It should read "experiment" instead of beta.
You know why? Because that is what Dan called it in an interview. That was my first damn clue to what might be going on here.
I have said it about 20 times now in the past few months. But I think Dan really means it when he says this is just an experiment. They have nothing to really lose as the top handful who were able to mine early on. They get a payout for the next 2 years regardless to the kind of shit steemit takes on the rest of the platform and its users.
I also think they might have miscalculated the amount of interest in investing into steem there would be, which probably has lead to a faster decline than anticipated.
Of course this my opinion. But I have been financially successful throughout most of my life and I will trust my own opinion and gut instincts. I hope the hell someone can come back to my comments down the road and laugh at how wrong my dumbass was.
I honestly can't believe more people can't see it, or maybe it's just denial.
Nobody wants to lock their coins for years in a contract. In crypto things move too fast. And most people don't trust altcoins enough to commit for 2 years on an unproven model.
I think steemit team has been thinking too hard on this project which is why there is a lot of complexity that serve no real purpose. Maybe they wanted to differenciate themselves from other crypto too much, the idea to pay bloggers with the mining rewards and the free transaction with graphene was good enough in my book, no need to go try fix problems when there is none, that's essentially what the inflation and the lock time period does.