I am travelling so please forgive any errors - I love interacting with you Quill because you make it so much fun! I am already tempted to hit you with a

!dramatoken

Depending on timing, I may successfully get a 'vote' from dramtoken for helping them identify drama on the chain (not quality).

Will this alternative use 'break the blockchain'?

(brb boarding a plane)

We made it! And I'm already voted (perhaps pre-quality because I'm just getting started)

There are other purposes for steem blockchain, it is as simple and as complicated as that - I want to write a book about it!

Think about Utopian, who use the power of steem to incentivize open source contributions. They distribute a growing part of the reward pool to that use case.

Have you gone to trending recently? I actually avoided it for a long time, so I was somewhat surprised to realize that there is much less 'any'-quality content and quite a bit more project posts announcements from new apps, businesses and groups.

I suppose how steemit was pitched is not what we are experiencing, but to my eyes the future is bright not bleak. These ever expanding use-cases will raise the value of the segment of the reward pool distributed to quality curation as well, even as more sp is locked up and voting.

To me, proof of voluntary should be important. The other option seems to be to dominate a shrinking ecosystem, lets see how 'only blogging' blockchains work out - more are coming online seemingly all the time!

But I suspect that 'get paid to blog' is a terrible business model - its a value suck from any ecosystem. For value to get paid (for that stake you are getting paid to retain value dispite consistent selling) we need value add use-cases. I'm working with a few groups to create that future, where what you get paid for your high quality is still worth something, not despite of bidbots, but because of them, and others.