Your position completely ignores capital gains. Capital gains is the ONLY mechanism that gets folks to invest in BTC, for example.
Consider this: @jerrybanfield made a post not so long ago that showed that mathematically he would be able to double his stake in 180 days by only self-voting. That's about 150% gains per year.
However, if Steem is at $1, and then goes to $20, then that is a 2000% gain, and that can happen in less time than a year.
By allowing financial manipulation of the rewards pool to provide 'dividends' for investors - and the largest holdings of Steem, indeed most of the Steem in existence, are the result of insider information and mining before the Steemit platform even existed - then this is essentially the same as fractional reserve banking creating wealth out of thin air - but only for the banks that are permitted to do so.
Merely working hard, and saving up enough money to invest cannot result in gains competitive with those banksters, nor the early miners, so those parties will always gain more in such systems.
Steemit authors producing valuable content is a far more valuable creator of appreciation in the price of Steem, as the recent skyrocket of Steem price at the end of May showed, as that was the result not of major investors buying Steem, but of many new accounts being created on Steemit.
The bottom line is that financial mechanisms that appear to be swindles are suppressing the growth of Steemit, and repressing appreciation in the price of Steem, and that is a far more profitable mechanism to reward investors than self-votes. The widespread perception that Steemit is being gamed by folks like @mindhunter and @tamim is a huge problem for not only the author community, but for investors.
I don't know if your responding to me, but I don't disagree with what you said.
I was replying to you, as you seemed to be of the opinion that the accounts referenced were just doing what was financially rewarding, and that was ok.
I hoped to convince you otherwise.
A truth about investing is that the greater the potential reward, the riskier the investment. This is certainly true with cryptos like Steem. It is why Steem could reward investors that bought at $1 with a 400,000% return if it goes to the price BTC was recently at.
But, if Steemit continues to permit mining the rewards pool with the scams the two highest paid authors on Steemit are running, well, the price of Steem will never rise to that level. Only showing that the use case for Steem, the Steemit platform, can grow and continue to drive adoption of Steem by paying account holders in Steem, can those gains become reality.
No one should be more outraged and against such scams than those that have plunked down hard cash for Steem.
Yes, but any crypto currency you can invest in has the potential to go up at base value. I mean bitcoin doesn't even have a platform, product or anything its its value is thousands of times what was invested.
To me the attractive part of investing in steemit is that that investment can be USED but currently its not really that easy for an investor to get immediate returns. If there was then people wouldn't NEED to GAME the system like is happening.
We need to accept that fact that investors want to make money and build that in for them. Also I don't think there is any crypto that didn't have insiders getting the biggest stake on the early. Thats just the benefit of being on the inside. Sucks for others but good for them. Its just the way it is.