I agree with much of what you wrote. There’s a few misunderstandings which I should clarify.

but rather we have to divide.

My estimate was for 1 day of activity recharged in 1 day, so I had already divided. That’s why I wrote you needed to roughly multiply my estimate. I agree we would need to divide the estimate shown at steemd.com.

is what it is trying to tell me that I can do is about 88 comments or posts over a five-day period?

Roughly yes. 😨😱

I'd say that you've made a good argument for the opposite, that SP is a fine correlation for resource demands on the blockchain.

But I wasn’t writing in that context about resource demands on the blockchain ledger but rather on the orthogonal data layer. The blockchain ledger (if properly designed) only has to store a hash of the data. The data itself can in theory be stored and retrieved separately if the design is correctly implement this way.

Real human users place resource demands on the data layer, bots maybe not so much unless there’s some DDoS attack incentive.

It's complicated by the fact that pretty much nobody involved in cryptocurrency understands jack-shit about economics

There are at least a few of us who do.

In theory, the witnesses would […] In practice, there's probably not enough actual money running around in the steem blockchain to pay for enough servers to maintain the level of activity and storage replication that keeps being promised.

Can’t scale because the conflation of the blockchain and the data layer is fundamentally broken economics and game theory. On a forum where we are not charged so much RC to discuss this, I could delve into this more deeply with you. Please kindly do not reply with more misunderstandings and false accusations about my deeper points. I can’t possibly summarize in a few words without causing misunderstandings. And my RC is limited.

If steem really believed in its architecture […] Sadly, that's not how it works.

The problem with setting transaction fees in a free market is much deeper, seemingly insoluble problem than you may realize. It ties into facets of design such as the blocksize quagmire and monopolization. @smooth will attest to you that I was writing about the fundamental issue on bitcointalk.org (and the Bitcoin Stackexchange) back in year 2013.

It’s not only do many crypto nerds not grasp market economics. Actual solutions may not exist or may be very difficult to formulate correctly.

Or more succinctly, "why would I pay to look at the spines of books when I can go next door to a library for free?"

Because (for one several reasons) in my idea (advertising for freemium) the freemium user can’t post.

but I'm not sure that freemium readers are not representative of a monetization opportunity sufficient to drive the system.

Separate concerns. The freemium readers can be a temporal state of being able to at least read something the first time they land there, before deciding if they want to sign up. Thus freemium doesn’t have to equate with the users who are not serious enough to signup or pay something. Actually there’s many details I’m not telling you my design secrets for my project under development.

But I don't hold it against anyone if they would like to get paid for their blogging. Some people have made a career out of it over the last couple of decades.

Some people play in the NBA, but not many. You might want to visit the link I provided.

Thank you for moving the goal posts, and saving me the effort. You made the broad claim that "micro-payments don't work."

Sorry no. I originally qualified my statement as quoted below and have not further moved the goalposts:

^{Additionally it’s well known that micropayments don’t work when the cognitive load involves the Steemians analyzing the cost of every action they do.}

Issues of adoption are orthogonal.

Disagree unless lack of appreciable adoption was one of the goals.

which is really what the subscription and donation architecture on Twitch is

Haven’t look but Paetron for ongoing monthly donations to those who otherwise work gratis on important endeavors or art (e.g. Eric S. Raymond), seems to work for its intended goal. But I hardly classify those as micropayments because the Paetron is subscribing until further notice to make automatic monthly contributions. By definition a micropayment is something so small that any cognitive load outstrips its value.

Voting systems do not have to be unfair.

The context of my point was a mathematical one in terms of reward distribution which I precisely defined in my blog I had linked for you. If rewards are distributed proportion to SP (i.e. linear voting), that is what I define to be “fair” in this context only. Such a voting system is more or less meaningless though in terms of voting having any meaning in social media for ranking. It may have other forms of “meaning,” but so do my philosophical turds while I’m squatting on the shitter.

IOW, I think Steem voting has more or less failed for social media adoption other than when users have a strong incentive to express sentiment with votes contrary to their economic incentive. And amongst real human minnows voting is basically worthless except for expressing sentiment. So voting on Steem is not entirely a failure. The problem is the whales can distort everything if they want to, because one real human whale can express the voting of a million sockpuppets.

The real problem is that there is no reason to vote for a normal user on the steem blockchain.

Disagree. I (slider set to 10%) upvoted your reply to indicate I had read it and that I agreed with much of it. Reddit voting indicates that users do vote their sentiment. I know because I have a -16 karma there because I posted contentiously about Lightning Networks.

Any of these points could be addressed mechanically, potentially without even implementing a new blockchain.

Agreed. But again the distortion power of whales always has to be factored in. Reddit struggled with how to make their voting algorithms not gameable and I think they just ended up highly randomizing it, but I am not sure because it was so impossible to squelch.

People are perfectly willing to engage with voting architectures that have no fiscal valuation at all as long as those architectures give them something they want.

Agreed.

The problem is not some form of inherent unfairness.

The insoluble problem of whale distortion is an inherent issue. You seem to be missing the point. When you actually try to design some of those features you mentioned, then you will realize how they can be gamed. If gaming destroys the utility of the feature, then the feature can’t be accomplished.

Most whales literally don't do anything, and I mean that very precisely. The vast bulk of SP on the steem blockchain has never been touched

You can’t know that because whales can subdivide their SP into many small accounts.

Flies to honey. Put more honey, more flies. And besides you could be talking about @smooth and the main Steemit accounts. But that removed from the active SP, then the malevolent active whales that remain are more potent if the “good” SP is idle not countering them.

This is a very complex topic and sorry if I don’t have enough RC to continue this discussion. I need to save for posting a new blog on 9/11 Pentagon flyover empirical smoking gun I discovered.

I do agree with you. There are issues. I’m working on it (not for Steem).