> Only those who do not understand the politics involved.

Perhaps I met only such activists then :-) Obviously you're right.

> Most (rational) expectations were that if bitcoin started to oppose the fiat money, it would trigger aggressive reactions (laws / bans).

Yeah, certainly, this was to be expected, but I heard it answered more than once that they cannot do anything about Bitcoin due to crypto. I think it was only the Ulbricht arrest that ended such delusions.

> The establishment would have no intention to replace their own fiat scam with bitcoin.

Scam or not, it's not like they would be unable to take Bitcoin over if they'd feel threatened. Bitcoin, interesting as it is, was, is and will likely remain too weak to endanger governmental systems.

Ethereum is too much hot air, too vague a concept, and its first actual application crashed and burned very badly. So the value on it doesn't make sense at all. We will see, I guess. Steem will power up again soon I think, just not quite so vigorously as the first big rally. I am looking forward to when I have enough that I am powering up some of my rewards instead of cashing them out. But it's very handy that they get partially powered up automatically. Builds up a nice little nest egg, maybe for the first time in my life I will actually save some of my money. Imagine that! lol!

It has the essential elements to run an enterprise. More or less. The choice who gets paid is determined by everyone, and this payment can be for anything. I think that makes it Distributed and Autonomous. You can do work here, you can document it, you can invest it into the company, etc. I dunno. To me it's like a corporation where everyone is just an investor and figure out how to do something that other people in the organisation want to see done, then document it, and people pay to hear about it... You can use the structure to ... Seriously. I doubt that after the full release there won't be a move towards using Steem itself to regulate even the development and marketing. 

I mean, look, people are marketing steem. They get votes, they get paid. How is that not a DAO? Do people think a DAO is an AI corporation? No, it's a free-form, anyone can join, anyone can try doing something, and if other people in the company like it, funds are diverted to reward them. I think you don't understand what a DAO actually is. It's an ad-hoc, geographically dispersed organisation. It could be Dispersed Ad-hoc Organisation as equally as Distributed Autonomous Organisation. It means the same thing.

How money gets moved around is the product of smart contracts, plus people's votes, plus their vested steem power, plus their reputation. This is governance.

anyway. I say Steem is a DAO.

Something else. If 'government by code' is the definition of a DAO, then the Ethereum DAO was not either. Because the Ethereum developers do not govern development by code. They did make the decision for the hardfork based on votes, but I can't remember whether this vote was stake weighted, as votes are here on Steem. 

A DAO, in my opinion, is defined by a distributed database system that allows the operation of an organisation without a centralised authority, through inbuilt filter algorithms that determine how to declare a result of a decision making process automatically and transparently... 

Thus, while to the extent the Developers here are in primary control, they in fact concede the decisions about major forks in the system to the system's voting system, and thus it is based on stake. I don't think one voice one vote works. Voting needs to be moderated by stake, or it becomes vulnerable to political machinations. Stake weighting does not entirely eliminate politics, but it does, and Steem has shown, act as a roadblock that tends towards conservatism, blocking new legislation, which as it is in the Blockchain, is the code. 

Laws are often called Codes as well. If you know anything about law, as well as programming and logic, you understand that they overlap very much. Laws can specify decision making processes (logic filters) as well as procedures (if this then that).

So, I think that in essence, Steem is indeed a DAO, and that it implements in practice what democratic/legislative systems do not. It achieves this by stake-weighting, because those with the biggest stake are most affected by these decisions. In proportion, all are affected equally by the decisions, but in terms of absolute magnitude, if a decision causes a drop of price by 50%, for example, a holder of 10% from a total market capitalisation of 100,000,000 loses 500,000. A holder of a starting 4 dollar stake, loses 2 bux. And this is why decisions can often be gridlocked in this situation, and only made when they really need to be. 

It is a system that works out better in the long run, because frequent code changes are expensive to implement. If they have a clear benefit, the biggest stakeholders will agree.

The bottom line is that both position and trajectory matter.

Very true.   The dynamic of "greater fool" theory is also in play.   People pile on with their chance of making money ever increasing even though they think it's a great opportunity