It seems that lately there has been growing discontent with the way that delegation bots are directing a large amount of the reward pool, such as @remlaps post and @o1eh's post. Personally I don't like these bots as I think they undermine the "proof of brain" concept at the core of Steem's value proposition. However...
Basic Income?
I do think it makes sense to question the economics of the chain and question whether the rewards structure makes it viable for creative people to spend time here. Delegation-bot users tend to post every day so that they have enough posts to get optimally voted on by the bots. This desire to have a daily opportunity to get voted on is understandable, but producing a genuinely high-quality post every day is a hard task, so this incentive tends to lead to lower quality content on the chain -- maybe not always spam exactly, but somewhere on a quality spectrum with spam at the bottom end. Another context where there's a desire to see guaranteed regular income is with ideas like Universal Basic Income, which, while still hotly debated, have some good arguments behind them. For example, GiveDirectly recently reported on some of their Randomized Controlled Trials of direct cash transfers in Kenya. What if, instead of expecting users to mask their reward-farming posts, we established some social conventions and front-end UI support to make Basic Income posts an explicit type of low-content post that was OK to put on the chain?
How would it work?
If we had a social convention that all posts to a certain tag or community weren't genuine "proof-of-brain" posts but were instead intended to be basic income posts then the UI could filter those posts out of the normal stream of posts and put them in a separate section. I think these posts should have a rewards cap on them (I find it a bit gauche when big accounts collect large rewards with low-effort posts), maybe the cap could be based on some formula related to global poverty measures, or perhaps country-by-country. Then we could all agree that there is nothing wrong with getting votes from any source to bring you up to the cap (although pretending to be multiple people to get multiple income streams would be considered a form of abuse).
Rather than proof-of-brain, we could consider this proof-of-body (perhaps a valuable addition to the chain's philosophy now that AI is increasingly capable of the kind of things that used to only be possible to do with a human brain), and they could be an avenue for occasionally being asked demonstrate that you're a real person using the chain ("Can you post a selfie with you holding a piece of paper with ______ written on it?" "Can you deposit X steem to an exchange to prove you have an independent account there and aren't someone else's second account?"). People would have to have some way of signaling what they're comfortable being challenged about -- for example I'm obviously fine with people knowing my real name since I use it as my username, but I'd be uncomfortable posting images of my ID since that seems like something that could be exploited for fraud, and some people prefer to be pseudonymous. And I'm fine with people knowing I live in Eugene, Oregon, USA, but I'd be a lot less comfortable posting my home address or exact location at any given time (there probably wouldn't be any real danger in me doing so, but I don't want to have to dox myself).
Steemit Support
Importantly, I'm not suggesting that the Steemit platform should actually provide a basic income to all users via votes, merely set up an avenue for posts to potentially receive basic income votes. In addition to the filtering mentioned above, they could provide a UI for posting this style of posts that would make sure they had all the parameters set correctly (and could provide some basic checks, like needing to do a captcha as part of submitting the post). I think the ideal implementation would maybe make these type of posts a different transaction at the blockchain level (maybe with a different reward algorithm), but hardforks are a big ask, and I think we could get a lot of the benefit of this by merely having a social convention that frontends like Steemit know to treat differently.
Benefits
By separating out posts that exist merely to be vote targets from posts that have genuine content we can help curators or just regular readers find those posts without having to wade through a multitude of posts that have a pending payout that indicates they're high-value even though they're not. The Trending pages might even become useful. Having capped rewards value on this type of posts could also encourage the delegation-bot businesses to value growing the userbase rather than catering to large accounts.
Thoughts?
So what do people think of this idea? Good, bad? Do you see any problems or challenges that would need to be worked out before the idea could be implemented?
In general, I support any idea that will help clean up the blockchain, specifically communities and trending threads, from low-quality posts. Your idea is a bit more complicated and unfortunately requires a hard fork, which is impossible under the current conditions, in my opinion.
I would like to clarify some details. Will basic income change STEEM's inflation pattern? Do we need to print more STEEM to satisfy everyone who wants to get a basic income?
In your idea, any post will receive a basic income or only the posts of those people who identify themselves in one of the proposed ways?
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I agree that a hardfork isn't possible, but I don't think what I'm proposing requires a hardfork.
The essence of this idea is to separate the idea of basic income into two different parts: where does the money come from and how does money get delivered to people. And this is only about the second part -- we leave the "where does the money come from" question open (many people already have an answer to that: they're using delegation bots). The idea is that putting this kind of "basic income" post on the chain is opening the door to say "I would accept rewards up to one day's worth of basic income via this post" but someone else would still need to provide the votes to actually bring the reward payouts for that amount. Since I'm not suggesting a new source of funds I don't think we would need a hardfork. (I think a hardfork could enable a fully featured version of this idea, with different post types, maybe splitting the reward pool, etc., but that what I'm proposing could be done with just frontend software changes and a cultural change).
If the chain actually promised to provide basic income from the rewards pool to any human that showed up I think it wouldn't work because we'd be flooded by people looking for free money and there wouldn't be enough value from inflation to provide it. But if we develop the infrastructure to enable provision of basic income and then it could be beneficial.
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Thanks for the clarification, now I understand your point better🙂. I will think a little more about your words. However, there is one weakness here - people's greed and self-love, due to which there is hardly anyone who would provide a basic income by selfless voting.
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This came up in comments of @o1eh's post, too. Another idea that I like is the idea of an interest-only account from @michelangelo3, but unfortunately I think that would require blockchain code changes, so probably not likely to be implemented quickly.
A quick way to approximate interest-only accounts would be to start paying interest on SBDs in savings. I believe the witnesses could do that with a simple parameter change. Since we don't seem to care about SBDs having lost their peg, that might be worth considering... Although, the problem is (if I understand correctly), it would raise the inflation rate of Steem's virtual supply. Pro: more daily author/curation rewards; Con: dilution of people's existing stakes.
Back to the topic of your post, I'm not opposed to it as a "lesser of evils" sort of thing. Ideally, I'd like to see people stop polluting the blockchain, but I think the 2nd best choice is what you suggest, partitioning the pollution away from the creative content.
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Sorry to reply twice, but I realized that I forgot to address the 2nd aspect of your post, the basic income/proof of body aspect.
As charities go, I'm a fan of basic income. I have followed GiveDirectly for years, and contributed to them occasionally. I'm only a fan, however, when the contributions are voluntary. They lose me when they want tax-dollars to fund "universal basic income". It strikes me as an example of the broken window fallacy since they can't study what would have happened if they'd left those tax dollars in the pocket of the tax payer. So, in theory I like your idea of offering a basic income structure that could be used by people/orgs who want to provide a basic income.
Basically, we can partition content as described in previous comments, based on "proof of stake", or as you're proposing now, based on "proof of body". I'm in favor of partitioning the content via any mechanism. I agree that "proof of body" would be preferred over "proof of stake", but I'm not sure how we can convince the existing "proof of stake" people to switch over to "proof of body". Maybe it could be a 2-step transition... Partition the content first, since that's the easy part, then start building and advancing the "proof of body" capability.
It's also worth mentioning that a different version of basic income has already been tried, I'd say with mixed results.
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