A: Merit believes a good community is built on stewardship. The scarcity of invites is an important dynamic there. If the system was flooded with invites, they would lose meaning and users would not think of them as valuable. Perhaps more importantly, some users might abuse that dynamic, and use it as an opportunity to spam other people with Merit.

Of course, spammy behavior goes against much of the core Merit ethos and is something we want to avoid. Maybe most important is that Merit wants people to be thoughtful stewards about who they bring into the community. If someone has a scarce number of invites, the hope is that they are thoughtful about which friends or colleagues might contribute most meaningfully to the community. While not everyone has visibly done this, we’ve seen a number of users mentioning that they’ve really thought about who to bring in, and even asked other in public channels a bit about them before sharing, which is very heartening.

Next up is the invite distribution. The most important bit here is that the invite distribution in Merit is dynamic and not static. The distribution is slow today because there are not that many invites being sent out right now in general. This is for two reasons. First, the community is small today, so the aggregate number being sent out is simply not that high yet. As it grows, the invite distribution will increase.

Second, the Merit core team, having mined since day one, have a significant number of invites between us that we have not yet sent. We are planning to pool those invites together and do some pretty cool partnerships in the future that I can’t talk about just yet. At a high level, the plan is to give those invites to other great communities and influencers. Of course, as those invites get sent out, the whole network will see invite distribution increase significantly!

One other point about invite distribution that is worth noting is that we are always working to improve it. We have a couple interesting ideas we are planning to formally poll the community with in the weeks to come. One of them is the expiration of stale invites. This would ensure that hoarding behavior doesn’t slow down invite distribution.

The supermajority of invite distribution (90%) happens randomly (we think of it as an Airdrop per block). 10% of the invites are given to miners. The way this work under the hood is that 9 in every 10 blocks have the random invite-distribution. Security Miners essentially get a small bonus of invites through mining in that 1 in every 10 blocks distributes invites to the Security miner.