Steem is both a test and an opportunity for humanity to transcend money back into true currency.
You are right that we are failing for expected obvious reasons, seemingly rigged like you're saying.
It's up to us to come together and enforce the difference between eSteem and Money. Simple as that. We don't allow steem to become money, we laugh at posts such as this until the truth is established as the only Way to Be.
The problem with Steemit is, it is doing exactly what the libertarians are criticizing in governments, that is redistributing other people's money.
Most investors aren't aware that those extra coins created every year to be distributed to the authors and curators as rewards are actually a form of tax on their investments.
This tax amounts to 6.5% of their investments in a single year and a good deal of that tax is blown away to content like this.
I have already written some posts about how to change this system and I'll keep writing. So, I think I'm doing my share of work to fix this system.
Can you point me to the paragraph in the white paper where this is stated? All I can find is 15% for SP holders and 10% for witnesses.
You can find it in their official FAQ. https://steemit.com/faq.html#How_are_the_new_tokens_distributed
If you do the math:
0.75 * 0.095 / 109.5 = 0.065Hence, the 6.5%.
Most people aren't aware that inflation is a form of tax and I plan to write a post about that later today.
A little too simple if you ask me. How do you take into account the anual decrease at 0.5%, the 10% for the witnesses and the 15% for the steem power holders? As an investor not being a witness and not powering up, the inflation would still be at approximately 9% this year.
Here is a formula that takes into account the annual decrease at 0.5%:
0.75 * (0.095 - 0.005 * (CurrentYear - 2017)) / (1.095 - 0.005 * (CurrentYear - 2017))InflationTax(2018) = 6.19%It comes down to 6.19% instead of 6.5%.
I don't have any problems with the payments to the witnesses or steem power holders.
It's a decentralized system and someone has to power the system. Witnesses do that.
If you think that the witnesses don't deserve their 10% cut and if you explain me why, I'm willing to listen.
15% payment for the Steem Power holders is just a dividend for holding an illiquid asset, which takes three months to liquidate.
At the end of the day, that 15% only provides an advantage over regular Steem holders, who have the advantage of holding an liquid asset that can be sold immediately.
By the way, even if we consider 9% inflation, it's corresponding tax would be calculated as the following:
0.09 / 1.09 = 8.26%PS: All results rounded for simplicity.
Of course the witnesses deserve the 10% but it is nevertheless part of the tax you calculate. And the mayority of them are authors and authors have steempower. If you take away the reward pool for curators and authors, you take away the essence of steemit. What will be left is just another crypocurency pumped and dumped by investors. There will be no more incentive to write good stuff, now there is, enough people make a living here, you may not see them at the trending page but if you make a grand per week with a couple of posts, compared to nothing on other platforms, that's pretty good too, don't you think? The real problem is that the quality diminishes, I heard from a, to me, big fish that she wrote better articles at the beginning, the more power you get, the lazier you can be. And let's be honest, for that kind of money, every trending post Is a piece of garbage, @neilstrauss being the exception, but he reuses finished material, albeit uncut. I can get a lot more value for my brain from a 10$ book than reading through the trending posts :)
So In that reapect you are right, the posts are overvalued. Instead of creating new technologies like SMT's to bring even more people to the platform, how about implementing a decent search, to find those who are already there. Growth is important but growth with frustrated people is not that good. Seriously, a company with a webpage that uses custom google search? I understand that it's additional revenue though.
I didn’t know @neilstrauss was on steemit. Thank you for the tip.
Since all the data is publicly available on blockchain, any developer can build a website on it.
Some examples like busy.org exist, but they don’t add too much on top of steemit.com.
A decent relevant posts and authors functionality is my top feature request as I explained in a post called You've Got the Power, Steemit User!
I contacted a developer about that and waiting for his reply. Let’s see who will come up with this feature first.