Since the integration of TRX into our Steemit Wallets, many have been asking, "What now?" What are we supposed to do with these TRX? What purpose do they serve within the Steem ecosystem? Is it just a little tip from the Tron Foundation? Why doesn't Justin Sun tell us what to do with them?

Well, in all fairness, these tokens have been gifted to us, and we should be the ones to get creative and find ways to incorporate them into our distinct social network experience. After all, who knows Steemit better than we Steemians! So I would like to offer up this idea in the hopes that we can bring our two communities together to create something even more unique. Yes, challenging, but unique!

It's my good old Trickle Up Ecosystem that never went anywhere when I proposed to incorporate it into our platform as a way of bringing in other cryptocurrencies, like DOGE, for example. In fact, the idea was to create the doge.blog app, which would have been connected to the Steem blockchain. Forgive me if I take a moment to rub it in your face, but when I offered the idea to the Steemit Community, DOGE was only $0.003! We lost that opportunity, but that doesn't mean we can't have a second chance.

And hence, the TRX Trickle Up Ecosystem can now have that chance to be incorporated into our blog. The first and second steps have already been done; we have a TRX wallet connected to our Steem account, and we have TRX tokens! Now we just need a voting system to begin curating with them.

How would you like to see something like this when you go and check the trending posts:

Now wouldn't that be nice! A TRX voting system! Let's go into the post and have a better look:

So how would this work? Well, our best Steem and Tron developers would have to really work hard together, as this would be a hybrid system. As you can see, there is an upvote button for TRX, which would work from the Tron blockchain, but the TRX wallet address comes from our Steemit wallet. You would have to become familiar with the Tron system, which if you have been being a good Steemian, you did your homework on how that blockchain works.

These will be two very distinct voting systems, with two different forms of reward distribution. You can vote with Steem Power, or TRX, or both. But here's the big difference. When you vote with TRX by hitting the upvote button, you will be required to transfer 1% of the TRX in your Steemit wallet to a central Steemit TRX wallet, that I will call @tronup for this hypothetical scenario. When voting, a smart contract is triggered on the Tron blockchain which calculates 1% of your present TRX holdings, and you will be prompted with the amount and the options of accepting or rejecting the transaction.

For those who are familiar with this kind of transaction, once you are comfortable with this voting system, you can turn on the Enable automatic signature feature, and continue voting for your favorite posts by simply hitting the TRX upvote button.

There are no downvotes, and all votes, whether on posts or comments, have a fixed value of 1% of your TRX holdings.

During the 7 days that your post is maturing and receiving upvotes, the @tronup account would keep track of who voted, and the Steemit frontend would update the accumulated amount of TRX for that post. At the end of 7 days, when our normal Steem Power, STEEM and SDB rewards are claimable, the @tronup TRX account would redistribute the total TRX for that post with a ratio of 10/90, meaning 10% of the rewards would go to the Author, and the remaining 90% of the TRX would be given to all of the Curators in equal parts.

So here we have 98.465984 TRX, out of which the Author gets 9.846598 TRX. That leaves us with 88.619386 to divide between 28 voters, which means each Curator receives 3.164978 TRX.

Trickle Down vs Trickle Up

Most of our economic systems, including Steem, are based on the philosophy of a Trickle Down economy, in which the wealthy are given more wealth with the idea that they will build bigger projects and companies that hire lots of people who then get the benefits of the riches that "tickle down" from the top. The Trickle Up Ecosystem reverses this, and the weight of the wealth falls to the bottom, distributed amongst many accounts who then slowly move that wealth upwards.

Tron Up: Lactose Intolerant

But what about milking the system? We Steemians are so used to having our ecosystem be abused! Well, this system would present some serious challenges to our traditional farmers, milkers and scammers. Firstly, within the Tron system, you have to be mindful of Bandwidth and Energy expenses. Secondly, you cannot anticipate the reward pool in advance, so you will risk not receiving a return on your investment. And third, the wealthier you become, the less you gain. Eventually, abusers would just give up.

Investors

An entirely new reward system would bring in new investors who now understand the value of TRX as an Influence Token, much like our Steem Power. If someone wants to support a very valuable Author, or an extraordinary content creator, that Curator would be encouraged to bring more TRX into there Steemit wallet.

The Retention Problem

Learning from our past experiences is always important. I have previously expressed my belief that our former retention problem on Steemit was do to the lack of adequately rewarding new-comers, or those who have low Steem Power. With the TRX Trickle Up Ecosystem, we have an opportunity to avoid that if we maintain the traditional 6 decimal places of Tron. Even small rewards help to incentivize a user to continue voting and posting.

Better Quality Voting

With this TRX Ecosystem, there's no free lunch! You don't get to vote with Steem's growing reward pool; you must vote out of your own pocket. This means that we will have an environment in which votes are given because of a genuine interest in the Author, or the post.

More Content, New Trending

With TRX being part of our blogging experience, many Tronians would begin to join the platform and provide new content. This could then create a new style of Trending, in which the rank of a post is calculated using the combined value of both Influence Tokens.

As always, thank you for taking the time to hear out my idea! I take no ownership of the system; this is Open-Source Knowledge which I now leave it in the hands of those who, if they desire, and are able, can actualize it for the benefit of our awesome platform!