As we all know, engagement mining is essential for the bbs network, as it boosts the cpm (and thus the money we earn through impressions by the factor 150x). But when are the funds who subsidize the engagement mining exhausted?

Some of you might be wondering what engagement mining is. So here is a short explanation from the bbs whitepaper: In order to bootstrap the BBS network, 50% of the BBS tokens will be distributed over multiple years to the BBS network boards, as ad revenues, based on the user-engagement they generate relative to the rest of the network on each day. 

On boards where active ad campaigns are running, engagement mining would subsidize the advertisers. This is done to bootstrap the utility of the BBS token for running ad campaigns across the network. (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1I2xYp0EKvVvNqtzngFy1k-l_B05g7wLJS5VSGL2dDcU/edit#)

But what even is a bootstrap? Growing a network tends to require subsidizing one side of the network. For example, Airbnb and Uber subsidized the “supply side” of their marketplaces by providing homes and cars to their users at a discount. This is often called “bootstrapping” the network. (https://wakara.org/what-is-bootstrap-the-blockchain/)

When applying the same logic to the bbs network, the bootstrap is done with the cpm boost. With the higher revenue per impression, earnings through impressions are boosted (currently on metabbs with the factor 150x) and thus posting becomes more attractive.

You can calculate the remaining days of the engament mining with the following relatively simple equations:

Remaining supply used for engagement mining * Price = BBS tokens in $ which can still be used for engagement mining

BBS token in $ / Daily Rewards = Lasting Days of Engagement Mining

Now let’s do the math: I looked up the adress on etherscan holding 50% of the supply which will be used for the engagement mining. you can see here (https://etherscan.io/token/0xFe459828c90c0BA4bC8b42F5C5D44F316700B430#balances) that this adress currently holds 496.499.000 bbs tokens.

In a next step i looked up the daily rewards which are generated through impression of the bbs network (https://bbs.market/METABBS/rewards). There are currently roughly 4250$ of daily rewards (average from the last couple of days).

Then i transferred the 496.499.000 bbs tokens from the adress, which pays for the engagement mining, in dollars with the current price of 0.029$ of a bbs token. This adress currently holds 14.398.471 worth of $ in bbs tokens at the current price. Then i divided this number by the daily rewards for the lasting days of the engagement mining (= untill the amount of bbs tokens held by this adress is zero). By using this equation, 3387 days (or 9.2 years) are left untill the engagement mining runs out.

However, in the future an increase in activity is expected, and thus the daily rewards increase and the funds used to subsidize the engagement mining are exhausted faster.

If we estimate the users base and engagement to 10X from this day that would cause the mining allotment to drain 10X faster. Now the mining will last only 3387/10 = 339 days. To combat this, the CPM would be dropped from 150 to (150/3) 50 which will extend this from 339 days to 339 x 3 = 1017 days (Almost 3 years). Also, with higher activity the daily rewards do increase. But with an increase in activity also an increase of the price of the bbs token is probable. So then the adress which pays for engagement mining is holding more dollars worth of bbs tokens and thus can compensate for the higher daily rewards.

To conclude, it is fair to say that we still have some time left to enjoy the cpm boost, and that this mechanism is rather flexibel and can be adapted to for example a steep increase in activity on the bbs network.

What really remains unanswered is what happens when the funds subsidizing the engagement mining run out? Will it still be attractive to post without the cpm boost? How to compensate for this lack of money earned through impressions?

Thanks to @vi5hall who helped me with the research.