The State of Steem - Let's Talk About It

THIS IS NOT FINANCIAL ADVICE; THIS IS MY JOURNEY. YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR MONEY.
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Cliff Notes:
Right spot right time: SMTs, RC delegation, Steem-engine, thinking of ways to scale steem for all. Steem is like WordPress with built-in curation incentives.

Steem inflation is a little over 8% and reducing by .5% each year until .95 is reached. little less than 20 years; 75% of inflation going to the reward pool.

Smart Media Token break down:
SMT won't replace the reward pool anytime soon as the dominant form of PoB rewards in $$. (IMO)
Steem will always be the most decentralized, liquid cryptocurrency

The reward pool is shrinking, regardless. SMTs will be forced to play an increasing role, that is how the system is designed. But it isn't knee jerk, it is gradual. When people rather earn SMTs then Steem rewards, because either the reward pool has shrunk and SMTs can offer higher ROI through various niche tags, or SMTs have had the time to mature and become liquid. - This is a free-market choice though, let the market decide which they rather have.

Keep in mind, there is a very small portion of the population that can even be steem whales, that's why we have SMTs to further decentralize the Proof of Brain process.

The same issues on Steem will happen on SMTs, some issues even worse. SMTs will be created by people, just like tribes. those people will set the rules. not everyone will like those rules, so those people leave and make their own community with their own rules. some people don't like those rules so they...
So, in the need to have perfection, you end up chasing your tail.

Steem inflation is good for onboarding, decentralizing governance.
5% (and shrinking) inflation isn't why steem price is down. Having a shit
economy for so long is what hurt steems price. its the lack of commitment to the vision of merging social media with crypto rewards. The same vision big guns like Vitalik and Larimer are currently pursuing full throttle.

Trying to make something perfect will strangle it with love and cuddles. FB and Youtube are savage, go read the comments. they even debated removing comments because ppl were purposely saying crazy shit in large profile YouTuber’s comment section trying to get them banned from adverting.
Referring to the Steem Whitepaper:
Page 15 steem WP:
Eliminating “abuse” is not possible and shouldn’t be the goal. Even those who are attempting to “abuse”
the system is still doing work. Any compensation they get for their successful attempts at abuse or
collusion is at least as valuable for the purpose of distributing the currency as the make-work system
employed by traditional Bitcoin mining or the collusive mining done via mining pools. All that is
necessary is to ensure that abuse isn’t so rampant that it undermines the incentive to do real work in support of the community and its currency.

The goal of building a community currency is to get more “crabs in the bucket”. Going to extreme
measures to eliminate all abuse is like attempting to put a lid on the bucket to prevent a few crabs from
escaping and comes at the expense of making it harder to add new crabs to the bucket. It is sufficient to
make the walls slippery and give the other crabs sufficient power to prevent others from escaping"

page 29:
A social network can maximize the value extracted from a set of content by maximizing the quantity and
quality of connections. Curating content is expensive and time-consuming while being near impossible for
computers to perform in the absence of links. Steem rewards users who are among the first to find and
identify new content.
By incentivizing curation the Steem network is able to use automated algorithms to extract the most
valuable information from a massive amount of content.