I feel like in the early BitShares / BitAssets days, asking lots of stupid questions ;)
So, I assume the popularity of posts can change quickly. For example on reddit, posts are at the very top rarely longer than a few days. If that was the same for steemit, wouldn't it create the problem, that after a while the payout to the original author and the curators would be close to zero? In other words: Wouldn't there have to be either a final deadline (time wise) or an algorithm that takes some kind of average over the life span of a post in order to calculate the payout?
That was my first steemit post!