The aggregate demand for speculation is highly diluted by the inflation focused only on those who don't lockup for 1 year weighted average cashout, as proven by the fact the price is on a perpetual decline that is greater than what is offset by the increase in money supply, i.e. the market cap continues to fall.
The following is not a logarithmically scaled chart, thus it appears the decline in the market cap is slowing down, but it is not:
http://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/steem/Move the slider to the right and you will see the decline continues.
AlexGR and smooth, I am sorry that I must speak so frankly to both of you. Because both of you were the key people that enabled me to avail of the opportunity to get $6500 from Steem. I am not ungrateful. But it doesn't help you, if I lie to you.
I was mostly quiet for ~1.5 months, not biasing speculators one way or the other with comments lately. I think it is time to speak frankly. Enough pain has already been inflicted on those who were fooled. Again I am interested in discussing the design, because I am interested in improving it (but that won't likely happen within Steem).
Edit: since Oct. 14, it appears the market cap has declined more slowly than the price, but this doesn't appear to be widening. Thus is probably one some "one time" event of some fool pouring money into Steem, probably that Chinese n00b bagholder whale. Perhaps there are some deals being made made behind the curtain. Any way, none of that can help them. It is fundamentally flawed. Radical changes to the Steem blockchain to remove voting, inflation only on liquid Steem holders, etc.. is IMO very unlikely. Even @smooth seemed to state in comment of the prior 2 pages that it is difficult to get radical changes:
I'll definitely bring your idees to the attention of the devs if I ever have the opportunity to discuss this sort of thing with them. Understandably there isn't generally a large appetite for major changes, but the more their ideas are apparently rejected by the markets the more there could be some receptivity. Maybe (in fact there is often a tendency to dismiss short term price movements as not indicative of much of anything, and there is a lot of validity to that).