RE: How viable is Steem as a currency as the Steem network must constantly create tokens to reward bloggers and enable votes (causing lots of inflation)?
There are many ways to distribute coins. For example, a front end or community can require that advertisements be paid for in Steem and can then distribute those coins to its users as rewards.
This is like to have someone to pay for the authors/workers for their work upfront and offset the inflation. Its great, but first, their should be a product for which someone will like to pay upfront. The inflation and getting rewarded to blog/work in some cases do actually work. I'm a real example for it, I came for the free money, but later bought in more (as much I can afford), and have never sold a thing.
The market is not moved by those like me, with few hundreds or thousands dollars, but from the large stakeholders, and the overall BTC trend...
Since you are a top witness with nice stake (with potential to pay upfront), and been around here from the beginning, have you used your stake to bring more eyeballs, large content creators with large followings.... build the product that someone will be willing to pay for..... then implement some sort of add sharing or whatever ... Incentivize following and good content ... All in all nice to have this brainstorming, but probably when/if the next bull market comes, all this will just fade away and we will be with some still imperfect product, but with a lot of hype ...
I've supported (both financially and otherwise) several projects to build applications, to recruit users and build communities, etc. None of them have really panned out overall (in the sense of creating enough growth to move the needle for Steem overall). The failures of the projects I've personally supported aren't the point though. The point is that no one has done it.
If we look at the application/project that is bringing in the most users right now, it is Spliterlands, which doesn't even use inflation rewards. In fact that their stake is inflated to pay inflation rewards is an added dead weight cost to them and a discouragement to even be on the Steem blockchain, and that is our most successful application in terms of growth. That's nuts.
The reason spinterland shines because it does not use the reward pool. The reason it shines because it is independent of the price of steem. Both it’s marketcap and user base went up during the alt coin bear market because of that. We need more projects like that, which are independent of the price but uses the efficiency and scalability of steem blockchain
Exactly. The reward pool is actually a cost to them, since their stake (which they need in order to provide RCs to their players) is inflated to pay for it even though they don't use it.
Well if we follow the Splinteralnds example, you can create a gaming development fund :)