When I say that Steem is an "Austrian Ponzi Scheme", I mean that it is "designed by people who are very savvy in Austrian/real economics". Regardless, many people seem to be operating with a very unclear understanding of the relationship between Steem and content creation.
From what I've come to understand, a vast quantity of Steem coins were initially mined at very low cost by Steemit founders (in somewhat of a shady fashion, as has been detailed at length elsewhere). THE STEEM YOU ACQUIRE BY CREATING CONTENT IS PAID TO YOU BY STEEMIT. Their cost to produce those coins was incredibly low compared to the current value, and the current value is being driven by content "whales" driving traffic to an otherwise pretty useless altcoin. Speculators are currently buying into Steem in hopes that the value will continue to increase - not due to any real market function that Steem provides.
In other words, since we already know that the value is entirely subjective, who is it subjectively valuable TO? On the one hand, content creators find it valuable for immediate trade for other currencies. On the other hand, speculators find it valuable for potential price gains. Both of these types of Steem users can see great short term gains, and have realized those in fact.
However, let's analyze the above from a long term perspective too. In reality, the speculators are paying the content creators in a roundabout way that has increased the value of Steemit, Inc holdings incredibly. But what service does Steemit actually provide, other than a content platform with a voting system (that could probably be purchased from a software mill for $39.95 plus customization costs)??? Other than that, the only real thing they're doing is bringing in one type of investor (speculators) to pay off another type of investor (content creators) while retaining the vast majority of the speculator's money in the form of increased speculative market "value" on their own stock of very cheaply mined Steem altcoins.
In essence, so long as the founders of Steemit can keep up the image of stability by dumping some portion of their Steem on more and more high value content creators who'll continually attract ever greater levels of traffic, the speculators may keep buying into the "Tulip Fever" and give Steemit free money. And beautifully for Steemit, Steem coins can be created ad infinitum so that, unlike a Bernie Madoff who ran out of OPM to keep the cycle going, they can merely keep issuing their essentially worthless "money" forever. Whether or not it actually retains any market value will be up to the individual speculators currently driving the price. If speculators ever stop buying, the price will quickly collapse to zero and they lose.
So how do they keep the market from collapsing too quickly? By incentivizing long term holding. Steem Dollars are a kind of gimmicky promise to pay someone a dollar at some point in the future, but with a large incentive to hold long term - the promise of 10% per anum "interest". Steem Power is likewise an attempt to reduce the number of people other than Steemit from cashing out by convincing them to "vest" in the platform for the long term, further increasing the perceived value of Steem that Steemit sells off in the near term.
Whether or not Steemit will default on Steem Dollars is irrelevant. Perhaps they'll make enough money in this scheme to pay out all the SDs, and still retain the vast bulk of their gains (thereby retaining future credibility). Perhaps they'll simply default and screw the content creators who'll anyways have been paid far more than what the value of a "Hi, I'm Jeff Berwick" post is actually worth and so won't complain too much in the long run. In any case, the bulk of the money invested into Steem ends up being one (very convoluted) step away from being a straight transfer from investor pockets to Steemit, Inc pockets. And they're not even actually providing any real service or product (since the content would have been created elsewhere anyways).
None of the above is to say that content creators should not take advantage of the particular market forces at play here. If people want to pay you to write content, go for it. Just sell off your Steem immediately for BTC or whatever.
