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     9 years ago 

    There's a couple good reasons not to self vote. The first is that curation was designed to provide rewards to content creators, not dividends to investors. The white paper clearly states how such financial manipulation is a threat to the platform.

    The second is that votes are more valuable as a means of attracting a community than they are of providing dividends, if you aren't so loaded with SP that the community can't compete with your ability to mine rewards from the pool.

    My self votes are worth a nickel or so. Each follower I attract to my postings has a monetary value far in excess of that, because all of them have votes, and most of them have votes that are worth more than mine.

    But these are merely financial incentives, and Steemit is a social media platform, not a capital market. The real benefits of Steemit aren't financial at all, but leverage the rewards system to create a robust market for ideas and community interactions.

    Just like money is a veil behind which real wealth is obscured (those goods and services which determine quality of life), so rewards are but means of creating robust and diverse communities that can deliver relevant ideas and mechanisms of enhancing our understanding of the world, and provide opportunities to take action based on that understanding in concert with like minded allies.

    Capital gains from price appreciation in Steem is a direct result of Steemit successfully growing and creating that community, and this mechanism, time tested and proven to work for other cryptocurrencies like BTC, for example, is also far more potential of profit than mining rewards.

    Steem has recently lost a lot of value, seemingly in concert with cryptocurrencies generally, rather than for reasons specific to it. It's about $1 presently. BTC is over $2k. If Steem appreciates to even 1% of BTC, investors in Steem stand to achieve a gain of over 20000%.

    For reasons, I think Steem is a better currency than BTC, and I am far more bullish than that in the long term. However, even at that low price, investors are far more rewarded by capital gains through the traditional price appreciation mechanism than through manipulating curation to mine the rewards pool.

    The fact that you can mine the pool today with self votes, and that there is no guarantee of price appreciation, is a factor promoting self votes presently. However, that rewards pool mining is a direct attack on Steemit's ability to produce that price appreciation in Steem, and this should be viewed as a threat to capital gains, and strongly opposed by investors that desire those gains.

    That there isn't an outcry against rewards pool mining by whales is valuable information regarding whether they view Steemit as pump and dump scheme, or a long term driver of price appreciation in Steem, imho.

    Here's a metaphor for mining the rewards pool of Steemit in terms of capital gains. If stock investors purchase stock in a broom manufacturing company and then claim the change those brooms sweep up after they're sold, sales of those brooms is going to be negatively impacted by this 'dividend' mechanism.

    There's exactly the same impact on Steem price from financial manipulation of curation that you would expect to see the broom companies stock price experience in that situation.

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