Do you see the people who up-voted your post which worth $10, $5, $2 or $0.27. Look into their wallets and you will see that they invested in steem that is why their up-votes have a value of more than $0.
I'm here since the beginning. Majority of the users you're talking about did not invest money. They invested their time. I invested my time and accumulated over 10'000 steem in a year without spending any money.
Why is it not like this anymore? Because now you buy upvotes. Why is the price crashing? Because this is unsustainable. Why did the whales used to power up the minnows? Because a token distributed to many people is far more valuable than a token in the hands of a few. Hence the price crashing as all the tokens go back to the few with the most money to crash on the market.
You said you did not invest any money but you accumulated over 10,000 steem over the year.
If you don't mind me asking how did you get 10,000 steem? Is it from the people that up-voted your posts? How did those people got value on their up-votes?
That's what this used to be believe it or not. We got paid for adding value to this community. The same value you add, except you're now expected to pay for upvotes. Which doesn't really pay you much at all.
That is good you managed to get that much steem from just posting good quality posts.
But the point I am trying to make is those people who have up-voted your post had money invested in the steemit platform otherwise their voting power value would be just $0 and you would not earn that much.
Just imagine this, what happens if no one buys steem or sbd? Then your 10,000 steem would be worth nothing. It's just like having a 10,000 likes on facebook that's about it.
What we need on steemit.com are people that will invest as well as post good quality articles.
If other people are selling up-votes that means people out there are buying it. The value of steem can only go up if there is a demand for it.
Correction. The people who powered us up were miners. The only money they spent was on their electricity bill to mine millions of the cryptocurrency into existence and then using the power to attract thousands of users to the platform by rewarding them and hence bringing up the price of steem as more and more people believed in the project.
The problem with advising people to buy STEEM for Steem Power is that people are not also being told WHY they should buy it. NOBODY should be powering up their account in order to make more steem. That is not how this works. Steem is an active investment, not a passive one. If you invest and you just want to passively wait for the price to go up you leave it liquidated. If you want to actually actively help increase the price, you power it up and you USE THAT POWER to make steem a valuable place to be. Paying yourself with your own steem power is a very bad way to do that. That's like treating this like a ponzi scheme. And that is what the people selling upvotes are doing.
So what you are trying to say is we just leave the creation of steem to the miners. We should not buy steem to power up. We just wait for the miners to up-vote our post in order to have steem.
I wonder what steemit.com is like if there is a rule that you cannot bring in steem and sbd into the platform. You can take it out of the platform and sell it for other cryptos or fiat but you can never put it in the steemit platform. Which makes the steem that are circulating inside the steemit.com are the steem that are mined by the witnesses.
Tell me, why did you join steemit.com, what enticed you to join in? Is it because of the steem that you might get when your post get up-voted?
If I have 100,000 steem to invest, I think it is wise to power it up to earn interest as well. And as @dan said "steemit wallet is the most secure wallet in the block chain".
Isn't that what others are doing? I have seen whales who are doing good to the steemit community by helping us minnows grow.
I think I am asking the wrong questions.
How about I ask you, what made steemit so great back then?
What happened, what went wrong?
Do you have suggestions that could make steemit as good as it was before, and what are you doing to contribute to make steemit better again?
What can you suggest to others like me who are new to the platform, who have no idea how steemit was back in 2016. How do we make steemit as good as it was before?
LOL. No that's not what I'm trying to say I'm not trying to say anything different from what I said. You asked
As somebody whose been here through the good times and the bad I know exactly what attracts investors as I've seen them come (AND GO). They don't always stick around because too many believe they can make money by earning more steem by powering up. But actually, if you power up 1000SP you pay out 1c. That's 10c per day, $36.50 a year, which costed almost $1000 to power up. Obviously this is not the way to make a return but many people are encouraged to "spend money to make money" here and they end up helping in crashing the price because they don't understand that when you invest in steem, it is just like investing in bitcoin except that you have the power to influence the value of the network USING YOUR SP to vote in such a way that makes the social network better.
THAT will increase the price of steem, and if you want investors THAT is what they need to understand if you don't want them acting irrational about their investment.
The bear market always comes. And this causes people to get greedy because it's impossible to hold up the price in a bear market. Apart from that it was the last hardfork. Linear rewards make it very easy to sell your votes. As long as you can do that the rewards will become LESS distributed which will make it easier for whales to crash the market.
I already pay for my delegated SP and I use it to boost minnows. I'm also building a community and encouraging others with their own communities. I also host a podcast which is very beneficial for new users to understand how this system works. You're welcome to join
https://discord.me/votu