@scottweston ..couple of reasons Steem on first touch point ( to a layperson like me) sounds like a ponzi scheme.

1. Where does the money come from ?
   Ofcourse it is also true for other cryptocurrencies as well , it is only valuable if enough people believe in it but the initial hang up is about who is going to pay for all the people cashing out?
   Think of something similar to a bank run - if everyone on steem decided to cash out , will steemit be able to support that?

2. So , I just make money for upvoting stuff ? sounds an awful lot like a click farm.
   On further analysis obviously one realises that votes are weighted and one would not want to ruin their hard earned reputation/steem power by clicking randomly.

3. So what if we are group of 30 people who keep liking each others post and keep making money in perpetuity ?
   Actually that happens a lot on other platforms too ( viz instagram) where people would like your post/resteem for $$ , its just not that visible to outside public.

4. The vernacular used on steem can be misleading --
   Bots are available and used everywhere , a concept that is frowned upon elsewhere in the social media.
   If they just called them schedulers/automators/pick a better word it doesn't sound that fishy ..ofcourse it is more of an optics issue.

5. Convinced steem users want to pull in more people to steem ( i do too) and that sort of chain building system is also observable in ponzi schemes.

There may not be causality because of that behaviour but certainly parallels to be seen in both use cases.

It takes some effort to scratch beneath the surface to get over these hangups and become a believer. I do not think its a ponzi scheme , it just sounds too good to be true at times !!