I find it quite fascinating to see the effects of the EiP unfolding. On the one hand, there are results I didn't fully expect and on the other hand, there are those results that I was very certain would come into fruition.
The latter also includes the rising amount of people powering up Steem.
Green is powered up, but there is also the Steemit Inc. powerdown missing in yellow, as they've paused it this month - Source
But why? What exactly did change, that gave people a bigger incentive to convert Steem to Steempower?
It's quite simple: higher curation rewards
With 50/50, the amount you can earn by simply curating with the best intentions in mind is easily on par with self-voting and selling-votes. Or in other words: you can easily gain 20%+ APR on your stake, simply by upvoting content.
The voting action is obviously not that difficult, but what matters here is the staked Steempower. The more Steempower you own, the higher your curation rewards will be. And if you're already holding Steem or are thinking about it, why not power it up and give yourself a nice return on investment, even by distributing the currency even further.
Most likely not.
I do believe we're currently in a very good spot for the individual curators, as the amount of active users is lower and free downvotes are being utilized, which results in the rewad-pool growing bigger than previously and every active user has a bigger slice of the pie.
But, there is a good chance, that we will not have this type of curation inflation forever. There are pros and cons for and against the reward pool, most prominently the fact that it requires active participation, which might hinder completely passive investors from buying Steem, as the inflation is still somewhat high and if they're not participating in the inflation-game, they're losing out.
So my personal opinion (and this is not to be taken as financial advice) is as follows:
Steem could very likely have a different distribution method in the future. It might even have drastically reduced inflation. Resulting in a much harder time earning Steem. And curation & author rewards really are just different types of distributing the currency. At some point, we might not even need to give away that much of the currency anymore, as the demand might even be enough on its own.
And when that happens: do you want to be the person who missed out on earning a good sum of STEEM by simply curating content?
I don't! That's why I powered up another 70k STEEM.
Wolf
PS: I do want to mention that STEEM, like any cryptocurrency, could also go to 0 or lose even more in value. Whether this happens, neither I nor anybody else can tell you. So make sure you're aware of the risks! :)
