How Blurt's HF3 Will Affect Vote Values and the Economy

It has been a long wait, but Blurt's Hardfork 3 is almost upon us. It includes a lot of changes, many of which you will need to read about from the coders; here I just wish to outline the economic changes that I have been involved in designing. I have written about these before, but this is an opportunity to bring them all together and describe what I expect to happen.

There were four economic changes considered but, in the end, just three were implemented; the thing left unchanged is the curation curve, as most people seem to like the fixed 50% curation rewards independent of vote timing.

Firstly, it is worth being aware that both the reward pool and the recent claims "pool" work on a 15-day cycle. This means that what you may see immediately is not what will happen once this cycle is completed. It will take at least 15 days for both macro-economic parameters to respond to these changes, followed by possibly another two weeks for them to respond to how the human activity responds! So, without any need for concerns or panic, I would expect it to take about a month for those parameters to fully settle down to some new level. How that level corresponds to the vote values you see is the aim of this article.

There are two main changes that, taken alone, would have opposite effects - taken together, I hope they somewhat balance each other out.

Firstly, we have removed the so-called vote-dust-threshold. This means users with low Blurt Power will finally see their votes have real value. We have also edited the reward curve so that it matches the economic system in Blurt. The increase in vote-yields with larger BP will be modest, and not so extreme as on similar chains, but it should encourage users to power-up.

Taking just these two changes, the value of votes generated in the whole Blurt economy will increase, and with it the reward pool will start to decrease until a new equilibrium is reached. Overall, this benefits most users with low and modest BP - anyone below 5,000 BP should see a significant increase in their vote values. This should greatly help the onboarding experience.

The other main change was in the way the Blurt macro-economy works, with the reward pool responding to the actual size of the active Blurt economy - this means the sum of vested BLURT compared to the total minted BLURT. This change on its own would see vote values initially decreasing, and the reward pool increasing. However, as the reward pool increases, it will start to pay out more rewards and thus slowly balance itself.

Indeed, this latter change is quite subtle in that after a month it will appear to have little effect! But the key is that the Blurt economy will slowly react differently to changes in powered-up vested BLURT. This means that everybody benefits from an increase in vested coins. No longer can some people complain that votes are sharing a fixed trough and hence taking anything away from other users - I have always thought this was encoded bad psychology, the feeling that everybody else is diluting your value. This also solves the issue whereby a fixed rate of newly-minted coins is being dumped on a saturated market, as in similar chains.

As I said, after a month, few may notice the subtleties, but it is important to know that positive actions have a positive effect on both the whole economy and the individual user.

The overall effect of these changes rather depends on how voting activity grows. I expect the latter macro-effect to be the most prominent immediately. This means that vote values will initially seem lower but that everyone will see their Blurt Power have some power. After two weeks, those vote values should start to creep upwards and find a new equilibrium. Beyond that, it really depends on more users, more posts and more votes!

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Please vote for my witness account @busbecq.
Can be done directly here.
Thanks!

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Final thought: I'm not the person to ask when HF3 will take place - just follow @jacobgadikian and @megadrive and wait for news.

Last final thought: admins of Blurt front-ends that show votes and rewards will have to change the formulas working in the background. Please get in contact on Discord to implement this. However, users please be aware that there may be a disconnect between what you see on a site and what you receive in your wallet - the wallet is always correct.