you have a claim on rewards which you will claim (or if you are part of shadowbot are claimed for you automatically). These rewards are paid in SP and SBD based on the allocation decided by the author.

All these rewards come from something called the "Reward Pool". This is Steem wide and all posts and comments earn their rewards from this pool. This is a STEEM thing not a ShadowBot thing, we need to be clear.

This reward pool is funded every block (every ~3seconds) with new Steem and SBD is able to be issued as a debt at any time to a user wishing to claim a reward.

Why does the Reward Pool matter?

The Reward Pool (remember this is internal to STEEM not a ShadowBot feature), is all the available STEEM that can be paid out to authors and curators at any given time. This is why SBD is going up in demand because there is only so much STEEM that can be created each block, and with more content created than available STEEM people are opting to take the debt of future STEEM (SBD) in it's place to ensure their payment.

Why users with low SP do not have the voting power slider

So now that you understand a little more about the Reward Pool, WHY do users under ~500 SP not have the Voting Power slider? Well this comes down to how STEEM works again.. When a user casts a vote their SP is used to calculate how much of VESTS from the reward pool are allocated to that specific post/comment. Now if you do not have enough SP and were to vote at say 10% power your vote would be considered "Dust". The vote would round down to 0 and have no effect on your earnings. If you have only say 25 SP and place a 10% Power up vote you would see it would result in dust and you would not earn any curation reward and the author most likely would not earn anything as well. It would simply be a waste!

Why the FVL exists

Based on everything you have read above you can begin to see the very essence of "dust" and the requirement by Steem's blockchain is the basis for why the FVL exists in the first place!

This is a feature built into Steem itself that we adhere to and designed around. The FVL is a mechanism for us to track the ever changing underlying Steem protocol in a way that is easier for us and the rest of our community to understand!

Why ShadowBot has the FVL

As you probably could have guessed by now the answer is obvious. The design of Steem requires users to have a certain level of SP before their votes at a Fractional Level would matter more than "Dust". This is not OUR design this is Steem's design! We adjust the FVL as needed to ensure ShadowBot's system stays inline with it's own users' growth and the Dust voting level Steem has built into it!