Yeah Ripple is terrible from so many angles. I held my nose and purchased some of that garbage and then peaced out on most of it. You just have to use it and lose it. STEEM has pretty bad distribution when it boils down to it. The STEEMIT account has so much and then there are like 10 or 20 whales that really have a very large percentage of the pie. All the initial STEEM was basically mined for around $5000 worth of electricity. So just imagine someone spending $500 or $1000 and mining an unfair distribution and ending up with accounts worth millions and then being a god king on here and being able to pay themselves and earning more and more. That is why in 2016 a lot of people who got on here just rolled their eyes and peaced out.

Oddly enough some of these Bitcoin forks end up with a really solid distribution because it leverages the distribution of Bitcoin plus the Satoshi coins are unlikely to move much and it is unclear if some of the other big accounts are still able to control their funds and recover the forks in the future as well.

I get what you are saying about some of these countries being rough to really make a go at things. I think our biggest disadvantage here is how everything is pretty expensive. Same with a lot of European countries. So much tax and insurance and so on and so forth so a person has to overcome that.

From everything I have read and seen it almost seems like if you go to some of these places like Thailand, Costa Rica, Mexico, Argentina......etc with our knowledge and some money a person could really live a lot better than you could here because you can be comparatively rich compared to a large portion of the population.

Another thing besides the distribution issue that STEEM suffers from is that it is easy for Investors to be getting "dumped on" by all the people trying to earn extra income off this platform. So it can create an imbalance of people cashing out. But it is an attractive investment in other ways because of the potential to earn. So hopefully that can balance itself out in the end.

I hate to say it but automated upvote bots actually are an enticing thing for investors with bigger pockets. If a person can earn 20% return / year off of it and they see long term potential in the ecosystem as a whole they could take a chance on it for sure.

I can see this clear vision for STEEM where in one platform such as STEEMIT or BUSY a person will be able to do all the live streaming , post videos, post pictures and video from a mobile app. Like everything will be on one platform.

I'm actually surprised someone with deeper pockets hasn't gotten funding to really take everything that is here already and make one new platform that will do it all based on this tech. I know there is going to be Appics which is supposed to be built on a SMT but that isn't out yet and the issues with anything built on a SMT is that it also suffers from the poor distribution of STEEM because a person has to buy STEEM to have power in a SMT application.

Over all we need to do what we can to really create a better more consistent payout and then when these other platforms come online we take the alliance over there as well and move as a crew onto every platform like that.