If your plan is to buy a million dollars of steem and self vote yourself some nice interest, I hope you consider who you are taking that money from.
See, steem rewards are a commons.
When you vote yourself hundreds of steem each week, or let a bidbot vote it for you, each steem comes out of the mouths of the people in places that a dollar a day makes a real difference in their lives.
That 8usd grande frappe crapichino that you think nothing of buying each morning could've bought a kid lunch for a week in Venezuela.
Now you've got coffee and she has another day without enough food.
Yeah! Crapitalism!
There is no avoiding the drawbacks of enriching yourself by taking food directly from little kids.
It's like taking candy from babies.
Literally.
I've been here two years now, I've got a pretty good feel for the math.
There is enough steem created and distributed by the blockchain each day to feed the greed of a couple few millionaires.
Not a dozen, but certainly a few.
Instead of spreading the wealth to thousands of kids
The facts are that we cannot support the expected roi of a dozen millionaires.
We can meet the expectations of one heck of a lot of thousandaires.
We can beat what the bank offers, if a few powerful bullies don't suck it all up.
When we make the math attractive to the newbs we give them a reason to invest.
When we make the math attractive to the already wealthy we only perpetuate the status quo.
When we make the math attractive to people with few hundred dollars a month of disposable income, they have a reason to hold their savings in steem power, or sbd.
They can pay their bills with the sbd and earn a better return hodling sp than keeping it in a bank.
Now, as much as we'd all love to see Steem at 1000usd, that just isn't realistic.
Really, 5usd steem doesn't make economic sense, either.
What fool pays 10usd for what one steem offers?
This is why more billionaires don't buy stake, the returns are greater in municipal bonds, and there the returns are tax free.
When those that control massive amounts is steempower are finally convinced that their profits lie more in adoption than selfvoting, we will see steem become popular with the masses.
Don't get me wrong, rich people are more than welcome to speculate on steem.
I think any millionaires that don't have 100's of 1000's of dollars in steem risk being bag holders as fiat currencies collapse.
Its just that if you abuse the reward pool for roi you are cutting your own throat.
The network effect of mass adoption will draw more interest than the technical advantages of being the best blockchain.
The masses don't care about that, they care about ease of use and what their friends are doing.
If you hold more than 1000mv please stop voting half of it.
When nobody votes more than 500mv the rest of us get more.
Why would an SP holder want us to get more?
Because we will tell our friends what a great deal Steem is.
Because when word starts getting out that actual money can be made on the internet, the rush will be on to get some SP.
Because when people in countries whose currency is collapsing look for alternatives they will look for places to park their money that is a stable investment, sbd.
When that starts to happen it will be time for the large SP holders to unload some steem.
Small stake holders will be better served as longterm hodlers.
At some point we reach our equilibrium.
As long as the massive stakeholders continue to abuse the reward pool through selling it to folks that think buying their own trophies makes them somebody in the world we can continue to expect the price to drop.
Which, poetically, serves those abusing steem what they got coming.
