I appreciate your comment, @smooth!
EOS block producers are paid in a month what Steem top 20 witnesses are paid in a year (more or less, not sure of the exact numbers). The resource requirements for EOS are higher, but not that much higher.
Wouldn't it be a way to increase the output for witnesses, including witness-decay votes? Or is there a big argument against it? Usually, witnesses are a great group of people competing for a top spot, and in thus trying to provide as much value for Steem as possible.
I wish it weren't so, but if we don't get a ton of Steem-growing output in return for all those millions of ninja-mined Steem that have been dumped and likely will continue to be dumped, destroying the price, we're fucked. And unfortunately we have not been getting it. There is no way for the rest of the ecosystem to replace that lost value on the back of 29c STEEM.
I agree. That's something I've noticed as well. As much as I hope there is still coming something out of it, looking at the transfer history is not a way to increase the mood.
And by the way: https://medium.com/ethglobal/ethglobal-2018-wrap-up-and-looking-ahead-to-2019-d9676e141eca
In the past year, 3,800 hackers from more than 65 countries built more than 500 projects. More than 1,000 of those hackers were new to ethereum. ETHGlobal events have become a heartbeat for the community: every few months, hundreds of us gather in a new place and #BUIDL.
It could be very difficult to catch up.
Ethereum example is interesting because unlike EOS it didn't launch with billions of dollars of funding and didn't start out with a huge valuation. In fact they went through some rough times and almost ended up needing to largely disband the core organization (though I'm sure people would have continued to work on it) before it really started to take off. What has Ethereum done better than Steem? Obviously the times are different, situations are different, but I still think we can learn some lessons.
I don't know what difference you think witness decay would make in the short term. What share of the witness votes, stake-weighted, are stale in the sense that voter is inactive or doesn't care? Because if the voter is active and does care they will just refresh their votes (almost certainly the case of the larger ones, with a bot, meaning no more human attention will apply than now). IMO it is very low and won't change things much if at all (the largest stake-weighted voters are all active as far as I know).
I do support vote expiration (I don't see a feasible way to implement decay in the consensus logic) but it is more of a longer-term theoretical concern to me (dead voters, etc.) and not something that is going to make a real difference now. In that sense I'd suggest we focus our efforts and resources (limited though they are, relative to other projects, as per other discussion in this thread) on things that matter.