I will be giving a talk at a Steemit workshop tomorrow, hosted by 
I see a lot of explanations, some good, some not so good. I have gotten great value from reading 
Please read these posts above if you want all of the curation reward specifics. This post is only aimed at testing my understanding of it.
Now that I have seen and understood past examples, with visualizations of mathematical formulae, with square roots and all of that - what I would like to do in this post is to formulate certain hypotheses pertaining to the game theory of voting. I have struggled to find enough of that.
Below, I have formulated multiple hypotheses about curation. Please tell me in the comments below which ones are true and which ones are less true, or entirely incorrect.
I will start with the ones that are pretty straightforward and build from there, so that beginners can follow the logic from the start.
(I am sure some of them could be wrong, so please correct me)
Hypotheses
Let’s assume for every scenario that my upvote is worth 1 dollar
- I upvote a post immediately and the post receives 1 vote only → 1 dollar to the author.
- I upvote a post after 30 minutes and the post receives 1 vote only → 25 cents to me, 75 cents to the author.
- I am the first to upvote a post after 15 minutes, and the post receives 1 vote only → 12.5 cents to me, 87.5 cents to the author.
- I am the first to upvote a post after 15 minutes, and the only one to vote the first 30 minutes. Later, the post receives another 9 dollars worth of upvotes → I make more than 12.5 cents because there are people voting after me.
- 5 curators become the first to give upvotes, 1 cent each, and they all vote after 30 minutes. Later, I give the sixth and last vote. Total rewards 1.05 dollars → The first 5 curators receive significantly more than 1 cent in curation rewards.
- It’s better for me to vote as number 2 after the large upvote of a whale, than to vote as number 5 after 5 low-value upvotes have been cast.
- The ideal/perfect scenario is for me to give the first upvote after 30 minutes, and have a wave of upvotes coming in later.
- I should focus my effort as a curator on finding and upvoting good content which is more than 29 minutes old, without any upvotes, but with potential to receive many upvotes still.
- A popular user has just posted something. Pretending for a second that there are no bots giving auto-upvotes, my curation competitors will vote as early as is necessary for them to be amongst the first 5 to upvote. I should vote ASAP to beat them to the race.
- Because of the bots, there is no point for me to try to make money by upvoting the content of popular users.
- I should not give my votes to already popular users if I want to make money.
- I can only spend 5 minutes day reading and upvoting, but I want to use all of my available Steem Power. I should go to “Hot” (and a tag) and quickly scour for quality posts that are around 30 minutes old still with few upvotes. Maybe I’ll get lucky.
- I can only spend 5 minutes day reading and upvoting, but I want to use all of my available Steem Power. I should do the same as above and quickly scour for quality posts. Maybe I’ll get lucky.
- I can only spend 5 minutes each day reading and upvoting. I should not power up.
- For the purposes of promoting the integrity of the Steemit platform (and thereby the value of my Steem tokens) I should not upvote a post, even though it looks good, if I see that the author uses Steemit as one out of many channels for his/her content and that the content already exists elsewhere.
These were just some of the thoughts I came up with. Am I more or less on track? Looking forward to your feedback and corrections!
And please go ahead and write down additional curation considerations if you have any. It's a cool topic to explore.