No, The Free Downvotes Didn't Cause The STEEM Price to Go Down
Downvoted to oblivion
One of the boilerplate arguments from bid bot abusers, circle jerkers and the like against EIP with the free downvotes implemented in HF21 is to point out that the STEEM price is low and that the ship is going down - because of the 2.5 free downvotes allocated to all stakeholders. I've lost count how many times I've heard that. Supposedly, investors who can no longer get a good return are leaving in droves.
Yes, I've seen a couple of cases of authors having their posts hit very hard by anti-abuse and curation projects with downvotes reasonable people would consider excessive. (Neither of those authors have stooped to ascribing the decline in the price of STEEM to the downvoting). But on the whole most people in the receiving end if those downvotes have had it coming to them.
But when I hear people say "investors are leaving" because of EIP it strongly tends to come from people who used to milk the system and create little value. After EIP, curation is much more profitable than it used to be. Bid bots are curating manually and there is very little overt vote selling going on.
But perhaps it would be time to start paying attention to the possibility of anti-abuse efforts beginning to suffer from a dearth of suitable targets. To an increasing degree, we might start seeing cases where reasonable people disagree.
However, I've been happy to see members of the community come to the rescue and heal damage done by excessive downvoting whoever the downvoters may be.
Hear, here!
@alliedforces curate
Keep up the great work!
The #spreadlovenotwar curation campaign is under the guidance of witnesses @enginewitty and @untersatz.
Markets are always pricing in the future. Steem began to decline with the announcement of the free downvotes already, in April, May and at the beginning of July.
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/steem/
The most likely candidate is the correction in the price of Bitcoin that began in June. The pump in the price of STEEM in March and April was caused by the false rumour that Samsung was going to buy into Steem. That turned out to be false and STEEM made a double top. When Bitcoin peaked in June, all of the altcoin market followed suit, including STEEM, which seems to be stabilizing now. I'm not even saying that the stabilization is caused by EIP working well. The reason is most likely technical.
When bid bot stackers say STEEM is lost because they're no longer allowed to milk the reward pool, I remain highly sceptical. Organic curation is in a way better shape than ever on this platform. I think there's a good chance that PoB will start creating and eventually capturing value here.