There is one part of the coming EIP that I have seen little discussion about: the reverse-auction period just after a post is published.
Did you know that it is being severely shrunk from the current 15 minutes down to just 1 minute.
Is there any good reason for this?
Does anybody have any coherent idea as to how this has been smuggled into HF21?
You can find it here on Github.
Perhaps I haven't been paying attention, but it hasn't exactly been trumpeted in the recent promotional posts about EIP and HF21.
In my recent analysis of the 50% curation idea I made the error of assuming that the curation algorithm would not be tampered with - I was wrong.
The idea behind the reverse-auction period was to avoid a ton of bots descending on a post within the first second and scrambling to lick up as much curation-rewards as possible. The idea was that most humans would need time to read, reflect and upvote long after the bots had left some curation-reward crumbs. Those automated votes that voted too early would suffer a penalty; that penalty decreased linearly from 0 to 15 minutes. There was a further tweak so that those lost curation-rewards were taken away from the author and given back to the reward-pool.
Now this is all being undone. Has the logic changed? Has behaviour changed?
Those 15-minute periods have been the only interesting game theoretic part of an otherwise naive economic code. Whether by luck or design (I think luck, actually), the reverse-auction period saw two simple algoithms combined to create complex behaviour seen nowhere else on the chain. The curation-rewards-game can be profitable but it is never perfectly predictable and hence achieves a dynamic that could well be useful beyond those 15 minutes. Instead, we see it crushed.
I'm going to (try to) avoid any mathematics, but this will mean that an auto-vote coming in after, say, 2 minutes, will collect its allocation of the 50% curation-pool - without any early-voting penalty. However, the new pseudo-linear rewards curve really hates small votes (apologies to most of you) so that removing the curation-penalty-reverse-auction-period actually boosts our small 2-minute vote.
So where is the logic in this? To take with one hand what appears to have been given with the other?
Or is it to keep the bots running? The new rewards curve plus the reverse-auction could render many small votes too small to make any curation-rewards at all.
I'll let you ponder this...