I have a question for the community, and I'd like as many answers to it as possible.

Hypothetically, suppose a person were creating a brand-new experimental token system and they wanted to give away tokens to people as a function of all the actions they'd taken on Steem. What's the best distribution model? I'm essentially talking about an "airdrop," where you pick certain kinds of people and then give them tokens for free.

To kick this off, let me propose a couple obvious ones and then a couple probably-dumb ones. The ground rules are simple: We need a rule that takes the entire history of the Steem blockchain and outputs the number of tokens to give each account.

First, the obvious and therefore somewhat lame ones:

1. Uniform airdrop: Every registered Steem account gets an equal number of tokens. This disproportionately benefits anybody who bulk-registered many accounts (I'm looking at you, Hive account@noganoo), early miners, and tech-savvy people.
2. Proportional to Steem Power: No-brainer. Obvious. I'd say probably too obvious.
3. Proportional to Author Rewards: This would have something in common with Steem Power, but it would exclude some of the founders of Steem. For example, Hive account@val-a has over 600 times as much SP as me, but I have 20 times more author rewards than him.

Now let's get more creative:

1. Number of replies: This could benefit people who are more engaged in the community. It could also benefit auto-reply bots like Hive account@cheetah and stuff.
2. Number of votes: Hive account@fyrstikken would do well with this one, as he upvotes nearly every post (every post?). Also Hive account@weenis. Remember Hive account@weenis? He was an absurd bot early on who upvoted and replied to every single post.
3. Average length of post: Why would we do this? I don't know! But we could.

Now let's be stupid:

1. Number of downvotes: Let's give tokens to the sociopaths in our midst!
2. Number of transaction operations: Hive account@poloniex rules here!
3. Randomly: Run a complete lottery. Iterate through all Steem accounts and assign them a random number of tokens.

Now you tell me how you'd distribute a new token! No answer is too simplistic, too dumb, or too complicated. I want to cast a wide net.

My readers: "Why are you asking us this, Hive account@biophil?"

I'm not telling. ;)