Reminds me of this article I read recently.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/may/29/the-financial-scandal-no-one-is-talking-about-big-four-accountancy-firms

You can't really entrust a group of individuals to guard a system when they are profiting from the brokenness of it. External market factors only temporarily mask how damaging the net behavior of all of these activities really are.

I am honestly not a fan of n > 1. I think we have already been seeing a race to the bottom with the cuts the bidbots are taking, but as they give more and more rewards to compete against each other they only become more attractive investment choices for those who delegate to them.

There is not enough combined sentiment+voting power to combat what is approaching a majority bidbot environment.

I think the major issue since the inception of steemit has been the distribution of steem caused there to be too few tastemakers, which narrowed the channel of content that was acceptable to those whose votes mattered, driving away a broader userbase whose interests fall outside of that spectrum of favored topic content creators.

This created a feedback loop of sorts wherein we have seen over time a slight distribution out towards those who write articles deemed favorable by those few individuals, they in turn continue to write what they've always been writing with an aim towards pleasing those same individuals, which is why the number of medium-sized SP holders who all write with very similar biases outnumbers those with varied interests and views.

And if steemit attracted some people over time who were interested only in investing and growing their investments, then they would naturally gravitate towards bidbots and other profit-making services, as they bought in with little to no intention of involving themselves in anything other than the money-related aspects of steemit. I think there were very few "true" idealists in crypto to begin with who found themselves on the platform, and they are outnumbered by those who have no desire to change any systems or rock and boats and are content to maximize within whatever system is available to them.

After the raid at Upbit we can see that Upbit volume of STEEM trading is already being outpaced by Huobi and even Binance, so now that we have potentially lost the Upbit frenzy upside potential I think it is due time for the markets to punish and properly price large steem holders who have been content with the status quo for too long.

Not to say that I think that it did not take some balls to hold a giant steem bag throughout the rise and fall of this past trading season, but I do think that because the rising tide lifted all ships it had lulled many into thinking that what they were doing with their SP was not that damaging to steem and steemit's future, which I think is totally wrong-minded if we look deeper at the economic realities and continued disinterest in steemit by an apathetic general public in many regions and user types.

If steemit was really doing as well as many claim it is, then, well, I don't know what to say to them, I would just ask them why aren't more people using this site recreationally from the middle band of the global income spectrum. As opposed to just being "forced" to use the platform as a means to potentially earn wages because of lack of other opportunities in their respective countries on the low end, or the idea that they can get rich if they use a stack of money to print more money on the high end.