"I am aware of several folks that have thousands of socks, perhaps in the tens of thousands. Competent coders can roll their own VPN's. Beyond that, and even simpler, dynamic IPs make IP utterly unsuitable as a means of ID. TOR exists, and demonstrates that seeking to use IP as a means of enabling 1a1v just ignores actual TCPIP tech. Prove you can change your IP trivially by turning your cable router off, and back on. Voila! a new IP, easy even for a non-techy. Folks with skillz can have as many IPs as they can have socks, which is limited only by the time and treasure they throw at the goal."

Hmm, it seems like more trouble than it would be worth. If what you say is true, then they've simply got to go with a content discovery algorithm. It looks like @trufflepig might be on the verge of doing just that. They seem to have found some kind of formula using NLP and a machine learning AI. At the very least, get a competing experimental trending page that is a default with an old trending as an option to click. I still think downvotes will poison the atmosphere, and we'd do well to remember that the smallest minority is the individual. It'll be all fun and games until we get a massively successful YouTuber who gets downvoted and tells everybody to go kick rocks because of it. Then if they bring that experience to YouTube, it will be devastating.

"This is demonstrably false. Financial benefit is not the only benefit extant. I cannot count the examples that show other benefits people seek than financial. I'll provide one, but know that I only provide one because encyclopedic walls of text would result from trying to provide even a small percentage of them."

I think you misread what I said there. I didn't say it was the only benefit.

"Reducing the reasons to own Steem to mere ROI so devalues Steem that we have observed it drop in value by almost two orders of magnitude from it's high."

I don't think the drop in steem value can so easily be pinpointed. For the most part, it was the speculative bitcoin bubble that caused the receding tide to lower all the ships (cryptos).

"You do not grasp the value of society. Feeding the homeless just encourages homelessness. Wanna actually help them get off the streets? You'd do better to encourage them to undertake the effort necessary by discouraging them from remaining on the street. Public flogging comes to mind."

That's crazy talk, that's assault and battery.

"The point of curation is clearly as varied as those curating. You may want to feel warm and fuzzy when you encourage someone to do what they're doing. I may want to feel bold and daring by upvoting trolls. Folks interested in ROI will do better to upvote devs and community builders than themselves, because self votes destroy the value of Steem. We have seen that self voting ninjaminers have more tokens, but less value as a result of their incomprehension of investing. It's why we are here and observing extant conditions on Steem."

I think if BTC was still as successful as it was at its peak. Steem would still be more thriving. Problem is, it created a lot of false expectations.

"I have pointed out over and over and over that the market is what gives money value. When the market grows, which can be encouraged by voting, then the tokens are more widely sought, which raises the price. Hoarding does the opposite. Self voting plays keep away with tokens, and whales extract ~90% of rewards using stake to manipulate the rewards mechanism(s)."

We might be thinking about different markets. I think one of the markets is the token itself. So they created an incentive to buy the token, which is a bigger vote which translates to more rewards if you value and take pride in the content you produce. Self-voting is not "evil" I've seen self-voters who create high-quality content. If they have any sense of self-esteem and pride in their content then they will vote themselves.

"That's why investors have no interest in self voting: it will not increase the value of their tokens. We can see they are correct because of the actual observable price of Steem and the user retention that has gotten worse every time increasing ability to use stake weighting to extract rewards has been hard forked in."

I think this all depends on to what degree of investor you are speaking and if their self voting just to game it up. Or if they do appreciate their content and think that it is quality. It's not cut and dry.

"Forced profiteering is too. Disabling the forcing of profiteering is not forcing altruism. It's simply allowing that actual ability to compete in the market."

Tell that to whoever coded in the ability for stakeholders to self-vote. Hey, they could easily code it out of the blockchain. They could code out self-voting. It wouldn't stop it from happening, I mean, people could easily get around it but.. It will make steem as a token immensely harder to sell people on. People don't even know what the hell steem is, to begin with. It doesn't make a lot of sense, with your philosophy you're going to have a really tough time selling people on it.

"The code presently prevents altruism by forcing profiteering, and the last post I saw from @felipejoys is a simple acknowledgement of this. Extracting author rewards via stake weighting is tantamount to selling the forges and presses of a factory. It's far less financially rewarding than using that tooling better to attract a larger market, and Steem today is all the proof you need of that."

It's mathematically limited instant gratification for those who prop up steem's token value. Take away that instant gratification or the promise of it and I guarantee you'll see a decline in market activity. The reason we got the market activity we did was because of the ability to do the thing that you don't like to see people do.

"No. We're in N. Korea now. Forced profiteering is no less tyrannical than forced donations... er, taxes. Profiteers aren't investors. They're destroyers of investments. Bain Capital Partners serially destroys companies by exactly that method. The code isn't random or impartial. It isn't socially agnostic. It deliberately devalues every other metric for value and completely focuses users to use stake weighting to extract rewards by practically eliminating the rewards content creators can attain. That's what HF21 did: cut author rewards in half, added a 10% tax for SPS to the 10% tax we already had to provide witnesses, and doubled the ability of stake to extract rewards via curation."

I am reminded of the old witticism 'the beatings will continue until morale improves.' It's bass ackwards. Rewarding people you want to keep doing the things they're doing will encourage them to keep doing it, like feeding homeless people on the street. BTW, I've been homeless, so I'm not ignorant of what makes people homeless, nor what it takes to not be homeless anymore. I've also been an accredited investor, so neither am ignorant of how to make money investing. I speak of these things from that base of experience.

You know what I think, and this isn't meant to come off rude; I think you're focused on the box from inside the box. That is to say, strictly focusing on rewarding content as the sole or only good, while I'm looking at the box from the outside regarding other matters. I'm thinking about why (or if) people will purchase steem, and how the success of selling the token equates to a larger steem value. Usually appealing to the instant gratification of the consumer is the best way to sell things. If a stakeholder is rewarding themselves, it means they're powered up. It means they are not selling the token to the market place. They are not creating downward pressure with their stake. Maybe they're not behaving 100% optimally, but this is still good for the value of the coin. This is part of the reason we need to fix trending so that people don't focus their envy on the free will of the stakeholders.

"No, that's not how life works. Those homeless people? No sticks, which is exactly what I mentioned to discourage them from sleeping on the street. Dysentery is a stick, in that sense, which discourages degeneracy, or bad public infrastructure. Sticks are an inevitable part of life, and it is carrots that are optional.

Anyway, until you grasp that money only has value because people give it that value, investing will never make sense, and you will continue to understand only profiteering - which is actually the opposite of investing. Investing builds value and profiteering destroys it. That's why Steem has declined in value by orders of magnitude, and this decline is obviously the result of forcing users to leave by extracting the rewards they should be getting to encourage them to produce content. Profiteering does this to every company it touches. Berkshire Hathaway is an example of investing, and BCP is an example of profiteering. Berkshire Hathaway companies become more valuable (not just in terms of stock price, but in every measurable social metric) and BCP companies are destroyed completely.

Only because the ninjaminers can't sell the content creators themselves does Steem still exist."

Say you know a millionare and you'd like to see'em invest a few million here. How would you pitch'em? Maybe this is something you should do write up the right way to pitch potential investors. How get the crabs in the bucket the right way. ; -)