Hive: Analyzing Hardfork 28 effect on Curation rewards.
Hive Hardfork 28 was already live on November 19, and it brought a lot of changes in the Hive regarding the block size limit, increased transaction expiration time, HBD treasury inflation and changes that govern how the voting mana and vote value will now differ from the earlier. Most of the changes are technical in nature and seldom are of any interest to the end user of Hive i.e Author and curator rarely discuss them. But in this hardfork, 2 major changes happened , that are really in the interest of the curators and actually impact the author and curator rewards. These both are as follows. i.) Reduction in Hive reward pool. ii.) Vote value is unchanged irrespective of your recharge percent of voting mana.
i.) Reduction in Hive reward pool.
Reduction in the Hive inflation leads to less Hive being generated per block, so it means there is less Hive for rewards and distribution. So this caused our votes are generating less Hive now as compared to the pre Hardfork 28. I have observed that earlier my full vote was 2 Hive but now it reduced to 1.75 hive almost 12.5% reduction.
ii.) Vote value is unchanged irrespective of your recharge percent of voting mana.
In the recent hard fork, it was implemented that 100% vote value remain constant for a user irrespective of it's voting mana recharche percent. If my 100% vote at 100% voting mana is of 1.75 Hive, it will remain 1.75 Hive even at 40% recharged voting mana. Earlier it will be,4*1.75 Hive = .7 Hive
How curation rewards are affected.
Let's assume, your voting mana at 100% and generate 2 Hive per vote, and you did some consecutive 10 votes, then the Hive generated by will be similar as shown in below table.
Full Vote value(in Hive) | Vote percent/100 | Total Hive generated By Vote |
|---|---|---|
2 | 1 | 2 |
2 | 0.98 | 1.96 |
2 | 0.96 | 1.92 |
2 | 0.94 | 1.88 |
2 | 0.92 | 1.84 |
2 | 0.9 | 1.8 |
2 | 0.88 | 1.76 |
2 | 0.86 | 1.72 |
2 | 0.84 | 1.68 |
2 | 0.82 | 1.64 |
18.2 |
Vote Value Table
Since curation reward is the 50% of the total vote value, so total curation reward will be 18.2/2 =9.1 Hive.
But, if someone used bot, and keep voting at 100%, then the person can generate 10 Hive rewards per day.
But after hardfork 28, my new vote value is 1.75 Hive , so 10 vote will generate 17.5 Hive and curation rewards will be 17.5/2 = 8.75 Hive.
So at average of 9.1 Hives per day it is 8.75/9.1 = .9615 or 96.15 % aor loss of 100 -96.15 =3.85% .
But at 10 Hive per day, it will 12.5 % loss.
Conclusion.
I guess it did cause us to lose the rewards in curation but current changes do give us more voting freedom. To use the mana generated daily is look like a daily task or forced activity instead of someone enjoying curation in their leisure time. Now it look ok, to keep my voting mana below 80%, so that I do not have to worry that I am losing some reward by keeping below 80.
I guess it further strengthens the habit of manual curation too, and now every vote has the same value, irrespective of the voting mana percentage. this will cause curator to reward all author with same consistent value and also at their will.