How's Your Income, Steemians?

I notice a discernable trend of receiving less and less Steem (whale attention) for my posts, as compared to two weeks ago, although I do keep getting the same (and probably even more) upvotes than I used to.

Would you say your posts receive less Steem than they did a couple of weeks ago?

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This puts attention to a very interesting aspect of Steemit - whales (founders, huge investors and early adopters) can increase and decrease the salaries of their employees (yes, that's what minnows are here), and decide whether minnows can cash out their payments or not. The reason for the whales' behavior is twofold:

• The price of Steem is falling, so whales prefer not to share their wealth (full weight upvotes) with minnows, most of whom will simply cash out their Steem and SBD, driving Steem's value even further down. Also, whale bots will prefer to reward only minnow posts, which are marked for 100% SP reward, so Steem remains in the system (preventing it's value to plummet even further).

• As a result of the continued devaluation of Steem, whales are becoming increasingly wary of Steemit's innovative but unproven model and prefer to play safe, in order to keep their investment.

There's a problem though. As I've previously said, inflation is built into Steem - the system keeps printing the currency, which means the more of it there is, the less its value.

But if whales favor keeping Steem in the system (by incenting users to click "100 SP payout" or by not voting full power on minnow posts), then Steem will remain in the system as Steem Power.

This doesn't change the fact that there a hundreds of millions of Steem Power tokens (or shares of Steemit, as they are often referred to), which devaluate with each additional batch of Steem mined daily.

Markets are aware that Steem Power (shares of Steemit) are in abundance. Since Steem and Steem power are equal in price, the market will always treat Steem as a tiny (and continually diminishing) share of the Steemit platform.

In essence, keeping Steem in the system as Steem Power, or out of the system as Steem, is pretty much the same. Cryptocurrency traders are aware that regardless of the available supply of Steem on the exchange market, they are buying a tiny fraction of a social network, which is worth very little.

And in the mean time, minnows get paid nothing, as they invest everything in SP, with each token of SP continuing to lose value, as they keep getting printed.

The solution is simple. We need more services using Steem, which either offer a unique product, or one that is better than the competition, which can be obtained for another currency. Otherwise Steem will continue devaluating, regardless whether it's traded on the markets or stashed away in the form of Steem Power.

Comments are very much welcome!