This story sounds remarkably similar to bitshares. Dan (cnx) pumps the price of some new "innovative" coin. What I like to call the Larimer Lemmings all buy into this grand vision. The coin starts falling in value, but people still proclaim "we have awesome tech and the devs promise even more cool tech and marketing campaigns to boot!".

This all happens while Dan and his cabal dump their shares in silence on the Larimer Lemmings. Dan keeps up the charade that there is some great new tech coming... usually there is a new tech, sometimes cool sometimes lame/scammy. Unfortunately most Larimer Lemmings think that this tech was going to be integrated into the platform for the benefit of the long time investors, but here is where they slowly realize they are being screwed. Dan doesn't will only implement this tech at a huge cost, and since he has most of the control over the coin (via stake and blind love of the lemmings) he violently forces the new tech to be adopted at a huge cost to his current investors. Ohh and if the community doesn't go along with it or he doesn't have enough power, he just abandons the project to start something new.

This is what Dan did with PTS, AGS, DNS, Brownies.PTS, bitshares, bitshares 2.0, and the story seems to be the same with steem. He comes out with a new investment vehicle every year and abandons the old ones. He vastly inflated the supply of bts in order to get funding for projects that very few wanted. His company promised business development and a marketing campaign but delivered nothing. He promoted bitshares as a sharedropping chain and told people to buy bts for that reason, then he creates a new chain and refuses to sharedrop! All while dumping his stake.

If you want to learn more about this come over to bitsharestalk.com. His lemmings are all over steem and are sure to downvote this into oblivion. That is if it isn't piled on with garbage posts first.