Yet if you were to try and share stories about this anywhere outside Steem, even from their own users the manipulations would go wild and the posts would often times get downvoted or negative comments would come up talking about Steem's early inflation or lack of distribution.

I get that there are problems with distribution here. Everyone knows it, and most everyone who complains about it has learned to do off-chain amongst themselves so as not to piss off the wrong people.

What I don't understand is why that supposedly damns the whole project from the outside looking in, when the highest-valued cryptocurrency, the one that started it all, has a pretty scary lack of distribution itself.

The entire Bitcoin community sits in a big circle-jerk above Satoshi's early-mined coins saying various things like....

• "Hahaha, it's okay guys, Satoshi is dead, right?"
• "Satoshi lost his keys. There's no way he would still be sitting on those coins if he still had them."
• "Satoshi would never sacrifice the integrity of his creation for money."

Meanwhile the spectre of those early-mined coins grows, and has caused at least one (failed) Bitcoin airdrop-clone to propose "reclaiming" those early coins to be mined again. If those coins ever moved, there would be chaos. I guarantee there are scripts in place to dump at least hundreds of thousands of BTC at the first sign of movement.

I don't really know where I'm going with this. I'm just sick of hearing about distribution on Steem as Bitcoin sits at a $111 billion valuation, with at least $5 billion ready to be dumped by a single actor with mostly unknown motivations and values at any time. Steem's entire valuation is $219 million. That's not even enough to make the largest hodlers mega-rich. There are single mansions with higher valuations than that.