We're on the same page, I'm not opposed to paying wages in STEEM but it should be more transparent. Of course, in the real world, there's little to no transparency on these subjects, but it could be yet another argument for crypto-currencies. There's such a quantity of Steem Power and liquid STEEM detained by the "founders" that they could easily crash the value or organize pumps and dumps (and seeing large transfers like that, it may be to cover expanses, it could also be for manipulating prices, and with no information, we can only speculate). None of these two options are good for Steemit, so they should be accountable, transparent and responsible. And to clarify my position, I'm all for rewarding people for their work, I don't want payments from Stinc to stop, I want them to be bigger (in amount, in the projects they're supporting, I'm also supporting Stinc delegating to community accounts, etc.), but with justification and traceability. Seeing they currently focus on becoming more of a "real organization", they must thinking about these aspects right now.
To cite the Declaration of the Rights of the Man and of the Citizen of 1789, even if Stinc has no obligation to comply with these standards : The society has the right of requesting an account from any public agent of its administration.
There's a gap between claiming to be a decentralized representative democracy (with DPOS furthermore, but that's another debate) and being one.
For the tax problem, I live in France (but I think it's the same thing in all of Europe), and the people receiving the wage pays taxes (income tax) but the employers also pay taxes (to finance social security, unemployment insurance, etc.) and that's what they're evading (Stinc). And when States will put their noses in it, it's easier to put pressure on one entity that has a lot of due taxes, than to scatter efforts on all the little amounts due by the "receivers".
Given that the steem graphene-like blockchain is a distributed public ledger, not sure how much more transparency is actually needed. Steemit Inc would in theory; not do a massive sell-off as this is counter-productive to the growth of steemit.
For the distributed ledger, OK all transactions can be seen, you won't be able to do much more on the Steem blockchain. But you can't see what's happening on the exchanges, so it's Steemit Inc.'s role to clarify and explain their actions.
For the manipulations, sure, Steemit Inc has no interest to dump the price.
But the real questions are
Who is really behind these accounts ? Who has the owner keys ? For me, it seems like Steemit Inc., the @steemit accounts, the founders' accounts, all that seems a bit confused, and with no clear links of who owns what and no transparency of propriety, it's hard to see where the real interests lie.
Steemit Inc. has interest in the long term growth of Steem but who tells me they're the ones with the real power and with the highest stake in this ?