It has gotten to the point where reading "updates" from st-ink that they force to the top of your feed is just a complete an utter waste of time, filled with false "hope" for things that aren't even essential for positive advancement of the platform or community anyway (and most people do not really care about). The biggest REAL problem for the value as Steem as a currency is obviously bc st-ink is cashing out 500,000 Steem a day, which even at $0.25 is still $100,000 USD per day! How much Steem do they need to cash out before they will let the value recover somewhat?! There are many people (including myself) that would love to be able to cash out some of their earnings at a decent value that we originally powered up bc of our faith in the platform, or maybe even pre-order some Steem silver rounds with Steem if it was even worth $1.... the same round project in which Ned was delivered an original one from 2017 and did not even take the time to post a photo (let alone a short article) about it on Steem to help promote the Steem silver round project (like there would have been anyone with more influence to help).

Ned just needs to stop cashing out copious amounts of Steem every day and stay the F out of Steem community affairs and development from now on. SMT's are a dead initiative bro, no offense - but let's be real (and communities, lol, we have our own, very well established communities thank you). I cant think of anyone who actually wanted SMTs to exist here in the first place anyway (aside from those that spent a ridiculous amount of time and money creating projects designed for SMTs only to loose their investments due to them not ever being released, let alone in the scheduled time frame - all those peeps are dead in the water with those SMT deals atm - but hey, who's fault is that?)

Aside from the collapsed price of Steem, and the obvious ecosystem detriments like the abuse of bidbots and the uneven distribution of wealth, putting most of the power in the hands of the few, who for the most part do not care about quality anything (why does this sound so familiar...) - STEEM as a community is THRIVING! Steempeak is kickin' SteemMosters has taken off like wildfire, Hashkings is about to release a VR version of the platform, the WeedCash network is just fucking awesome for many reasons, Steem Engine is providing custom forms of everything SMTs failed on which is bonkers, and even Dtube has made drastic improvements with some super ingenious server saving developments and developed a token and blockchain of its own... while all St-ink ever seems to be concerned with is how can we run things more cheaply while still cashing out as much as we can and ignoring user's amazing suggestions that can actually help things.. Its almost as if they want to keep the price down and the community subjugated.

All I can say is, give the people their platform, your screwing it up like a government screws up its country. We do not need your centralized regulation and power structure any longer, you made a TON of money off this, its time to give the people what they deserve, and back the F off! Be a little better than our world governments and have some compassion for people other that your inner circle. Seriously... oh and the "light-accounts" idea is just absurd due to info mentioned here and more - @STEEMITBLOG AND IT'S UPPER ESCALON ACCOUNTS SHOULD BE LITE ACCOUNTS... then we'd be good.

(turning this into a post later for more exposure - although that will be limited since I don't use bidbots lol)