I’d like to the chance to answer everyone’s questions here, I think we started a valuable discussion here today. Although I am a little hurt and offended by the way it came out, but I am generally a bit hypersensitive so it’s probably just me. Over the entire history of Stax all the decisions along the way have had input and discussion from the community and discussion is always welcome. We have had votes and always worked together along the way.

I will start by saying operating and running Stax, is a lot of work at times and there are fees associated with hosting the server that she’s runs on. It took a lot to learn just how the programming runs and how to balance everything. The constant struggle to monitor power and weights, and make sure the nodes are operational takes a lot of ongoing effort. As well as traveling with my laptop at all times or rushing home when there are issues, as well and the ongoing DM’s and messages I receive. In this past it was proposed that Hive account@phelimint (I) received the 100% vote as compensation, but that was in fact long ago, when gold members were also receiving much higher votes. I do agree that with the requirement to lower the ongoing tiers that should have likely been reassessed as it’s likely much too high now, I admit this was an oversight and nothing more and for that I will apologize. I am happy to forgo any bonus and receive the appropriate tier for my own contribution to the project.

There is also discussion regarding Stax’s wallet, I realize now that, that has never been expressly discussed and I always just assumed that was property of the bot owner, which is certainly the standard across steemit. I understand everyone contributes with their votes, but everyone also receives votes in return. I can assure you all, that she will not be powering down and that power will be used as ongoing rewards to everyone much like any other steemit account. Everyone is certainly being well compensated for their votes and contributions along the way and Stax is by far the most lucrative community/subscription bot currently operating on the steem blockchain. With that being said, the wallet and curation rewards are accumulating, and likely adequate compensation for any work Hive account@phelimint(I) am doing on a regular basis (as per the above discussion and discontinuation of bonus votes)
I also want to discuss the self-vote and Hive account@qurator vote trade that is currently ongoing. I know it has also been discussed extensively. I would like to say that I think it would be very short-sighted to discontinue these things and they do fund a vast majority of our ongoing leases. It will give back slightly higher vote for the rest of the month, but next month voting power will drop significantly and everyone’s vote will fall drastically. I will work through the math here and then it’s open for discussion how to proceed, if it’s the will of everyone to stop, then we most certainly will.

This math is all based on current steem/sbd prices. It might get confusing, it often catches me up as well, but hopefully it will help.

Let’s say Stax’s daily post rewards are $60, 20 comes from the self-vote, 20 comes for the quartor vote trade, and 20 comes from the vote from the community. I know curation loss is quoted at 25%, but it`s usually quite a bit less, so around $5-8, that leaves a liquid reward daily of 20SBD or, if steem stays 1:1, that’s 600Steem at the end of the month. It is all contributed to the delegations. Let’s also be conservative with this number and say that buys approx. 30 000SP for the next month. This also reduced the burden for people to donate to Stax, which I have always suggested against since ROI’s can’t be guaranteed.

I’ll work through some more numbers with this assumption for the Gold tier and use a 35% weight.
30 000SP at a 35% vote(example gold tier) is $1.74. Currently Stax has 94members getting votes and the balanced amount is 1100%/day. 200% of that is towards the self-vote and vote trade. If we add it to everyone’s vote in the tiers, that’s about 2%/member, or course for gold it would be higher so let’s say an extra 5%. A vote at 35% with the current power of 117 000SP is $6.80, if she loses 30 000SP and now has 87 000SP but casts a higher vote of 40%, that vote is now worth $5.78. This is a difference of $1.02. Thus a gold tier member will get a higher vote of $0.72 if we continue the vote trade and self-vote. These are also using conservative numbers, we lose less curation and likely lease a bit more SP. Of course there is also significant variation based on steem/sbd prices, but this is fundamentally the reason for the vote trade and self-votes. It might be a bit “circle-jerky” and people don’t feel right about it, once again we can totally stop it.

I quickly want to further discuss Hive account@qurator and why Hive account@phelimint gets a vote from it since that was also brought up. Hive account@qurator is a subscription vote bot/ steemit community. Anyone is welcome to join, Hive account@phelimint(I) have been a part of it since the very start and Hive account@scrooger and some other members of their team are blockchain friends of mine. For the most part it runs very similar to Stax, you vote it daily and/or donate/delegate and you get a vote in return, although it has around 1000 members and the same SP as Stax, so your rewards are of course much less. I do all off those things in return for my vote, the same as any member. I don’t get anything extra due to the vote trade with Stax. I do think it’s a great service and suggest everyone here consider being part of it.

I hope that this helps with the current discussions and I am happy as always to have ongoing conversations regarding any changes to how Stax’s operates and following the will of the community.