What's the point of onboarding new people, if they are not allowed to sell their earnings?

I've never been in favor of that, in fact I'm not even in favor of entire power up/illiquid Steem concept for the most part. I do recognize some value in the security aspect, but my view is that people who own stake should be allowed to sell it and restrictions just discourage people from holding it.

However, I do feel that we need to mindful of balance between the amount that is paid out and the magnitude of the Steem-growing benefits that are being achieved. For example, onboarding itself is a benefit, to the extent that the users are active, retained, etc., but it also doesn't have unlimited value per user, and no platform pays an unlimited cost to recruit new users (or it quickly goes out of business). The numbers have to make sense.

For example, the SPS Fund could partially be used for this. We now have over 158K SBD in there. One may think that it's good to have those funds available for future developments, but I think we need them now the most. To be honest, If I could, I would burn at least 50% of the fund today to support the price of STEEM.

The DAO fund isn't circulating so it probably doesn't affect the price much. There is a small effect due to overhang (the possibility that it could be paid out and then sold in the future), but with only 160K SBD in there now this is really small.

If the amount sitting in the DAO becomes large then I would also support burning some of it to reduce the overhang effect.

[@burnpost curation rewards]

Maybe we can experiment with that. My feeling up to this point has been that voting should be neutral in terms of the opportunity for curation rewards and the amount allocated to each payout be determined by these unbiased voter preferences (in fact I question the merits of the allow_curation_rewards option existing at all). In addition there is the in-built mechanism which reduces curation rewards on fast votes (and burnpost definitely gets a good chunk before five minutes). But it is in fact true that some voters might be more likely to vote with curation rewards disabled.