Clearly voters have seen fit to allocate significant rewards to these efforts.
Nah, man. They are there to get the curation rewards because big whales will vote on them.
Also, it protects the relative stake level of those voting accounts because the "authors" won't be getting inflation, or so it seems.
as an investor, seeing that a good chunk of inflation is going to a burn is more of a positive to me that makes me more likely to want to invest
How many people actually care about burning? There are literally trillions of USD out there, but that doesn't stop everyone and their dogs cashing out into it.
This is wrong, or at least the people trying to do that are doing it wrong. These posts are too popular and too predictable for curation to be high return. Much of it is pushed into the before-5-minute zone where curation rewards are returned to the pool and the rest has high competition.
But this really begs the question. Why are the whales voting for it? That's of course where most of the rewards are coming from, not the smaller snipers. And the whales aren't getting good curation rewards either, due to all the front running.
Okay, so this reflects lack of confidence that paying to (some) authors is actually a good/effective use of inflating investors funds. You do realize that's where the rewards come from, right?
IMO that is how the system is supposed to work. Stakeholders should vote to pay (some) authors when paying authors generates a positive return in the form of high value to Steem (or at least value that is aligned with rewards; small rewards may not need much value, in absolute terms), not "just because".
@burnpost is the default "none-of-the above" option. Arguably it should be built right into the system, but since it isn't, we provide it as a layer 2 solution.
All about both supply and demand. There is huge demand for USD, so the high supply is tolerable. Other currencies (including, of course, one that starts with S), not so much.
I am a currency trader for a while. The reason USD survives because there is no other game in town. The reason there is huge demand for USD is because even the largest economic enemies of the United States, hold massive amount of USD and USD backed assets. There is a case against USD touted for last 20 years. The fundamental argument in favor of the bear case for USD is solid. Even Buffet shorted USD in the late 2000s and early 2010s, against the EUR. One of the worst trade BRK-A did in their entire history. Now, Buffet has very deep pocket, so he managed his loosing trade much better than a regular individual or a govt., but still he incur massive losses that would have broken almost any other entity.
My point is, as long as Chinese Govt, and Chinese Private equity funds, and rest of the world's private equity funds continue to hold US Govt. Bonds and USD backed assets. There is nothing that is going to happen to USD.
Ask yourself the question: What else would you rather buy? Euro? LOL. That is similar to buying Iraqi Dinar! :)
That. I can agree.