I Think Ending Content Rewards Paid Out In STEEM Any Time Soon Would Be Premature

Some people, including some influential ones, have been saying that STEEM should become a utility coin as soon as after SMTs have been rolled out. I'm assuming the remaining inflation would be directed to Steem Power holders, witnesses and to the Steem DAO. The argument is that what content creators are doing here is not worth the portion of the total inflation that goes to them, which is 65%. It follows that the bloggers and the rest should be cut off from the gravy train being the dead weight they are.

This is our cat in my wife's office at our home. My wife is a teacher. Whenever she goes to her office to correct papers this little "colleague" of hers joins her. I think viewing content creators on Steem as "colleagues" of this kind is mistaken.

I think such a move would be premature even after the rolling out of SMTs, which is slated to happen in the next hard fork in the spring of 2020. Or, more precisely, it is way too early to jump into that conclusion now. The inception of #newsteem was only six weeks ago. The results are very encouraging and I really don't think we have seen the last of them, yet.

Also, in light of how Scot token economies are working, abruptly ending content rewards shortly after SMTs go live does not sound like a good move if the idea that the blockchain should support content creation in the first place. Scot/Steem-Engine tokens have very little in the way of liquidity. I think none of them are accepted or traded against anything but STEEMP (the asset pegged to STEEM) on Scot bot. Of course, SMTs will be part of the core Steem blockchain and traded on chain with the trades validated by Steem consensus nodes. But I don't believe it will be a short process by any means to get them accepted anywhere or to create sinks for them. The whole SMT model could require modifications as well as considerable marketing effort for it to get any traction after it is released.

If I'm brutally honest, Scot tokens (the Tribe tokens) do not amount to much more than shitcoins for now. I do think some of them have potential. But their extremely low liquidity, general lack of proper sinks and wild price fluctuations makes them experimental at best at this stage. There are not even live price charts available for any of them, yet. Even STEEM itself is on a somewhat shaky ground in the bigger scheme of things. But it has an active weekly user base of about 10,000 transacting accounts and it is traded on about a dozen exchanges globally. That group of people is the only thing that separates STEEM from being yet another practically dead DPoS project out there when the state of the market is considered. Steem's DApps populating the top of State of the DApps rankings is a strong selling point when Steem is marketed to developers. Steem has an active user base willing to try out new DApps. That's thousands of testers willing to tolerate very immature products. If that user base is deprived of its earnings in STEEM, split up into small niches each earning their own token with little to no actual price discovery, that will not bode well for the chain at this stage.

The only rational purpose I see in stakeholders talking about getting rid of content rewards on Steem is an effort to set an expectation of a short term pump owing to a hypothetical cutting off of 65% of the inflation. But even that is a somewhat flawed theory as much of the liquidity on exchanges is liquid STEEM sold by Steemit, Inc to pay for development. I believe any other reasoning in favour of cutting off the inflation would be based on a misconception about what gives STEEM value.

After SMTs have proven themselves, the idea could be worth reconsidering. But not any time soon.