@elyaque as an early follower of your content, I appreciate that you have been consistently pushing this out daily. This is always my first read when I jump on Steemit.

I think the power downs, the price and the volume of liquid STEEM on the market are all symptoms of a much larger problem which was never addressed and continues not to be addressed: a broken system of vote power vesting.

Because each vest has the same vote strength, whales will always have massive concentrations of voting power which will always be out of reach from the average user. Consequently, no matter how much an individual powers up, the strength of their vote will never increase beyond a specific threshold. In fact, unless you are consistently earning more in rewards than the curation bots of whales earn, the power of your vote will consistently be lower and more diluted every day.

I think writers who do not write content under the top three most popular tags, yet grab lots of page views have come to realize it does not matter how many registered users attention and upvotes they grab. If they are not on the right bot train with the right few individuals with the right concentrations of STEEM power, they will never earn more than X amount of rewards, regardless of how many followers and regular readers their content grabs. So, they begin to ask what's the point in writing and powering up? In their mind, it's better to take the rewards and dump them because tomorrow liquid STEEM will be lower.

For curators, it's in their best interest to join bot trains to maximize their curation rewards because they realize their voting power has zero effect on the trending page and they realize in the current system it will never change. Moreover, why do I need huge amounts of STEEM power, when I can just hitch a bot to the right train, voting on the same handful of posts and authors to get consistent curation rewards? I don't need STEEM power to profit so it's in my best interest to dump everything I get because the price today will be higher than yesterday.

The only utility STEEM currently has is the implied advantages of vote power. That is all. As long as the vote power vesting remains broken and is perceived to have no real value, then the underlying asset to commoditize its utility will reflect that.