What it is I want to achieve is student collecting steem which they can then use to get a discount on premium training, increasing my sales. I intended on making a steem purchase to be in the position of being able to give rewards. Maybe I am just fooling myself.

Okay, let's focus on this and consider whether it's plausible or not. It should be easy to take the emotional factor out of the running and just look at whether something makes sense.

You want to increase your sales. That's commendable and desirable! From a business perspective, everybody knows what they get out of that – you get more money that you can spend, and the student gets more education that they can use. The value proposition is straightforward.

So from a business perspective, how does "making a steem purchase be in the position of giving rewards" work in your head? First you just imagine how it would look? Write down a little scenario, a little script, about what someone would do, what you would do, and then what would happen in terms of back-and-forth or personal experience over multiple steps in your mind of how that would work. Don't worry about whether mechanically it actually could work like that, we're just trying to figure out what it is that you really want.

Now, let's look at some of the more structured realities. How much does an average comment earn on Steemit? What is the process by which an average comment earns that much? What is required to happen before an average comment earns that much?

Is that much (even that much) enough reward for how much you're asking the student to invest?

I would say odds are that it's nowhere near. I would also say you already know that the odds are that it's nowhere near. So in order to solve this conundrum, we have to look at the imagined process that you just wrote up at the top, the script of interactions between you and the student and "a system" (because we're broadening the way we're thinking), and figuring out what exactly you want the student to experience in order to, going back to the business motivation for your choice, increase your income and increase the students' access to education that they want.

If what you really want is some sort of "loyalty card" mechanism, you can do all of that with a spreadsheet. In fact, you probably have all of the bits necessary to track and understand that information on your system already. You know what things the student has paid for, you know what things they have registered for, and you could come up with a pretty straightforward function for determining how much what they've done is worth in terms of "loyalty value" while tracking how much of that value they spend to go right back into the next loop of their loyalty value. Now that I've said it, you've probably already worked out at least half of how to do it by this point in the paragraph.

If you're feeling somewhat emotionally compromised to the point the phrase "fooling myself" is in play, that's another place to look to figure out what you could do and what you should do versus what you can do. My guess, and this is only based on a year of observation of your public behavior and statements, so take it with a grain of salt, is that you really gotten wrapped up in the Steemit experiment and maybe sipped a little bit of the Kool-Aid, and not being able to use it as part of the mechanism because you can imagine it being a really useful part of the mechanism, makes you unhappy and a bit sad. And I get it. I really do. It would be really cool if it would work, if it could work. It would be gratifying. But we are numbers people. What do you really think of the numbers?

I am totally on board with frequent flyer miles/loyalty card reward systems which provide you a magic coin which can be exchanged for discounts on products going forward. I say that is a very popular and very workable road to a successful deployment. The problem is the question, "does STEEM have the mechanisms in place to make it the magic token for that purpose?" And I think the problem is that Proof of Stake is a terrible mechanism for what you want to do. Because I can imagine mechanisms which would work in the absence of anybody else within the domain of that token. (In fact, if SMTs were a real thing, it might be possible to define such a system within the context of a single SMT, which could have any relative value to STEEM in terms of exchange, but contain its own evaluation for exchange within its own micro-ecosystem.) But as it stands, to really pump value into the student subset of the Steemit population, it would have to be you, personally, literally handing STEEM to people in the community by way of reward and expecting to get some portion of the STEEM that you handed out back to pay for premium content – in an environment where you've already pointed out that STEEM can be spent on multiple things.

That doesn't seem sustainable.

Which is a bit of a shame, but those are the numbers.

I suppose, really thinking about process, if the way that you imagined it was purely votes from your account would be the mechanism of reward, the share of the rewards pool those particular votes earned would be the student reward value, rinse and repeat, the process would work – as long as all you expected for value for the students' interaction would be the value pumped in by your votes alone. Theoretically, you might could inject enough SP that way to get a very small community going – but it would be very, very slow, very hard going, and maybe not possible within the heat death of the universe. Especially if you want to do other things with your SP as well.

Hard facts, but you have to look at hard facts when you're talking about business propositions.