Is 11m SP such a high threshold for the return proposal on SPS?

If you don't know what on earth I'm talking about, please start with my post from yesterday.

To get back to the question in the title, yesterday I would have answered YES. I actually removed my support for the return proposal for this reason.

But... I wanted a closer look today.

We currently have a total of around 201.5m combined SP.

Of that, 11m SP represents less than 6%, more like 5.46% to be exact. So a proposal would need to received the votes of at least 5.46% out of the total 201.5m SP to pass the return proposal, if its level remains at around 11m SP.

Let's say that huge accounts may be reluctant to give their vote easily and probably Steemit will continue their policy of "non-vote" on SPS with their main accounts as well, like they do with witness voting.

So let's exclude the top 50 accounts by SP. I haven't done a precise calculation, because I did it manually and I round it up to make it easy. Of the total 201.5m SP, still over 90m SP remain when top 50 SP holders are excluded.

Let's see what would it mean to convince these guys to give you enough votes to pass the threshold. 11m out of 90m means roughly 12.25%.

So one would need the votes of 12.25% of the total stake, excluding the top 50, to pass the threshold of 11m for the return proposal.

If we were to make a comparison to witness ranking, since voting for proposals was often compared to voting for witnesses (although there are significant differences), one would need to gather the support similar to a top 48 or higher witness to get funded by SPS, if all conditions and witness votes remain the same as at the time of writing this post. I've used a value of 504.6856291947 for steem_per_mvest, to convert MVests behind witness votes to STEEM.

That doesn't seem unachievable... but it certainly isn't easy, even for proposals which probably deserve the funding.

There are several hurdles to pass:

• getting enough awareness for your proposal in a short time
• dead or long term inactive accounts, which have SP but won't vote
• convincing people of the importance of voting on proposals, and yours in particular; I've seen witness proxies are used, so at least have them set a witness proxy (although ideally in the future there should be different proxies for witnesses and SPS, I believe)
• unlike witness votes, which are still often quite static, voting on proposals is very dynamic; you don't vote for the author of proposals, you vote for each proposal individually, but the link is still made in people's minds; it is much more complicated to motivate enough people to vote multiple times for your proposals.
• for proposals set to receive funding immediately (active, not upcoming), the urgency of gathering the votes is even higher, as with every passing day, less funds will be received

Right now we have 3 proposals gathering above 4m SP in votes. I believe all three are serious, yet none was able to attract more than a little above a third of the necessary votes to pass the return proposal and get the funding.

Have a look and maybe do something about it! :)
https://steemproposals.com/proposals