Author and Curator Rewards
Most of the daily inflation of Hive is distributed to Hive users, in the form of Author and Curator rewards. In theory this 65% of daily inflation is distributed like this, in an equal split between authors and curators, but reality sometimes has a way of defying theory.
This post is intended as a retrospective analysis on how much the Hive network has "spent" rewarding authors and curators since the split from Steem in March 2020.
Author Rewards
Author rewards are split between liquid and staked author rewards. In general you receive half your rewards as HBD and half as Hive Power, but sometimes the HBD is replaced with liquid Hive when the HBD debt limit has been exceeded. In practice, more value is distributed in the staked rewards, most of the time, but there have been times when HBD has been overpriced and users are getting substantially more value in HBD rewards.
The chart below shows the daily value in USD distributed as author rewards, divided into Liquid Hive, HBD and Hive Power. It seems we typically spend about $10,000 per day on author rewards even in a bear market, but at the lowest points of the prior bear market it was about $3000 a day. At the heights, we have seen amounts approaching $70,000 awarded to authors per day.
Curator Rewards
Curator rewards are paid fully in staked Hive, aka Hive Power. The chart below shows the daily value of Hive Power allocated to curators per day.
It should amount to about the same as author rewards overall, but in practice it is usually more. Hive typically allocates about $10,000 in curation rewards per day, but with past lows of less than $3000 and highs of almost $75,000 per day.
Does the 50:50 split hold up?
In total, we are spending about $20,000 a day on authors and curators, but is it evenly split between the two?
Here are two more charts, the first showing all author and curator rewards combined, and the second showing the relative distribution of author vs curator rewards per day. I changed the colour scheme in the latter when I noticed the opportunity to create a national flag out of it.
As we can see, as long as HBD price is properly pegged, the 50:50 split does hold pretty well, although not perfectly all the time.
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Very interesting analysis @demotruk! Really good to see the mechanisms in action and that, most of the time, the rewards are split quite evenly.
Interesting stuff. I had wondered about the value of daily rewards. What proportion are going to @hbdstabilizer via @hbd.funder ?
Nice colour selection for the last graph.
I have not yet accounted for those, but I'll take a look at benefactor rewards for hbdstabilizer, hive.fund, null etc. and add another chart.
I take it that anything going to null gets burnt. Some of those others get a lot each day. I expect many don't understand all the intricacies of making the finances work, but then they just want their rewards. Thanks again.
I would like to say here that this division is absolutely right and the way we see people who work hard on it and create their own content is not due to the circumstances of those people. They have to cash out their money. And the people who are working on this platform by putting money are the people who are earning rewards by staking their stuff. And the way we saw that when the market went down a lot last time, they were HBD stable, which was a very good thing because there weren't a lot of stables coins.
This makes a lot of sense, thanks for sharing
One small question, there have been many occasions when #HBD has exceeded its debt limit or it has only happened a few times. I would really like to see the healing rewards (Hive Power) represent a little more than 50/50 and be used to improve the quality of our votes to support other users
Only twice briefly since the split with Steem, but back in the days of Steem it was much more common to exceed the debt limit.
so only twice and briefly it means that you are working in a good way so as not to exceed the spending limit
I think I now understand a bit of how Hive pays authors
Thanks for the explanation
In-depth Analysis, Glad to know 50/50 is well maintained and this thing is going to make happy both the author and curater.
It's so much less than I thought was "mined" on posts... 20k give or take?
Damn if only Hive can go mainstream as fuck, we'd all be millionares 😂 things are starting to happen though, the blockchain games are lighting up and the threads of Leo are on fire!
This shows that hive has a strong mechanism to maintain the stability of the ecosystem.
Consider yourself upvoted sir! This is a great explanation and a good reminder that it’s just as good to spend time curating here when you’re not writing or to do both of course.