hmm @shadowspub, in a bit of a hurry and way behind or replies but i fear you might have mis-read. I keep stating everywhere that steemit is all too often mistaken for STEEM, meaning it is not, i know how it works. But on the subject of de-centralization : it is NOT de-centralized, steemit does dictate and the top 20 has every incentive to follow as steemit is the biggest dumper/producer of STEEM. So i'm sorry if you misunderstood i was actually saying its a misconception that's adopted far and wide that steemit inc = steem while it is not.
As for your small sites , i think i can answer that : they live by external revenue, not by dumping their own resources into dollars to pay the bills so if they suffer from inflation its the dollar itself they suffer from, while here things work quite differently, if inflation isnt tackled then by all mathematics in the world eventually you will run out of people to bring a friend and some money to fill the gaps.
Don't wanna argue ... there's plenty to say, BTC has 9000+ nodes and no one gets paid to run one, there IS no BTC inc and it has ZERO utility.
And as for all of us, i feel its a great misconception to think the main chunk or 'the masses' are willing to do so. What is the reason your average working class hero would want to PAY to post puppies or his newborn sisters latest kid ? And if they don't what is the reason for the middle classes to spend money on 'content' and if they don't what is the reason for advertisers and investors to put up a billion ? And when that billion gets put up how long will it take before its sold off ?
I wish i had the solution but imo part of it is stopping inflation (which will be really hard to translate towards THIS platform/DAPP run by steemit.inc)

but maybe not impossible, we're already not getting SBD yet no one seems to stop and its clearly not pegged at USD $1 at the moment.

If the platform is owned by the community then i sure as hell have heard a lot of community-people who think its a REAL bad idea after HF21 to spend money on a post ...
and then some ... i gtg sorry, and sorry if you mis-understood that, its probably something that could use some awareness raising : the fact that steemit inc just runs a dapp and happens to have half of the people who developed the blockchain it runs on .. where Larrimer seems to have left at a very convenient time actually , which is another topic im not getting into lol.
External revenue is what keeps the others going, not their own coin dumped in the ocean

maybe contests to give people free hardware to run nodes on if they are willing to pay the electricity and sign for a set time at least is better than paying a happy few to be the enlightened protectorate (it DOES look like enlightened despotism - if you had given the whole lowdown on how HF21 would halve the author rewards and anyone , thats where you can see how many people actually give a ...copulation... there , could see it well on twitter too when it was down, in the first hours barely any reactions or retweets , if that would have been the case, a mass information campaign, objective, and then asked the WHOLE community to vote i personally doubt very much it would have passed ... its a survival trick but it wont last , not like this, not without paid services by the company and not without entrepreneurs being convinced how this thing can help them (which is not my job) ... i WAS on twitter fast, i give my opinion plenty, i bought most of the steem i own in all my accounts so i can hardly feel responsible but its pretty sad to see me spend some leftover money at the end of the month and see it sold off the week after
pretty, pretty sad ...

to deny reality won't change it and if anything Darwin teaches it's that nature doesn't care wether you adapt or not, it will simply make sure you realize the consequences and if you can't (which in some cases is very possible, its possible that you simply can't) then that's the end, fast or slow and lingering, facts of life that wont fit in an always-positive world of marketeering and TED-talks on stage ..

anyways - @yapcat was well-chosen as a name , maybe you mistook by the only two days old but ive been here for over two years. I could easily upvote my comments to have better rep but i wont lol ... its a one-size fits all talking account and so far i have done some talking it seems and maybe an experiment to see how far i get on rep without posting (as posting is a liability now with certain downvote cartels feeling justified on the slightest notion what's defined by THEM as abuse) - if the system has abuse as a potential then it will happen, you can't expect every single human on the planet to be nice just because you say so and a lot of that 'we gotta go together' to a lot of people really sounds (it does) like 'bring a friend and some money to save the whale from starving' so if the fortune-20 and steemit find revenue USING steemchain but not dumping steem THEN maybe the price could go up lol, mass adoption has but one perk : you get numbers that become attractive to advertisers and maybe even investors but as i already said : why would your working class hero want to spend beermoney (and thats not looking down okay im not gonna start calling people 'normies' like ojou-sama would while she's probably one of the biggest normies around, thats downright offensive) why would Joe, Bob and Alice spend their beermoney to do what they can do on facebook AND even risk having it downvoted because someone somewhere thinks its not #new world order ?
... slightly absurd but hm ...
if everyone had the same opinion the place would be boring and if they dont fix it they will hurt the most, not guttertrash like myself who got a few 100 and thought it a good idea b/c the frontpage said "post shit , get money !"
:)