Quote from: jeffthebaker on July 19, 2016, 10:06:37 PM

newbies tricked into thinking that they, too, can turn a profit.

The bolded is an inaccurate statement. No one is being tricked, as it is indeed possible. I have been able to earn $851.43 without buying any STEEM, and I know of many other people that have as well simply by posting content, comments, and curating. Anyone can do it if they are patient enough. Is it easy? No, but if someone gives up easily, or never really gives it an effort like you or the other trolls here on Bitcointalk, then it is misleading and untrue to call it impossible. It is certainly not impossible to make decent money if you work hard at it. It is a numbers game. Ask 10 girls out and 9 will say no, but eventually 1 will say yes. Steemit works similarly. Keep producing quality posts and comments, and eventually you will be noticed. Compared to other social networks that pay you nothing- Steemit pays 100% more. I've never seen a cent from Facebook, but I've been using it religously since 2005.

Quote from: jeffthebaker on July 19, 2016, 10:06:37 PM

Ultimately they are just going to make money until people wisen up and stop buying into this massive bubble.

Everyone said the same thing about Ethereum, but that bubble never popped. The fact is no one can tell the future. Steemit has more utility than Ethereum at the moment, so I can see it easily surpassing Ethereum's market capitalization for the time being.

Quote from: jeffthebaker on July 19, 2016, 10:57:43 PM

The people making big bucks off of Steem don't want to fix the system. It's broken in their favor.

That is another lie. The developers, which are the biggest whales, are working hard to improve the ecosystem and platform.

Two changes in the past two days intended to help fix the ecosystem:
https://github.com/steemit/steem/issues/177
https://github.com/steemit/steem/issues/178

According to Github, there have been 21 releases and 599 commits since March. They are as dedicated as any other development team, probably much more so than a majority of other cryptocurrencies.

Furthermore, it is in their best interest to fix Steem and make it the best they can be because they can't dump (see below) and most of the value of their holdings is held in SP. If the value doesn't hold for 2 years, they are going to be much worse off than their paper balances look right now.

Quote from: jeffthebaker on July 19, 2016, 10:57:43 PM

If whales are dumping, even if the fish are pumping, the price is not going to hold, and certainly won't appreciate 10x.

You do realize that whales can only dump in 104 weekly payments over the course of 2 years? Steem is pretty well protected from "whale dumps" as compared to any other cryptocurrency. In any other cryptocurrency the whales can dump whenever and however much they want to.