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I was wondering that, too, but I don't really have an opinion. 😉

And of course, there's still a lot of room for things to deviate from that model. I suspect that the witnesses will eventually decide to start issuing SBD interest, which would tend to drive the virtual supply (and therefore daily production) up. I'm also not sure if that's good or bad.

If our delegation bot users could get interest by saving SBDs, maybe some of them would prefer that over daily posting. But of course in that case, the trade off for less spam is higher inflation. OTOH, stakeholders who depend on income from delegation bot users might oppose that strategy, so maybe the witnesses who pursue SBD interest would get unvoted. Lots of question marks...

With the change in direction, the only thing I'm fairly confident about is that the behavioral dynamics in the next 8 years are likely to be somewhat different from the first 8.

I suspect that the witnesses will eventually decide to start issuing SBD interest

Do you think that this will happen - is it being discussed? Presumably the objective is to move funds from voting bots into a more profitable model?

With the change in direction, the only thing I'm fairly confident about is that the behavioral dynamics in the next 8 years are likely to be somewhat different from the first 8.

Hopefully a shift away from contests 😉

Do you think that this will happen - is it being discussed?

I think it will happen, eventually, but not any time soon. I'm not aware of any discussions on the topic. That's just me speculating.

When I look at that curve and see that witness rewards will drop from ~8,900 per day now to ~2,100 per day in 2037, it makes me think that the witnesses will want to explore interest payments as a possibility to increase their daily rewards starting in something like 2-6 years from now (unless the price of STEEM goes up enough to compensate for the reduction. But if that happens, the daily virtual supply - and therefore daily rewards - will go down even further, so the STEEM price would need to go up dramatically to sustain their current level of income).

Hopefully a shift away from contests 😉

Maybe. If contests are mainly a distribution mechanism, there will be progressively less to distribute. OTOH, it also makes it harder to reward the authors who produce attractive content, too. I have a hard time imagining how the decline will play out with content producers, investors, and curators. I guess this also depends a lot on how the STEEM price moves.

Consequences followed by more consequences... followed by even more consequences 🙂

Ha ha - You've asked what we were all thinking 🤣