Naturally, our "proof-of-brain" has turned into an obfuscated "proof-of-work". Humans being the clever and lazy beings that they have naturally looked for the quickest and easiest way to generate the greatest return on the platform. This works for Bitcoin, because automated mining is only way to generate actual coins. But for Steem, I guess the hope is that social mining is harder to automate because people have distinct tastes.

Unfortunately for Steem, everyone has a taste for money. So, they'll burn the social aspect down as automating the process requires less work on their end. That's not to say something like Steem could never work. But it does make Steem fragile as a cryptocurrency. It's too dependent on having a majority of the stakers to behave in a social manner. But that requires more effort and generates less returns. There is no incentive to be a good actor on Steem. People have tried, but they all fail because they have to compete against the incentive structure.

Luckily, the system will come to an equilibrium price where the number of people that care about the platform as a social ecosystem will outnumber the people who care about the system as a means of generating maximal returns. Unfortunately for those users who are optimistic about Steem, I believe this number is very close to 0 if not 0. But maybe it's not.

It's the large users who will ultimately be put in the tough place. They can either continue to allow their "value" be razed to the ground via their own apathy or they can start to do something about it. I suspect they believe this issue is partly due to the rampaging bear market on cryptocurrency. But what I think this bear market is truly showing is that altcoins were always overvalued and their natural correlation with Bitcoin over-inflated their price. At some point you would expect to decouple from Bitcoin as you are a social network and not a "Proof-of-Work" coin.

Ironically, as long as Steem has monetary value it is a "Proof-of-Work" coin in its own weird way and Bitcoin already does that better.