RE: Pfunk's blog is an example of collusive whales.
A ponzi scheme is a scam because it promises high rates of return with little risk to investors. Every investor of steem or bitcoin should know that there is risk involved. However, unlike a ponzi scheme steem is not just worth "speculative future value", it also has USE value, in that it can be transferred across the world without the need for a bank and it also serves use value as influence on a social media platform. The only reason it looks like a ponzi scheme is because new investors can increase the demand which increases the price and there's always the chance somebody will cut and run with whatever profits they made since their investment. That doesn't make it a ponzi scheme. As long as nobody is claiming this is guaranteed to succeed then nobody is being scammed.
Whether or not the steem devs are making a promise of making money isnt the question (and they pretty much totally are thats the whole god damn point of all of this lol). The question is whether or not steem is a clone of the federal reserve that more or less creates a system of debt by inflation/compounded interest so on and so on. I understand the steem token has value just like bitcoins despite not being a physical thing like gold but the question is whether or not the intrinsic value can keep up with the inflation.
The inflation was dramatically decreased in the last hardfork.
There is also the question of whether or not the devs are deliberately hiding the fact that people may not be able to keep up with the inflation. I believe that would satisfy the definition of a scam if not a ponzi scheme.
Yes it was decreased but even with the current inflation afaik its still a problem. Im not totally sure though I still need to investigate.
Steemit looks like a ponzi when some whale can post some lame pics and get $200 to dump on the market. While normal people watch the value of their SP fall, and that same dbag whale starts flagging anyone who notices their scam