Steem Hardfork Pull Request Submitted - Beneficiaries paid based on author's payout setting
Hardfork 18 introduced the option to include beneficiary payouts on posts/comments. Because they have not yet been exposed via the steemit.com UI, a lot of people don't even know what these are, but they are an extremely valuable tool that is supported by the blockchain. I just submitted a pull request to make this already amazing feature even better! (Details below)
What are beneficiary payouts?
When an author creates a post or comment, they receive 100% of the author rewards (the total rewards of the post, minus the curation rewards that get paid to voters) by default. At the blockchain level however, authors have the option to specify up to eight additional accounts (along with weights) to share their author reward with.
This means that if two or more authors want to collaborate on a post together and have their rewards automatically split, they can.
It also allows third-party application developers (such as eSteem) to run a profitable business model. These applications can set their application to take a small percentage of rewards from each post/comment that is made through their tool. This way, they generate a profit by making their tool better and increasing their number of active users.
Collaboration between users and application developers being able to make money by developing apps for Steem are two things that I think are mission critical for the success of Steem in the long-run.
What is wrong with the current beneficiary payout system?
Well, the fact that more UIs are not supporting this feature is unfortunate, but I believe that will be fixed with time. That is also not the focus of this post.
Currently the way that beneficiary payouts work is that beneficiaries always receive their portion of the payout as 100% SP. This means that if the author selects 50/50% payout and receives half of their rewards as "liquid payout" (typically SBD), then even though the author is receiving SBD - the beneficiaries are not.
This lowers the utility of the beneficiaries tool by putting the beneficiaries of the post at an economic disadvantage compared to the author. Also, during times like now when SBD is trading above $1 USD - it takes money away from the beneficiaries, since they are losing out on SBD payout (which is worth more).
A proposed fix has been submitted!
I just submitted pull request 2555 to the Steem GitHub repository to fix the beneficiary payout logic. The PR updates the blockchain logic (via a hardfork) so that beneficiaries are paid out using the same setting as the author.
When will these changes take effect?
Even though I have done the development for these changes, since they require a hardfork - they will not take effect unless they are accepted by a super-majority (17/21) of the witnesses.
My PR is attempting to merge these changes as part of HF 20 (which Steemit is developing), so it will still be up to Steemit, Inc. as far as whether or not to accept these changes as part of their hardfork and merge them into the "official" repository as part of HF 20.
I plan to do my best to work with the appropriate parties to try and get the changes accepted and into production, but please be aware - there is no guarantee they will.
My hat's off to you @timcliff! It is extremely important to have more contributions to the core blockchain development from the community and not always be reliant on Steemit, Inc.
It's great that they are focusing on the larger projects, but there's no reason why we shouldn't be able to still have smaller community-driven hard forks while that is going on.
There's a lot of talk about changing things to improve the platform, but very little action. I would love to see a system of financial rewards put in place to further encourage these type of improvements like some other platforms have. In the meantime though, it's great to have top witnesses like yourself contributing in this way.
I want to thank you for having a community discussion on the price of Steem. I hope you continue these discussions, to put pressure on Steemit and other platforms to innovate, and find ways to boost the value of Steem.
Steemit needs to hire the right people. They can't assume they know everything. They need to surround themselves with people who are smarter. It would be great if they hired some professional experts that can help work on a new business model.
The should hire people over 50, who have the right experience when it comes to business.
We need to create online stores, where we can buy and sell goods using Steem.
I hope to accept these changes for HF20 we need to improve the system of rewards not only for Esteem if bo to attract more new creators of applications and make Steemit grow more
We have so much creators already. I think steem must be booster-only platform and whale-friendly persons.
Great job, @timcliff. I'm so happy to see that someone from outside Steemit Inc. is making pull requests, and I hope other witnesses are inspired to follow your footsteps.
This is a great change that will surely be benefitial to the Steem ecosystem. I have seen people that have wanted to cooperate on writing and publishing posts, but have ultimately decided against it because one party would only get SP, while the other party also got liquid SBD (this was when SBD was valued higher). This new system will make it much more appealing to cooperate on writing a post.
Have your previous pull request about the SBD print rate change been accepted by Steemit Inc. as part of the HF20 bundle yet?
Best regards from @valth
No, not yet.
great work, steemit is still taken shape thanks to you guys. I guess the integration can just allow us to set collaborators like the way you can select 100% sp or 50/50 when dropping a post.
I may have come across one site that allows to a benefactor but looks like I have forgotten
I guess it was author there.
Yes
Great work, Tim! You are raising the bar of what is expected of a top witness and leading the way towards a new level of community ownership and responsibility for the STEEM blockchain. This is our chain and we're responsible for it! I'd love to get your input on the idea of employing someone like Object Computing to help us with things also.
Thanks Luke! Everybody finds their own ways to contribute :) I have a coding background, so this seems like a good way to put my skills to use.
Regarding the proposal, I am neutral at this point. I'll be interested to see how it plays out.
@timcliff
Will the value of SBD fall after these developments?
It is unknown. The amount of SBD printed will increase, but not necessarily enough to push the price back to $1.
Who is doing the production of SBD?
Would you advise them to switch to STEM for SBD owners?
It is done by the blockchain. The rules for production are explained in the whitepaper.
This is the second time in as many days that someone has talked about the Steem community making changes and not only relying on Steemit Inc to push change. This is a nice trend!
We have to be forward thinking as a community and as users. A lot of the solutions will be found within our member network. Let's keep Steeming and moving forward!
So if 5 of the witnesses went MIA nothing would ever change on the Steem blockchain?
Stakeholders can always elect new/different witnesses.
Are there any forseeable ways that this may be abused by scammers ? I understand it is just a way of equally rewarding partners on a job but I always try and think of it from a diffrent angle. Also I may have read over it but does your proposal include a variable option for the split or must everyone take an equal piece of the reward opossed to on person being able to get 70% another 20 % and a third person getting 10% ?
I am not aware of any.
The existing implementation already allows the author to set variable splitting using weights.