RE: Never ending inflation - do we really need it?
Inflation is need to fund rewords... or in other words, to give a paycheck to Steems employees which with daily activity and posting increases value of Steem Network.
Every company to survive need a source of income which comes from outside. This income needs to be big enough to balance the costs of network.
In other words.. Steem need a business model. In theory this could be ads or some premium features... but I think Steem can do something much better... and maybe @dan and @ned even right now are working on that:
If Steem will take a 1% fee from each transaction made on SteemBazar, then this can be more than enough. And... people will be happy to pay this fee, because they will know, that this is distributed later to best bloggers on the platform.
Right now to support you favorite youtuber, you need to buy a t-shirt directly from his shop. With SteemBazar you could just buy a t-shirt from anyone on the market, and thanks to that your favorite youtuber will have a chance to fight for those collected fees :)
But this is just a theory... but you know... we can make this happen :)
Having a profitable business model would be nice but it's not crucial IMO. None of the other major crypto-projects (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dash) has such a model and they are doing fine without it.
What is crucial however is for Steem to fully replicate Bitcoin's business model, including inflation. As long as Steem's approach to inflation diverges from Bitcoin's, there is no real-life proof that Steem's business model has a chance to work. It's all just an unproved theory, never tried before.
I still have not found a good answer to this question: why do we need inflation to stay constant? The only argument I hear is this: "Inflation needs to stay high and at a fixed level because once Steem has millions of users it will need a lot funds for rewards". But the thing Steem does not have millions of users right now and is likely to go bankrupt before it can reach this kind of traction.
In other words, I find this approach quite disconnected from reality. I wonder how much more the price needs to tank before we revise our inflation strategy. The current one is clearly not working.