While I agree with many parts of your evaluation, I gotta say that justifying burnpost and sbdpotato doesn't really help, either. If the supply of any given good is pre-determined (and both these experiments have a tiny effect on the overall supply of STEEM / SBD), then demand will be the driving force behind the market price.
Clearly, price of STEEM has been going down not only due to the increasing supply, but more so because the demand hasn't kept up. How can the community foster demand? Clearly not by promoting frequent spam posts to be visible. And surely also not by taking a chunk of the rewards which have been meant to reward good content. In that respect, this article deserves more payout than any of those "experiments".
What bothers me most, though, is that sbdpotato / burnpost take up significant portions of the community's attention. Instead of discussing and building solutions to make Steem a better platform / community, we're caught up talking about promoted spambots. This is sad, as it's like trying to close a volcano crater with a chewing gum.
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Neither is tiny (therefore the supply is not per-determined)
@burnpost, last I saw, was the largest single recipient of rewards and about 8% of all rewards. I don't consider that insignificant. But really the goal of the project isn't to be a particular size, that is up to voters. The goal is to give voters the option to direct rewards to burning, which it does. If voters vote a small amount, or a large amount, or a medium amount, then so be it.
As for @sbdpotato, it is already reducing the supply of SBD by more (about 500 SBD per day) than the amount being introduced into circulation (about 285 SBD per day), and that rate is growing by about 50 SBD per day. Over time this is very much not insignificant. (Since the SPS proposal is now funded, the rate of increase will be much greater.)
Or to put it another way, if these were really insignificant, they would not show up on Trending and we probably wouldn't be having this discussion. Clearly voters have seen fit to allocate significant rewards to these efforts.
No, it is absolutely both. To claim otherwise is silly. There is an enormous amount of Steem being sent to exchanges and sold every single day and every single week. It absolutely has an effect on the price and has had an effect on the price.
I'm all for increasing demand, but I don't think making a pretty Trending is a signficiant factor in that. We had months and years with all sorts of different Trending pages. The two things that have remained constant are: 1) Everyone is never happy with what is on there. 2) Neither the Trending page itself nor paying rewards as we do to the types of posts we do has demonstrated real effectiveness as a growth driver for Steem, nor a demand driver for STEEM investors.
If you have new ideas how to boost demand (and growth), I'm all ears. In the meantime, I remain firm that giving stakeholder voters the option to vote to reduce supply is a positive and not a negative.
One last thing, for all the 'ugliness' complaints about the visibility of burns and other economic projects on Trending, 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 (i.e. increasing demand) than seeing that my investment would be inflated away to pay people for posting a picture of a tree.
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.
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.
Tiny as compared to the total supply, which it is (at least in terms of STEEM).
I said it's both. But in the design of an economy that increases its monetary supply over time (like all real-world economies), they rely on growth to not have tremendous indvalidation of their currencies. This is exactly what hasn't happened here. Having a supply-increase rate of 7% yearly doesn't matter much, if demand for that currency increases faster. Every successful startup would show growth rates of above 50% yearly, and likewise most of these inflationary cryptoeconomies make such an assumption.
If the economy fails to grow as quickly as hoped / anticipated, price will go down. Obvisouly, STEEM was very hyped (much above its fair value) end of 2017, but there simply aren't enough drivers to motivate people (and I mean real people!) to start buying STEEM at a larger scale.
Seeing empty posts pushed to Trending multiple times a day will discourage anybody from buying STEEM ("This is what the stuff is good for?? Nah, thank you!"). Why not at least use this empty (but valuable) space to promote good Steem / crypto projects, curate great content or whatever. This is why I really don't get the appreciation both these projects receive.
Okay, and such tremendous invalidation is a benefit to no one. It destroys the existing investment and also destroys the resources available within the community to actually build (or even sustain) anything.
If we aren't growing enough to more than offset the cost of 7% inflation (and we clearly aren't, since we aren't really growing at all, and pretty much never have apart from a few short burst secondary to price spikes), then 7% inflation is too high. It makes a lot more sense to preserve capital until such time as we can fix the growth model, rather than waste it.
Indeed, what little of a growth model we have seems dependent on favorable price action. All the more reason to be skeptical of continually flooding the market with new coins.
That's under consideration. It is potentially an added benefit from the use of the space, but there is also very little evidence that "Trending" is a true growth driver (or valuable), despite the claims being made here (your implied claim included). In fact, it is mostly a leaderboard and something that some Steem insiders care about a lot about and the rest of the world not so much. It is perfectly fair for investors to vote to take a gain in lower inflation (burnpost) or a better-functioning stable value coin (sbdpotato, and also sometimes burnpost) over a prettier trending page (and also fair to vote the opposite).
Another excellent bit of market evidence that Trending space is not worth much is that no one has ever been willing to pay (e.g. bidbots) much of a premium to trend. As a thought experiment, if I were to auction off the space in the burnposts, how much do you think I would get? All evidence suggests, to me, that it would not be enough to even be worth the effort.
IMO trending prettiness is just not that important. Feel free to disagree and vote accordingly though.
I can tell that being shown under Trending does indeed generate a lot of clicks, and therefore reads, and thereby is significantly more valuable than not being there. The absolute value of these views / reads is debatable, and overall traffic, no matter where, in the crypto space is generally low.
I can only reiterate what I've been suggesting for hardly anybody could ever live off the payouts at such a low price.
I don't know exactly what such a Steem(it) would look like nowadays, but it would definitely take more example in the existing incumbents of content and media which have attracted a vast audience without any monetary expectations (at least as they were a similar size as Steem is now).
Maybe this would be very disappoining for investors in STEEM, but in the short-term price matters too little. STEEM price will only reach new sustainable ATHs if Steem grows significantly. I would advocate on spending the time and energy on building better clients (e.g. use-case specific, or offer whitelabel discussion platforms that can be curated using Steem Engine tokens or SMTs), or improving the protocol (e.g. work on improved Sybil attack resistance if that is considered a huge problem).
That said, I shall probably stop discussing @sbdpotato and @burnpost now myself and just let everyone do whatever they deem is best for the network, even if I think they're wrong. At least I gotta admit that it's well-intended :-)
Thanks for the input. I will say that people do work on building better clients, etc. and these initiatives in no way take the place of that work. They are parallel efforts to attack the issue of sustainable (and, going forward, more than merely sustainable, but successful) Steem economics from multiple angles.