Regards, dear friend, @valued-customer.

How about concentrating on the quarters?
Start Q4 2018. The value of the STEEM was 0.8 usd approx.
End of Q4 2018. The value of STEEM is 0.2 usd approx.
What happened?
Certainly this bearish phenomenon affected almost all the cryptocurrency market, but what happened with steem, because it has cost so much to recover?

Just this low price caused the massive abandonment of accounts that were active producing material and receiving rewards that helped the distribution of capital and maintaining the inflationary balance of the blockchain steem policy.

Then we would need new accounts, new users.

I do not know the volume of new accounts created this year, but we would have to know the real activity of these accounts.

The truth is that the new game Dapps, are capturing the largest flow of active users.
Maybe this will help maintain the economy, but then the creation of original content would be lost.

I apologize if my comment is out of place. I would like to know if my approach is wrong.

Thank you for sharing this valuable information.

All best, Piotr.

> price of Steem is underperforming (we've dropped to the low 50s on Coinmarketcap) despite the fact that it's a superior currency

Are you doubting the power of the free market? Maybe it's right where it belongs... Maybe it's overvalued...

>  Why have rewards at all? To create incentive to produce quality content that markets Steem and potentiates capital gains for stakeholders.

This is why I have argued in the past that the price equilibrium is headed towards zero. There is very little incentive to produce a "quality product" that grows the base, most successful product is merely there to play the political game. Steem exists for the core userbase ("the community") to gain power and influence within the userbase ("the community") but such politics scares your ordinary content consumer. Whichs leads to...

>  The rewards pool has been gamed to the point that Steem is suffering from poor enough optics that we underperform the market. 

> Maximizing rewards for improving development and driving capital gains is what actual investors should want. It sure is what the market wants to see, as well as **most everyone** on Steem today.

I don't necessarily think that this is true. I think plenty of people on Steem are content with playing the political game or milking the system for profit. People tend to be self-interested before they care about more global ideas like the health of the network, long term sustainability, etc.

Fine post, sir.

Imagine if the intended model all along was _never_ to dilute the rewards pool 'too much' -  but instead,  give it back to themselves, while at the same time sucking in user numbers to raise the awareness and price...


If you don't want to risk getting shot at -stop putting your head above the parpet.

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To support your work, I also upvoted your post!


###### [Vote for @Steemitboard as a witness](https://v2.steemconnect.com/sign/account-witness-vote?witness=steemitboard&approve=1) to get one more award and increased upvotes!

>It isn't wise to drain the blood from a barnyard animal you'd like to sell at market for a good price, and that is analogous to profiteering and extracting rewards from the platform when you'd like to see Steem generate capital gains.

The problem is that it isn't the animal's owner that is draining the blood...it is his neighbor climbing the fence, draining the blood, and saying "hey, we're all in this together" when it comes to reward pool rape

***

I don't think that it is the existence of curation rewards that is the problem, but rather that those rewards are time restricted...if you don't jump on a good post soon, then there is no reason to curate for returns.

This KILLS content as a long term  resource for the platform.

Other than loons like me, who goes back and reads old Steem posts?

@kevinwong replied to my comment <a href="https://steempeak.com/@valued-customer/re-kevinwong-84152b04-d611-46f7-8503-db42f4552cd2-2019042">here</a> thusly:

"50/50 alone isnt that effective, from my pov the fix would need other measures as per linked in my comment above. It should be thought of as a chord to play and wouldnt sound as nice if we just play one note. If curation rewards aren’t important, then 100% author rewards would just cause more to self-vote and is the equivalent of 100% curation rewards as I’ve demonstrated above. I’ll just copy and paste trafalgar’s comment on it:-

There is a dirty little secret about curation %, it can be circumvented via a secondary market. So in theory people are free to kick back curation rewards (which some bid bots do) and author rewards and reach their own %.

In practice, with a certain level of free downvotes, the official curation % will likely prevail in that it'll determine economic behavior.

The idea behind all of this is to leave as much behind for the author as possible while using a combination of bribes and deterrence to get the stakeholders to actually vote on what they like rather than take their own vote rewards (either directly or through selling them). Curation, free downvotes and superlinear are just bribes and deterrences that are necessary, but we want as little of it as what's minimally sufficient, as they all have downsides/costs.

Superlinear makes it more difficult to place an exact value on a vote per SP as it's value is dependent on the future popularity of a post. This makes it more difficult to just vote on something that's shit, as you'll likely get more from curation if you vote on something that'll become more popular. More importantly, it also forces all profitable behavior into the light. You can't spam 5c micro votes across thousands of accounts using a bot and avoid detection. Well you can, but due to superlinear, you're doing it at a loss, because 50% of something popular is more profitable than 100%% (as here you're both curator and author) of something thats garbage."

I then replied:

"That's the very reason I proposed making profiteering from even author rewards unprofitable, to wit:

>"...no one should live on less than 3% of median income, nor attain to more than 300%..."

My first reaction to this idea was to reject it, because we all want posts that reward us hundreds of Steem.  However, only very few authors ever have a post that gets this kind of reward, and most of them are for developing an app, or something similar, rather than being simply audacious and remarkable content.  Those kinds of things can be rewarded via other mechanisms, which I touch on briefly below.  For ordinary posts, such payouts are as scarce as hen's teeth.  

In his daily posts @arcange provides data, and has been since before I started here.  Amongst that data is median post payout.  For April here is the chart he published today:

![medianpostpayoutapril2019.png](https://files.steempeak.com/file/steempeak/valued-customer/3lW7QsKh-medianpostpayoutapril2019.png)

Essentially, the median payout on a post is less than .25 Steem.  So an algorithm that adjusted upvotes prior to payout to increase the amount of rewards to at least 3% of that, or .075 Steem, or down to no more than .75 Steem, would eliminate vote selling by eliminating significant payouts.    This particular ratio is just what Huey Long proposed for income, as applied to current actual median post payout data, and not the actual point.  The point is the mechanism would eliminate self voting, circle jerking, and vote selling/delegation as means of extracting rent with stake from the rewards pool that should be marketing Steem instead.  The only reason left to upvote a post would be actual curation (which for most people is already why they upvote posts, since their curation rewards are utterly inconsequential, as is obvious from the median author reward on posts this month.  My curation rewards to date (calculated from Steemworld data) are ~4% of my author rewards (which figures I actually do not believe.  I am not a dolphin, and I would be if Steemworld data was correct), and 4% of .25 Steem is laughably negligible, even for desperately poor people) - for content qualities judged subjectively by voters - and not for any financial reward.  

No more bribes, profiteering, or any such thing would degrade actual curation and encouraging authors producing good content that attracts eyeballs and Steem buyers to the platform.  Since the spread of rewards is two orders of magnitude (1000%), substantial difference between the lowest payouts and the highest allows higher quality posts to be rewarded substantially more than lesser quality posts.  Is any author really 1000% better than even the worst?  Maybe, and, again, this ratio isn't my actual point, and certainly might be more or less wide, as I indicate below.

The median payout is so low that no substantial stakeholder would even contemplate bothering with amounts that small.  That makes it particularly instructive to them:  that median payout is what most people are paid out on their posts.  That's what median means.  That is what you are expecting to draw in new users of Steem.  I reckon we can do better, and get better results.

The average payout is a little better:

![meaveragepostpayoutapril2019.png](https://files.steempeak.com/file/steempeak/valued-customer/RyiAzQci-meaveragepostpayoutapril2019.png)

Using this as the basis of our algorithm might be more acceptable to even good authors, many of whom are resigned to payouts of this caliber presently - because botvotes skew the average so far from the median.  If we take the high of three Steem at the beginning of the month as our key figure, then at payout posts would be rewarded from 1 Steem to 9 Steem.  

This is utterly useless and completely laughable - without a mechanism that enables substantial stakeholders to profit from their holdings.  That is why I propose a mechanism to do that:

 >"...dividends from delegating to development projects..."

Historically, investors purchased equity in an endeavor and undertook to increase the value of the vehicle to attain capital gains, and creating new dApps, improving Steem, and similar undertakings are the means that can make Steem worth more money, and create capital gains.  Creating a dividend stream from such delegations creates a beneficial impact on Steem, the community, and devs, as well as reverses the negative impact of extracting resources by degrading curation that has been the status quo to date.  I don't even provide any estimates at all of effective rates of return, because I'm incompetent to do so, and this is just a concept that is meant to provide a framework that such details can be provided for by better minds than mine.  Yours perhaps.

So the concept here is simply to eliminate profiteering by extraction of resources Steem depends on to grow it's market, and replace that income stream for substantial stakeholders with dividends for causing development of Steem and the ecosystem that makes it valuable.  @steemalliance has just been provided a framework (via stake weighted vote on @dpoll) for the foundation that will choose developments to fund to effect that purpose, <a href="https://steempeak.com/steemalliance/@steemalliance/official-results-of-foundation-structure-election-the-merger">The Merger</a>, so stakeholders would be able to choose from a list of approved developments to fund, or propose ones not on the list, I suppose, and @blocktrades has completed the <a href="https://steempeak.com/blocktrades/@blocktrades/steem-proposal-system-will-be-completed-on-monday">Steem Proposal System</a> development itself, the DAO, so the means of effecting this dividend stream seems to have only now eventuated.  Timely, serendipitously.

We hear often the refrain 'code is law' from folks intent on nothing more important than their ROI.  Since they don't actually care about the reason for the code, or what other affect it has, executing code that allows them to generate ROI for being beneficial to the platform and community, won't hurt them.  After all, 'code is law'.

Enabling those posts that are made to fund development, like the recent announcement by @aggroed of <a href="https://steempeak.com/steem-engine/@aggroed/scot-testing-underway-are-you-ready-for-your-own-token-that-can-distribute-like-steem">SCOT testing being underway</a>, or @steemchiller's weekly <a href="https://steempeak.com/steemworld/@steemchiller/steemworld-weekly-support-31">funding arrangement for Steemworld</a>, to be replaced by funding via the DAO as approved by The Merger when it gets to work, will eliminate that particular need to provide greater payout on that kind of post.  Other examples of posts of significance I am more than willing to entertain discussion of.  

By these mechanisms, not the particular payouts I mention, which are but mathematical examples of the idea (based on current data), I reckon the harmful extraction of rewards intended to market Steem can be replaced with dividends for beneficial application of stake, and votes on posts can become actual curation, undistorted by mere financial machinations and thus actually support Proof of Brain.

Thank you in advance for your consideration."

Which I hope better explains the concept, as the fact it is intended to eliminate the need for bribery to curate entirely.