@edicted,

Thanks for the detailed comment. Undoubtedly, you'd be able to surmise that I disagree with all of it.

Firstly, "rant." Really? I thought my article was a well-argued opinion piece, notable for its restraint of hyperbole. Surely you wouldn't argue that vote-buying/selling isn't having an extremely deleterious effect upon curation? If so, spend five minutes in Trending.

This entire rant only applies to Steemit.com and not Steem itself. Your perspective is one of a blogger. Spoiler alert: blogs aren't that valuable.

Perhaps you ought to Google the market capitalization of Facebook and Twitter then get back to me.

The people who bring real value are the ones who know javascript and Node.JS.

Your perspective is that of ... a coder. :-)

The value of social media platforms has absolutely nothing to do with computer code ... and everything to do with genetic code. The ONLY purpose of the former is to enable the desires of the latter.

The reason STEEM is ranked 60th in terms of market capitalization is because PEOPLE don't want what your code is providing. Where are the new users? Why can't we even retain the ones we once had? It's because we're not providing a service they want. This is a self-evident reality that the coders, most of whom are dreaming of striking it rich in a DApp SMT ICO, can't seem to come to grips with.

That being said Steemit is talking about massively altering inflation in four different ways:

• increased curation to 50%
• non-linear reward pool
• separate flagging pool
• funding development

So, trying to solve all the problems I articulated ... but WITHOUT prohibiting cheating just in case the pirates want to continue with their piracy.

Each of these changes by itself represents the gross power that Steemit Inc wields. All of them at the same time turns us into a central-banking joke.

Ahhh ... the ever-demonic "Central Bank" allusion. I'd be willing to guess that you're ... an Anarchist. I'd love to hear your explanation about why, in the entire history of humanity, Anarchism has never once been implemented. Could it be that there's actually a reason why "anarchy" and "chaos" are synonyms in every dictionary and thesaurus in existence (and yes, I know what "anarchy" means in ancient Attica Greek)?

At the same time, your faith in Dan is highly misplaced.

For all the criticism that @dan receives, I've yet to identify anything he's done to which I would take exception. All the insults seem to be ideologically motivated, allegations that he's not a "Believer." Well, neither am I. I belong to the Church of Whatever Works and am highly suspicious of Utopian ideologies irrespective of their colorings.

To me, pragmaticism is not a dirty word and @dan seems rather focused upon being pragmatic.

He is a joke in the true decentralized community,

The people who ponied up USD $4,000,000,000 in his ICO would probably beg to differ.

and Steemit 2.0 isn't going to pick up as much traction as you think it will.

Well, we'll soon find out, won't we?

Quill