Why Have My BLURT Rewards Fallen Recently?

Firstly, let me say that the Blurt blockchain is behaving as it should and the rewards are being properly calculated. However, the experience people are having is due to some changes that needed to be made when Blurt was launched. The experiences of the last 3 months were actually the anomalies - what we are now seeing is normal operations.

Let me explain...

In the beginning

When Blurt was launched it took a snapshot of Steem token holders but, unlike Hive, it did not copy over all the posts - including posts that were pending rewards. Also, what used to be the STEEM-per-MVests parameter was changed to BLURT-per-Vests and re-based. These two changes had consequences for the short-term economics of Blurt.

If you look at any Blurt blockchain explorer, you will see numbers for the "Reward Fund" (aka reward-pool or rpool) and the "recent claims". Those two global parameters define how your votes turn into BLURT rewards.

The formula for generating payouts is quite simple:

payout-in-BLURT = (reward-pool) x (post-claims) / (recent-claims)

The recent-claims are actually similar to rshares generated by your vote, but they also take into account other factors such as early voting or a vote removal etc. Now, imagine when Blurt was launched, the recent-claims were kept as a number but those claims did not correspond to any claims made by posts - because no posts existed.

So, imagine those claims as in two piles: one is the claims at launch (let's call them synthetic-claims) and the other is the claims generated by new votes on new posts.

recent-claims = real-recent-claims + synthetic-claims

Now, it is economically damaging to keep those synthetic-claims so high for ever, so code was written so that those claims would slowly be deleted. At the end of this process, all the claims will actually be from real votes on recent posts. This is where we are today!

So, as Blurt has developed, those synthetic-claims slowly disappeared and real-recent-claims grew larger and were processed at each payout. However, because Blurt is a new chain, the number shown as recent-claims has been steadily falling; this is because the synthetic-claims have been deleted faster than real-recent-claims have been generated. This had the effect of increasing the reward-pool fairly quickly.

Those who have posted on Blurt since it started may recall that in the early days payouts were very small - much smaller than now. Then, as the reward-pool grew those payouts became larger.

What has happened recently is that those synthetic-claims have now dropped to zero, and will be of no further concern to the economy. The remaining recent-claims are now all real claims generated by votes. Hence, those claims generated higher payouts and thereby reduced the reward-pool fairly quickly from its then high.

What we all experience now is the end of that whole process.

Both the reward-pool and the recent-claims are now at levels that reflect the true activity on the Blurt chain.

To sum up, the synthetic-claims created at the launch of Blurt created an artificial economy that firstly increased the reward-pool and then decreased it again to the current real level. The consequence of this is that reward payouts started very small, grew to be quite large and now have dropped to their real level.

Final thoughts

Why was this done? Well, anybody who has studied these Graphene DPOS chains will know that if they are launched from a clean genesis block, then post rewards can be astronomical. This is because the reward-pool fills up quickly but the recent-claims are very small, hence the payouts can be huge. To avoid these initial hyper-rewards, it is sensible that the initial state of the chain should have some synthetic-rewards.

This is actually an innovation and, I suspect, the devs were not sure that it would work as intended - it has! The confusion of users is that this wasn't fully explained at the start - now it has!

One very final thought is that those economic changes I wrote about before will be implemented as soon as possible and will make small and medium-sized accounts feel much better.

Any further questions, please ask in the comments section.