In any of those scenarios, the "bad" actor would need to purchase relatively large amounts of STEEM in order for their plan to "work" effectively. But purchasing that STEEM is actually beneficial to STEEM and its user base, so I don't think the damage would matter much, especially once their behavior is exposed. If there is a much larger user base and the platform is as popular as these scenarios assume, then there should be plenty of users to counter those single "bad" actors.
In other words - these scenarios don't seem plausible. Someone trying to harm the network would first need to support it with their own money. And if they did that, their plan would likely fail anyway.
Also - this assumes that a single blogging platform will be the most important element of the STEEM blockchain. I don't believe that this will be the case.
I'm curious, in light of "the experiment," do you still think those scenarios were implausible? ( I don't think abit and smooth are trying to harm the network, but they are providing a case-study of the attack vector that I highlighted, and there has already been some apparent user egress. In hind sight, the timing of this post was ironic.)
You may be right. I mentioned the price increase from the attacker purchasing steem as a mitigating factor in my post. I'm just not so confident that a high-value stakeholder would be unable to disrupt the network if they were willing to burn the value of their investment.
And you're definitely right that if steem takes off enough that people start using it for other purposes, then disruption to the social network might not matter any more. I shouldn't have ignored that point.