Villianizing an active poster and commentator who spent $20k USD worth of Steem and got a 9.6% return from self upvoting comments is just plain ignorant. 9.6% is not abuse. I have already shown you that I can get a passive return of 23% by lending out my SP to users who will self upvote the shit out of their own comments. Do you really think those minnows doing the borrowing aren't looking for a return on their investment?

Exactly.

I really believe a lot of people don't understand or appreciate how crypto works and/or Steemit and the economy

If it was abusing the system to upvote yourself they wouldn't have provided a checkbox to upvote yourself when you submit a new blog post.

There is a way to abuse the system but clearly 9 months on from when you wrote this post people still can't tell the difference.