Most of the Authors can not hurt the price. The dumping comes from above.
Much of the stake is not being allocated to create value at all. It is a difference in opinion on what brings value.
The eyes of the community cannot support all of the dumping, but it is mathmatically impossible for the dumping to come from most authors. The witnesses also sell to pay expenses.
Although I am not a fan of how they are approaching this, I do hope it teaches people why it is important to fight abuse. We can't change SteemIt Inc's selling, but do we have to support self voting, bot abuse etc? If people learn to downvote maybe not.
By the way I agree the funding of the SPS should have come out equally, it does need to be funded.
Agree and disagree. Yes "most authors" purely counting numbers can't hurt the price because their earnings are tiny. But the reward pool in the aggregate is responsible for a large portion of the selling pressure, in that it totals about 17 million STEEM per year, far more than what even Steemit is selling (about 9.6 million per year).
Not 100% of the reward pool is sold immediately but a very significant piece is, and of that which isn't sold immediately, a lot of that ends up being sold somewhat later anyway.
17 million STEEM/y is important, it is a big challenge to find enough investors to float that selling, and we need to be very careful to make sure it is used effectively.
You are under the assumption that the stakeholders and witnesses are better at directing it at places that add value. Based on the distribution and the last 3 years, I disagree.
It is not the tiny users that have run down the price and run end users off. They just don't have the power or the stake.
You and I both remember the original distribution. Any changes in that are a result of large stakeholder selling and small accounts buying or holding.
My view is that the mechanism which has been used for that for the last 3 years has been severely flawed and these new mechanisms are much better, especially the SPS mechanism which apparently (I say because I have no personal experience but I believe those who claim it) has a track record of working well on Bitshares.
IMO with the exception of Steemit nearly all large stakeholders selling from the original distribution has long since occurred. What is left of the original distribution, people have mostly decided to keep long term (there may always be exceptions and people may always change their minds, but it isn't a constant flow of selling). And remember, in the original distribution Steemit had 80% and everyone else shared 20%.
But numerically the inflation paid out to content rewards matters a lot. It is more than the rate at which Steemit is selling, most probably higher than the net rate at which all whales, Steemit included, are selling
To be clear, this does not mean content rewards going to minnows. Most of it goes out at the top. But we also can't micromanage where it goes. Maybe with better mechanisms we can have some chance of managing it at effectively all.