I am skeptical too. Lets say the initial offering of Steem had not been bought into at all by the bitcoin community. Then Steem would only be worth something inside this website. It would more accurately represent the value of the content we're creating here. Blogging on the internet isn't worth much. But we did buy into it and in doing so gave it a perceived real world value. To justify that valuation something of equal value must be created here.

Ya, I hesitated to call this multilevel marketing or a pyramid scheme because I don't completely understand it yet. Having its own currency makes things complicated. But it certainly has aspects of that.