I assume you meant GB rather than Mb of RAM/Disk.
I have also said that it is hard to kill Steem as long as we have witnesses. It kept going when Steem was 6c and some of us did well from that.
I do think Steem is struggling to grow. We get thousands of new accounts each week, but the number of active users is not increasing. We just passed 2000 dolphins, but it's been almost there for months. Minnow numbers are also not really growing. Thousands of accounts are powering down if they have not done so already.
Many of the new accounts seem to be created as potential bots. Steem will not be social if it is all bots.
I have seen dissent over groups like @SteemFlagRewards when people feel they are unfairly flagged. That is why it has to be done with care. They have to give guidance on why they do it. The last thing we want to do is put off good people. I know some people feel they are entitled to whatever rewards they can grab through vote sellers etc, but we all have the right to adjust rewards up or down. In some cases that does not happen as most will be scared of retaliation by some big accounts.
Getting some big names on board would help. Dlive got PewDiePie and they are catching up with Steem on Alexa rankings. If we can just get niche communities such as #comics, music, knitting, whatever to migrate here it might create network effects that would produce growth in real, active users.
If the witnesses, whales, orcas and dolphins want to see a return on their investment of money and/or time they have to help build the community. That can be via voting, delegation and other donations. It has been said we need a bigger 'middle class' with enough SP between them to ensure the rewards are spread wider.
Steem is imperfect, but there is nothing else with the same potential right now. Competitors are bound to arise (Dan's new baby?) and they could easily steal the limelight from Steem.
Steem on!
Somebody needs to build an app on top of Steem where the economics of the internal token or coin are more aligned with community building. The Steem economic system is a macroeconomy that is good at producing and distributing coins based on activity that is not necessarily social. Websites such as steemhunt and steemstem, and possibly others I have not seen, are examples of how to do this.
Steem's macroeconomy is not perfect but actually works fine, but it is like expecting your bank to fund a social club - you can, of course, use your bank to fund one :-)
Steem is a framework to build things on. It isn't 'fair', but then neither is life or the capitalist system. What we do have is freedom and that has value.
I don't pretend to understand all the economics, but the balance could shift with SMTs/tokens and if there were far more users with some SP. I'm interested to see where it goes.
I'm not sure encoding "fairness" would work anyway, but having enough feedback loops that attenuate behaviour that is damaging to the chain is entirely feasible. Most people obey their laws most of the time not due to a sense of fairness but a fear of retribution; if encoded, that's just a negative feedback loop.
As you say, Steem is a framework, and more than SMTs I hope that SCOT fulfills its promise of being a more flexible tool so that some projects will "reframe" the rules so that their communities can thrive with little or no interference from the underlying blockchain economy.
I'm also not saying it will be easy - but it's worth another experiment in crypto-economics.
There are also some non-economic social issues, such as the ease of keeping in touch with friends, but this article was mainly about financial issues.
People will work around algorithms. It's up to people to determine where rewards go. Flagging/downvoting is part of that, but many people will just not do it and in some cases you have to fear big retaliation. Another aspect of the freedom of Steem.
Yeah that is the point. Using a new account with a little SP is useless and your vote count nothing.
Some are migrated to EOS or just have a blog with crypto donations