Why a Steem Power reward cap would be as controversial as the block size cap in Bitcoin
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![enter image description here](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4d/ME_456_Fairness.png)

https://youtu.be/8cDKUq2yZqc

@craig-grant initiated an interesting discussion when he said that there ought to be a cap on Steem Dollar rewards. He set the cap at $500 per blog post. This blog post is a proper response to his, and also to initiate a wider discussion on this topic. I will outline my concerns in my post, and open up a discussion.



My list of concerns with blog post reward caps
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 1. It acts as a salary cap for bloggers. Just as with the salary cap for sports, or for anything else, this salary cap skews the market.
 2. It breaks the functioning of Steemit as a **Social Computer**. 
 3. It empowers the dollar over Steem Power.
 3. It gives an unfair advantage to high net worth individuals who can now buy as much reputation (Steem Power) as they want, while everyone else is capped.
 4. It will divide the Steemit community as much as the Bitcoin block size cap divides the Bitcoin community.



What is the true value of the Steemit community?
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The value of Steemit is in the people who participate with it. So it is about the value of the social network behind the technology. This is a very valuable social network which is why posts can pay out so much, and why the market cap is currently high, but it is reputation which is the big picture, and in this case Steem Power is our reputation currency. 

So in my opinion the worth of the person does come into play. That could be the social worth, as in who the person knows and their social reach. That could be any particular kind of wealth they bring to Steemit, whether it be beauty, intelligence, or something else. Steemit has wealth from we who engage with it, and only by giving large rewards to great people can we expect to retain them. These rewards shouldn't to be measured in Dollars but in Steem Power because Steem Power is our reputation currency while Dollars are only useful to people who have bills to pay (and I admit I do have bills but that's not to say everyone cares about that).

Steemit as I see it is about community, and is a social network, while the blog posts are about the value of the content of the blog, but at the same time there is reputation involved where a blog post by a particular high valued person within the community will get higher payouts. If Elon Musk for example were to post here, he might get a very high payout even though he clearly doesn't need the money. The same with Dan Larimer who routinely gets high payouts on reputation alone.

This doesn't mean their content isn't highly valuable, but more that the community values them as a whole person because the community knows them well. So I would say a lot more goes into the value of a blog post than just the value of the text, but also consider that Steem Power is reputation. In my opinion, it doesn't matter whether the dollar values are attached to the posts, but it does matter what the individual is doing for the Steemit community or is trying to do for it.

In order to reward long term commitment to the community, I think we have to prioritize reputation and Steem Power. I think for example @dollarvigilante gets such high payouts because of who he is, who he knows, and his established fanbase, and I think it's perfectly rational to reward someone like him higher than most bloggers.

I originally thought, why not reward individuals who have higher Q scores? I'm not saying to disregard content, but there are thought leaders, celebrities, VIPs, or just people who have been involved in the crypto community for a long time, and as a result, Steem Power flows to these people. I guess you would call these people top bloggers, and this may be the case, but to be a top blogger takes years of blogging, and it's not like they just came on Steemit from no where and get $10,000 or $20,000 posts.

I don't think you can separate **"value of the person"** from **"value of the post"** when reputation is what we are talking about and Steem Power gives a person more power if they are a top poster. Basically whales have a certain status, and Steem Power is the currency of status, and I think the trick is to make it more fun for people to compete for that status (gamification), but I don't see a way where you can cap in any direction without unintended consequences. 

The rich yet uninvolved investor example
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For example if I don't know anyone in this community, never post, never care about crypto, Steemit, don't share any values except profit motive, but I work for a big company, and my company pays me a very high salary which most people might see as dramatically unfair (way more unfair than these $20,000 posts), then I of course would be free to use my acquired dollars no matter how I acquired them, to buy unfathomable amounts of Steem Power, and there is no cap on me when I want to buy reputation.

So I would be able to buy without limits? But people who actually care about Steemit but who have nothing but time, cannot ever compete with my ability to simply buy whale status? I think that is the source of the problem. At least as it is now, while it might not be fair, it's equally unfair to everyone. The random rich person buying Steem Power will never know if some random poster could get a $50,000 post, multiple times, and become their equal. In a Steemit where there is a $500 cap, **it will become just like the block size cap on Bitcoin** and people who are filthy rich will have unfair advantages over people who have to earn whale power on Steemit. I'm not convinced the cap will be easy to raise once you set that kind of precedent, and I think corporations might love such a cap because it means bloggers can't really acquire Steem Power at the same rate when you consider there is also a frequent post cap.


Steemit as a Social Computer
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In order for Steemit to function as a social computer, it has to compute something. Steemit currently can compute the value of a blog post in relation to the market cap of the Steemit community. This is an incredibly interesting experiment because for the first time ever, people who have been blogging for years, can finally see what their blog posts are really worth to the community.  This ability for the blogger to see the truth in terms of worth of his or her posts is lost if there is an artificial cap in terms of some socially meaningless dollar value.


Why empower the dollar?
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I understand people need to earn dollars to pay bills. I'm one of the people who has bills to pay. At the same time there is no real way to determine the true value of a dollar. I don't know what a dollar is worth because it's worth something different to different people. The only way I can know what it's worth is in relation to other dollars which also really have nothing more than subjective worth, but what the dollar does is allow us to pay our taxes, pay our bills, and sustain ourselves.

But what is the dollar in relation to Steem Power? It's not reputation. A person with a high net worth in banking should not be able to simply leverage that to buy as much Steem Power as they like while those who have to earn it with time must compete for it and on top of that deal with both a "reward cap" and a post frequency cap. In this way there is now a maximum amount that any blogger can get in terms of Steem Power no matter how good their posts, no matter how hard they work. This approach in my opinion of having the cap would have short term benefits in exchange for long term pain.


The Steemit community ultimately is going to divide
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It seems the Steemit community is ultimately going to divide, so the question is how would we like to see it divide? As the community gets big there will be a clash between people who think there should be a reward cap and people who don't. In fact, there are also people who are saying Steemit should have a minimum reward akin to a minimum wage such as what Trevon says in this video: https://youtu.be/rahImw2qjv8


My opinions and thoughts
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I think @craig and @trevonjb mean well and want to create a Steemit which is perceived as fair. Unfortunately I think due to game theory and other reasons, there is no way to make one part of Steemit fair without adversely effecting other parts of Steemit. In addition, I notice the people who are trying to make Steemit fair are focused very much on the dollar payouts instead of the Steem Power flow. The flow of Steem Power to top bloggers in my opinion is necessary if the whales are powering down, and if the power is distributed to everyone equally then it becomes a lot less fun for people who play to win.

In my opinion, the key to Steemit success is gamification. The idea is to make the pursuit of Steem Power a fun process. The casino element is controversial but it does add an element of unpredictability and fun for some players. Seeing Steemit as a game is another dividing point because not everyone sees Steemit in that way. So I propose people try looking at Steemit as a "Social Computation Game" and mutual aid society. If it's a Social Computation Game then it has to actually compute something, which means putting some kind of cap on the output would make the results completely meaningless even if it would spread the money a bit more. It would be like having a cap on prices or on salaries in sports, and then with that you can never have the super star athlete.

There is indication that you can run a sports organization with the salary caps. There is also the model used by the UFC which is a very top down model where fighters don't have much room to negotiate their salary yet fighters get retirement benefits in exchange. The thing about sports is that you don't have a very long career in sports, and you make as much as you can while you are in your prime because you are an independent contractor, there is no retirement fund to take care of you when you get old, and in a way bloggers face the same realities.


Bloggers as athletes 
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If we like we can think of bloggers like we think of athletes. There is a very low chance of making it into the NBA and everyone knows this, but people try their best because of the chance to get rich. People also lose their money just as quickly because the time in the sun is very brief. In social media or blogging it's even more brief than in sports and a person can literally have one year in the spotlight and never be heard from again. It's literally 15 minutes of fame for some people.

A cap puts a limit to this and even if a post goes viral it's limited to $500? It might be perceived as fair to some, and in some short term view it might diversify the content a little bit, at the same time it will create a long term divide, and cause long term controversies, and there are many problems which would only become apparent when you have hundreds of millions to millions of bloggers but which aren't currently apparent now. 


My list of solutions
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 - Raise appeal of Steem Power through gamification. Steemit has to be fun just like WoW is fun, and people must buy Steem Power in pursuit of fun not just profit.  
 - Rather than a reward cap, instead a reward shift. Shift the percentage toward Steem Power and away from Steem Dollars if the reward becomes above $500. In this way the person still get much more Steem Power and a lot less Steem Dollars but the Steem Power flow will remain in favor of bloggers.

 
**Additional notes:** A popular complaint is that the top payout or trending blogs now are mostly people talking about Steem, or crypto, or anarchism, and this to me is no different from a month ago when people complained that Steemit was rewarding travel bloggers and the highest post was a make up tutorial. People are going to always complain about whomever is popular at the time, and when Steemit trending was rewarding mainstream people, there were just as much complaints as today. In my opinion, it's not possible to make everyone happy all the time, and when posting anywhere else a person has no expectation to make profit, yet because the dollars are in everyone's face *UI*, it encourages people to think about the dollar more than anything else. This may be solved with improvements to the UI, and these improvements to the UI can also help people find similar posts from the same author or other posts voted up by the same group of voters. 

References
1. https://www.weusecoins.com/why-blocksize-limit-keeps-bitcoin-free-decentralized/
2. http://www.boxinginsider.com/headlines/floyd-mayweather-manny-pacquiao-purse-exceeds-nfl-team-salary-cap/ 
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salary_cap 
4. http://www.bloodyelbow.com/2016/6/23/12011036/white-defends-ufc-pay-fighters-make-a-lot-of-money-were-on-par-with