Disagree. The payouts on Steemit have nothing to do with price directly because there is a fixed payout no matter if there's only 1 post per day or 14k posts per day. When there were only a few authors & curators, the rewards were higher. As the # of users has grown to over 200k (and climbing), the rewards per average user is going way down. The only way for rewards to continue to pay enough to keep people interested is if more people buy steem and power up their accounts with steem power (in order to earn more rewards). It's a classic Ponzi paradox.

The reason the payouts will affect the price of steem is because the entire Steemit platform relies on new blood (the Ponzi aspect). New blood won't pay to power up if they are earning $0.01 per post. The new blood reads the posts from a year ago when a popular post could make $1500 and they think they can make money. When reality sets in and they realize they can't make any money without buying in at a high amount (and then taking a big risk that the platform will be around for a year so they can recoup their power up investment), everyone bails and the price tanks.

Bullshit. The whales and dolphin accounts post crappy content all day long so they can get their author and upvote rewards from self-voting + votes from their followers who worship them in false hopes that these large steem power accounts might show some upvote love to their minions.

There is a TON of crappy content every few minutes (including posts like a picture of Hitler on a toilet). There are fake fan pages with NSFW content earning $50 because stupid people still up vote when they see skin. There's stupid memes and recycled Youtube content that is literally just a headline, 3 words and an image or video link making $ because they are posted by high steem power accounts.