Powering up already earns you 12% ROI/year, without doing anything else. There is something very wrong with "pay yourself" exclusively, which is why I put the emphasis on "just" to vote yourself. First, when you lock your power in you're expecting the price to go up so that by the time you power down you can take profits, but if the price isn't doing so, you're obviously not earning anything. Staking by itself is predicated on that, so while it encourages holding, it's a gambit of long term profit taking. You might have more coins by the end, but if they are worth less than what you initially went in on, you lose. Steem inflation does not necessarily mean that it dilutes the value, just like the white paper points out, so when conventional wisdom says that increasing the supply devalues the currency, real world debunks that, be it USD or Steem. The market price is influenced by sentiment. If people have a lot of confidence in a place/project, then it will translate directly into gains. This is exactly what happened when the price crashed in the summer of '16, and exactly why the price exploded in the beginning of the summer '17. In the former case, it was the poor distribution to a few people that cashed out completely, in the later, it was the Whale Experiment and the build up of the engagement that blew up. Think about the first thing I said about if people see this place as unsustainable/ponzi scheme.. because the types of people who are attracted will be those high-risk-takers and/or scammer/marketing types, both looking for short term gains/pure speculation, zero logic or common sense, no scruples, pure hype. So what can we expect when they enter the scene? To exacerbate the already shitty situation. They won't stay long, and when they leave, it will be worse than before, because they have not added anything at all. The market is purely feelings and confidence. Powering up is supposed to increase confidence, the crux is that right now, people don't even have to power up, they can pay themselves with Bidbots. Why power up? This is the problem. The same thing with self voting, yes it's bad, and yes as you know, exclusively or almost exclusively self voting is terrible. The attraction for steem is that contributions get rewarded. If you don't believe in that, go to dash, go to those much more successful "currencies", but this place is much more than a wallet, in fact, the wallet is an accessory, noting more. The main attraction is the community, its certainly not "ROI" or anything like that, as this was evident by the fact that people kept flooding in after the crash in '16, but, if the use case for steem, or social media, dies or is bastardized then so will the price, and then the only reason to power up, to invest, is short term speculation. We can't have people taking and taking without adding anything in the long term. Yeah it's great that they power up, but if that power is abused like the haejin/rancheretardo what good is that? There's a good reason why self voting should be Much Much More risky than right now, the same for buying votes, and there's a good reason why Curation rewards exist. They all ammount to increase confidence and that will undoubtedly translate into increased demand for steem.

I see this retard under me:

I put thousands of my hard earned dollars into steem power as a gamble that the price will go up and I get some nice residual income coming in... how can that be so frowned upon... Dash masternodes require locking up dash to earn money so why not lock up steem for self voting?

Only a retard Gambles with their hard earned money, so taken for his word, classic retarded-af behavior. Does anyone need to explain that steem is not just a crypto? The idiot thinks that omg why can't it work like a dash? Because if everyone was simply paying themselves THIS PLACE WILL BECOME A RACE TO THE BOTTOM. It's very simple, it's antithetical to steem, and it evades all common sense to think that money trees exist. What the fuck does your stake add? Why expect that by adding no value you can take value, unimpeded. Only a retard could fathom "why can't self voting earn money". It can't, because it's a net negative. It adds no value, it only extracts value, and as all finite systems have a limit, it will literally be a race to the bottom if everyone did that. The only way to make Steem worth something is to add meaningful things to it, to give it value, to make it appealing to NOT IDIOTS AND Retards, and especially to the scummy high-risk takers that are no different from the assholery of the world who ruins entire neighborhoods by putting liquor store, bars and strip clubs in already shitty places, extracting all wealth from the community and exacerbating the poverty that they banked on, until they undoubtedly close up shop and move on, an option that the rest of the neighborhood does not have. You can self vote, but why power up when you can simply avoid that gamble and bidbot, though, I have a sneaking suspicion, that it will not be long before the strip clubs and bars will close up.