Hello fellow Steemers! I write for you today in the humblest way I possibly can.
Steemit is more than just a ponzi like Onecoin, the latter actually a totally legit scheme by the way, nothing wrong with it in the eyes of the law. Steemit influencers (the whales and those who pre-mined before ninja-launching) plays on the foolishness of influencers in other areas, voting for them to gather more audience which equals more investors, which equals more value to the tokens and actual liquidity for the tokens that reflect prices on the platform.
Therefore, Steemit doesn't work like a direct illegal MLM-system where new users add direct monetary value to user levels above them, and so on. That doesn't mean it's based on proof of work by blogmining, as many want to believe. It isn't even backed by real PoW since the decentralized factor is virtually non-existant. It is much worse than ETC, which is a huge scam by the way. But Steemit is way bigger.
Its playground is the grey unregulated area around cryptocurrencies in general. The whitepaper gives a clear understanding of this by giving contradictory statements in various ways aswell as being modified without logging the changes.
Steemit is the equivlent of an elitist-cryptoanarchist wet dream of playing digital golf. Only the Tiger Woods of the system will prosper - this will also lead to its downfall.
Downfall won't be the lack of liquidity (at first), the downfall will be annoyance and lack of trust in the system.