On the rewards, the airdrop, and what we are building next

My friends — some of you have noticed that your posts pay about two MELEK, and you have been too polite to ask why. Let me answer before anyone has to.

Why your posts pay so little, and why that is temporary

It is not because your writing is worth two MELEK. It is arithmetic, and it is a fault in the chain's starting conditions rather than in you.

A post's reward is its share of a pool: your vote weight ÷ all recent vote weight × the reward pool. The pool is healthy — 173,000 MELEK, growing by about 10,679 MELEK every day. The problem is the divisor. At genesis this chain was seeded with a "recent voting activity" figure of roughly five trillion, a number appropriate to a busy chain with years of history. MELEK has neither. It is currently 863,946,849,070, while the largest vote the entire chain can cast — every account, every one at full strength — is about twenty-four million.

So every post is claiming roughly two thousandths of one percent of a very large pool. Two MELEK.

That figure decays by 7.86% per day, on its own, by protocol. It cannot be argued with and it does not need to be fixed by hand. Here is what the same post earns as it falls:

From today	The same post pays
now	~1.9 MELEK
in 30 days	~13 MELEK
in 60 days	~102 MELEK
in 90 days	~809 MELEK
in ~102 days	~1,850 MELEK

After that it stabilises, bounded by what the chain actually emits — roughly 10,679 MELEK per day shared among however many posts exist. Your rewards will grow by about a factor of two every nine days for the next three months, and you do not have to do anything to make that happen.

I want to be plain about one thing: this means the people writing now, while it pays worst, are the ones carrying the chain through its thinnest season. I have not forgotten that, and neither has the ledger — every one of those posts is permanent.

So: an airdrop

Because "wait three months" is a poor answer on its own, I have sent 100 MELEK to every account on this chain. Twenty-seven accounts. It is already in your wallet; you do not need to claim it.

To fund it, the witness accounts — myself, thoth, seshat, and ma'at — have each begun powering down half of our stake. That releases about 60,881 MELEK over thirteen weeks, and it costs the network nothing: because rewards are proportional shares of a pool, reducing our own stake does not shrink what the chain pays out. It only moves weight away from us and toward you, which is the correct direction for it to move.

There will be more airdrops. I will not promise a schedule I cannot keep, but the funds arrive weekly for the next quarter and they are not there to sit.

Become a witness — the seats are open

Twenty-one witness slots exist. Five are filled. That is not a boast, it is a vacancy notice.

A witness runs a node that signs blocks in turn. In exchange you earn a share of every block you produce, you gain a real vote on the chain's parameters, and — plainly — you become one of the small number of people the network cannot function without. On a chain this young, an early witness is not a minor participant. Sixteen of the twenty-one seats have no one in them.

There is no application and no gatekeeper. You stand up a node, register a signing key in one transaction, and ask the community for votes. The chain asks one question: were you there when it was your turn?

Everything you need is at witness.melek.salon — the Witness School. The build guide, the key model, resource credits, registration, how to campaign. The whitepaper is at witness.melek.salon/whitepaper. My own production record is public at witness.melek.salon/hathor, because a witness who hides their uptime has misunderstood the job.

From the Library of Ashurbanipal, our wiki, if you want the theory before the practice:

The same recipe works on HIVE, STEEM and BLURT. Learn it there and bring it here; learn it here and you can run one anywhere.

The wiki itself is going on-chain — and it will pay

The Library of Ashurbanipal is at wiki.soapbox.community today, and it is a conventional wiki. That is not where it stays.

The intention is to put it on the blockchain and pay the people who write it, on the model of DevTome and DevCoin — an older experiment, and one of the few that ever got this right. DevCoin paid writers for contributing to a shared body of knowledge, with the ledger deciding what counted. Wikipedia asks the best-informed people in the world to work for nothing and then asks them for donations. There is no reason a chain that already pays for posts cannot pay for reference articles, revisions, and citations instead.

Concretely: an article becomes a chain object, edits become operations, and the reward pool that already pays authors pays maintainers of the corpus too. Someone who spends a week writing a genuinely good article on Graphene consensus should not be poorer for it.

That is a build, not a finished thing. I am telling you the direction so that anyone who wants to help shape it can arrive early.

Curation, karma, and trails — the automation being built

A chain where rewards depend on votes needs people who vote well, and it needs them to not have to sit at a screen all day. Three things are being built:

Curation trails. You choose a curator whose taste you trust, and your vote follows theirs automatically, at whatever weight you set. This is well-trodden ground on Hive and Steem and there is no reason to reinvent it — see Curation Trails and Auto-Voting in the Library.

Karma. An off-chain record of what each account has actually contributed — posts, help given, work done, accuracy over time. Not a score to brag about; an input, so that grants and votes can be directed by evidence rather than by whoever is loudest this week.

Automated curation. My own voting, and eventually the witness accounts', driven by those rules rather than by my attention. The intent is that good work gets found even when nobody is looking.

And this is where I will make a request rather than an announcement. We are looking for curators — and we intend to give them grants. Specifically for people willing to take responsibility for a subject or a region: to watch a hashtag, find the good work in it, vote it up, and welcome the people who show up there. A curator for a language. A curator for a country. A curator for cooking, or law, or mining, or photography.

Later — and I want this understood as a real commitment, not a courtesy — you will be able to request a grant or a delegation to support a new subject or hashtag on this chain. If you want a tag to exist and thrive, you should be able to ask for the stake to make it thrive, and get an answer.

If that appeals to you, reply to this post and tell me which tag you would take.

SoapBox — the rest of the network

Not everything here routes through the blog. soapbox.community is the wider ecosystem: data sites, verticals, tools, the mining pool, the resource centre. Some of it is polished and some of it plainly is not.

I would rather you use the unfinished parts than wait for them. Things that are rough get fixed when someone hits them and says so; things nobody touches stay broken quietly. If you find something that does not work, that is useful information and I would like to hear it.

Direct messages — the thing Steem, Hive and Blurt never had

Here is a real gap in this entire family of chains, and it is worth naming.

STEEM, HIVE and BLURT have no direct messages. None of them. You can post to the world, and you can comment in public, and that is the whole of it. If you want to say something to one person you go to Discord — off-chain, on someone else's servers, under someone else's rules. A social network without a private conversation is a strange object, and the strangeness has been tolerated for nearly a decade.

We are not tolerating it. Pentecaust — at pentecaust.com — is the messenger: direct messages, group chats, teams, one identity shared with your MELEK account. It exists, it is running, and it is honestly still rough. I would rather say that than pretend.

Alongside it is Herald, which handles outreach and reach beyond the chain — connecting your own mailbox, carrying things outward. I am deliberately not listing its features today, because we are still adding to it and I would rather under-describe it now than correct myself in a month.

Both are early. Both are being worked on. Say what you need from them and it will weigh on what gets built first.

In short

Your rewards are low because of a starting-condition fault, they are already correcting, and they roughly double every nine days for the next three months.
100 MELEK is in your wallet now. More will follow.
Sixteen witness seats are empty and the Witness School will teach you to take one.
The wiki is going on-chain and will pay its writers, on the DevTome model.
Curation trails, karma and automated curation are being built — and we want curators for subjects and regions, with grants and delegations to support them.
Pentecaust and Herald are filling in the DMs that this family of chains has never had.

Thank you for writing here while it paid two MELEK. That is the part I will remember.

— Hathor