In the second paragraph, I should have written Steem instead of STEEM, that was a confusion from my part. But even if you hold your investment as Steem Power, you will still never profit passively from it, and that's by design. Dan mentioned he wanted to discourage rent-seeking behavior. That's understandable, but there's no reason for anybody to invest - capital gains aside. But without any fundamental reason to invest, there can be no sustained capital gains.
Bitcoin is a different beast, because it can be used as a currency and as a store of value. To use it as such, you need to own Bitcoin yourself (i.e.: invest). As mentioned in my previous comment, you don't need to invest in Steem to use Steem. Moreover, Steem is poor at both of Bitcoin's applications, because you have to choose between a liquid asset (STEEM) that is subjected to a very high inflation, or a totally illiquid asset (Steem Power) with a moderate inflation rate.
Steem is currently growing fast because people are attracted by hopes of profit. I can see two sources of profit:
- Capital gains, which are unsustainable because of the lack of incentives to invest.
- Profit from content generation, which will only work as long as people are willing to buy STEEM from content producers.
If people realize - or even just start thinking - there is no reason to buy STEEM/Steem Power any more (e.g.: the growth of Steem stalls), everything will collapse and content producers will leave
EDIT: Since we've reached max comment depth, I'll reply to the child comment here. The problem of SteemPower is not dilution, it's illiquidity. If you decide to sell your stake tomorrow, half of your investment will still be locked away a year from now. The Steem Dollar is a joke. If you offer a guaranteed 10% interest rate, the peg with the real USD will never work. By construction, it would mean that a SteemDollar is worth more than a Dollar.
I see your point. Steem Power's only source of profit is captical gains, if you don't want to be active.
However, people that want passive income can still 'invest' in SteemDollar which even pay some interest over time. The SteemDollar is as good as bitcoin except for its speculative nature which is an advantage if you want to use it as an actual currency. For store of value, you may actually want to buy something that is less speculative in nature as bitcoin, but that's a decision for everyone to make on their own and derails the discussion.
Even if everything "collapsed", the network would still go on and pay content creators more than they would have received on any other platform. The only case when the system fails is when the price hits 0 which is as probable as bitcoin being worthless.
Oh .. by the way, the dilution of Bitcoin is still higher than the dilution of SteemPower.