I will concede that I did not believe that the merit distribution would drop so low because I presumed that more people would spend their smerits as they learned about the system and there would be a kind of rippling effect from the continued spending, and I also presumed that sources would either continue to spend or perhaps increase their spending as they got used to the system... which seems to NOT be happening.
In the past week (from Friday to Friday), 3481 Merit points were transfered. That's 3481/7*30=14918 per 30 days.It would be interesting to see how many of those came from Merit sources, who generate up to 19500 sMerit in the same period. But since not all Merit sources are known, I won't try to get the number.
Perhaps through inference some of that could be determined, but there still remains a bit of difficulties to infer the level of source for each source member who had been inferred to be a source.
Many of us recognize the saying that a house of cards built upon inference built upon inference built upon inference has some difficulties standing.
Surely it seems to be a reasonable inference that a decent amount of the drop in the smerit spending amount is likely coming from the fact that regular members have largely spent their initial distribution (those active members who were inclined to spend their smerits), and likely another reasonable inference is that not all the smerits are coming from sources - perhaps 15% or more are coming from non source members.
I've still never been able to empty my source sMerit, and "my own" sMerit has now piled up to exactly 300. From now on, I'll try to keep my source sMerit under 10 (and 0 would be fine too). If it's higher (as it is now, I'll Merit more posts.
I've started this right now, meriting 8 different posts in 2-3 seconds (yes, I try to break my record ).
I've started this right now, meriting 8 different posts in 2-3 seconds (yes, I try to break my record
).It seems to me that one of theymos's more recent disclosures about the replenishment of source merits does seem to provide an incentive for merit sources to spend their source smerits sooner rather than later, because they replenish 30 days from the time that you spend them. So that is a nice little built in incentive for any merit source (who likes being a merit source) to readily and eagerly spend his/her source merits.
Again, regarding your non-source smerits, it seems completely in your discretion whether you want to keep 100 of those or 300 or 500 or some other number or even to NEVER spend them. I would be against theymos creating any kind of decay rule regarding those nonsource smerits; however, I would have NO objection if he were to figure out some kind of incentive system to get folks to spend some of their nonsource smerits. I am not sure what that would be, but with things like smerits it seems that carrots would be psychologically better than sticks... especially for any of the libertarian minded members, which there are some of those in bitcoinlandia, including this forum, as you likely have realized ... you might be inclined in that direction, yourself?
