This strikes me as an even more clunky Rube Goldberg machine than what we already got.

At least with upvotes/downvotes, it only asks a user to consider if they liked or disliked something. A bidding model, in theory, might solve some of the problems he mentions. But now everyone has to make up a number for what dollar value they believe something is worth, a lot more work and cognitive load. And if you really liked something, it would just mean you put a very high bid, so that you don't risk yours becoming a future "downvote" should others vote it higher than you originally did as an early curator.

In any case, for something to actually be a bidding system, it has to be that the curator actually makes a transfer themselves. And don't allocate from a rewardspool. Perhaps an idea for how to let multiple people bid for a sponsor role in a community?

My solutions is 1. that we just remove the inflation-based rewards pool from STEEM completely after SMTs are here. 2. That we focus on non-inflation-based ways to run a successful platform economy in which we make use of the fast and fee-less SBD and the removal of middlemen to allow more efficient, fairer, and better connections between advertisers, sponsors, promoters and other clients and the content creators. If creators who get good amounts of views are able to monetize their work well thanks to Steem without needing new tokens to be printed, then the whole worry of downvotes goes away anyways.