Could you expand on that please? I'm not sure what inputs you are referring to.
Sure there are other inputs in the form of posts, comments, and upvotes. But I'm talking about monetary flows. Money leaves the system whenever an author or a curator cashes out. Where does that money comes from? People writing posts and comments don't add money to the system, and neither do miners. So where does that money come from that ends up in the pockets of the authors and curators? It looks to me like the only answer is it must come from people buying the various Steem tokens for money. Are there any other monetary inputs?
If there were advertisers, then that could be a source of the money. That could even allow for the Steem token holders to make a profit overall, if the advertisers paid enough to cover the payouts to authors and curators. But as I understand it there are no advertisers, or any other source of funding other than token sales, and so token sales are subsidizing the content creation and curation, and can full expect to make a (monetary) loss. Such a loss is fine if the creation of a body of curated posts makes up for it. But that doesn't seem to be how the platform is being positioned.
I see people thinking they're smart to "power up" because they will earn great (monetary) rewards. But I don't see where those rewards come from. Similarly with the Steem Dollars token. Apparently I can buy some Steem tokens, convert them to Steem Dollars, and expect a very good rate of interest on my holdings (in dollar terms) with little to no risk. How? Who is paying that interest, and why?
I don't mean to be anti-Steem. These are just the issues that occur to me when I look at it.