Can We Burn SteemIt into Success?

Coingecko just told me that the price of STEEM was 0.03849 and the market capitalization of STEEM was $21,182,199. I guess that means that the supply is 550,329,930 STEEM.

$21 million is not an excessive valuation. 550 million coins is not an excessive supply.

For that matter, financiers looking to develop products in STEEM might see the low valuation of STEEM and turn elsewhere.

Can We Burn STEEM into Success?

I have in the past intentionally upvoted #burnsteem25 posts. I admit, if I cannot find a post I want to support, I will upvote one of the bot generated burn posts.

While intentionally upvoting burn posts I ask: "Will burning the author rewards positively impact STTEM?"

Voting burn posts simply makes it harder for authors to thrive on the platform.

This Post

For this post I am powering up 100% of the author rewards. When I do this, steemit adds the steemit logo by the title.

I then decided to send 25% of the rewards to @null. The effectively burns the tokens.

I am burning tokens that I would otherwise power up.

I contend that powering up author rewards has a better effect that burning author rewards.

Is the Act Powering Down Immoral

Last year I borrowed some money and bought several thousand STEEM. I am repaying the loan by powering down curation rewards as is reported on SteemWorld. SteemWorld says I earned 13.54 SP last week. I set the power down to 10 STEEM a week.

I actually think that this is the best way to play the SteemIt game. Buy a big pile of STEEM and power down the curation rewards.

The general rule is that one needs $480 in STEEM POWER to have an upvote value worth $0.02. You really need $500 in SP. Half of the reward goes to the author. Half to the curator. You win the game if you end up pulling more money out of the platform than you put in.

You get seventy upvotes a week. Lets image that STEEM stayed stable. You would get $0.70 per week. It would take 685 weeks to repay the investment. That's just 13 years!

The long term survival of SteemIt lays with curators who believe that the mathematics of curation is worth it.

As a curator, I must admit a dislike for authors who attempt to harvest the rewards pool. I appreciate the authors who power up 100% of their rewards. I am more likely to upvote posts with the steemit logo by the title.

It is tempting to just upvote the burn posts, but I prefer to reward those authors who are trying to create quality content.

Conclusion

I am amazed that SteemIt managed to create a rewards platform that works.

The marcap is just $21 million. That is not a lot in the scheme of things.

While SteemIt has several accounts designed to harvest STEEM rewards. I do not think that simply burning rewards is the answer.

Long term success is dependent on the platform attracting quality content and programs that use STEEM.

When I curate, I look for the #steemexclusiive tag and the steemit logo by the name of the post showing the author is powering up.

Image Credits

The image from Night Cafe shows a man holding a match while looking at rubbish and contemplating a burn.