I am very happy to have received such a warm welcome! Never before have I received more than $10 for a post and steemit rewards me with 100 times that, just for an introduction.
Now I know it is not possible to sustain such payouts but like the pavlovian response, the most powerful feedback is the intermittent positive feedback. Let us assume the masses like to occasionally get windfalls for posting things they would have posted anyway. Let us also assume that as random as some of the payouts appear to be, that over time the higher quality posters will sustain higher payouts.
Since steemit doesnt charge the upvoter anything and it is used as the actual money creation device, there are no constraints to upvoting other than the stakeholder's judgement. Locking up the funds for 2 years is a good trick, but it is a short term stopgap, but still quite an important one that prevents flooding the system with excess inventory. Each week the liquid steem increases by 1% of the powered down amounts which against a growing userbase will not slow down the price growth. The in-wallet convenient purchase to the entire userbase at a slight premium creates an upward bias to counterbalance the powered down steem. At any given time the downpressure from the powerdowns is fighting with the power of a year old userbase against the current. Almost doesnt seem fair.
What this means is that as crazy as it seems, the price of steem can be sustained at current levels with just the current level of new users. tl:dr more users -> higher price -> more users -> ..
It is possible that steemit is a viral positive feedback loop and that might be one if its only big problems. What happens at a million users? At 10 million? At 100 million?
First the current website is a centralized point of failure and it will not survive any immediate growth to that level. Of course companies have long handled the millions of users, but that is expensive and with the decentralization tech it will be possible to decentralize the website.
I am very new here so not sure about all the projects going on behind the scenes, but hopefully a major project is to fully decentralize the entire website so that it becomes impossible to DDOS or be shutdown by anybody. Since most of the content comes from the blockchain, I am pretty sure that putting everything into a chrome app that directly interfaces to the full nodes will be possible.
It just happens that my iguana project is a multicoin crypto node all in a chrome app, so if there is a network wire protocol spec, I can look into having it directly interface to the full nodes. I dont do any GUI work though, so I will need help on the GUI side. Maybe a lot of the existing steemit.com html can be reused, not sure. Once we have a chrome app that directly connects to the fullnodes, then even if the main website is down, steemit keeps rolling. And we know that blockchain p2p networks can grow to any size. Also, for those allergic to google, it is possible to use emscripten and run in any browser.
If there isnt a "projects" section, I think we should start it so we can track all the worthwhile long term projects.