Capital markets have long operated, and do so because they provide gains, which reward investors. The white paper clearly declaims against financial manipulation, which clearly is happening on Steemit, and only possible because VP is weighted by SP.
In May many users came on board, and the price of Steem skyrocketed, rewarding investors very well.
Why should SP be allowed to financially manipulate curation, when capital markets create far more rewarding gains from investment? BTC has no social platform which can be used to mine for profits by manipulating content, and I know of no investors crying that it was a bad investment.
There are a great many vehicles for capital investment that similarly are profitable, and do not manipulate a social media platform for ancillary profits. Steemit is the only platform that this is possible on, and there are problems that are unique to that profit vector.
How would severing the financial manipulation from curation, by severing the SP weighting of VP, be harmful to investors, or Steemit?
Steemit is not the same as BTC. If investors wanted to invest in BTC, they would invest in BTC.. A lot of the value from STEEM (and other alternate currency coins) is what they do beyond the simple financial transactions. One of the main 'value added' propositions for STEEM is the blogging and rewards platform. A lot of the investors that invest in STEEM/SP, do so because as a stake-holder they have influence over how the platform is run.
Well, investors traditionally have control of the Board of Directors, through which they manage the company. Steemit provides nominal management direction through it's corporation, and capital gains as Steem appreciates.
About three years ago BTC was valued similarly to Steem today. Recently BTC was $3000. Were Steem to appreciate to even 1% of that value it would return ~20000% to investors.
Dipping too deeply into the rewards pool chases away the guests, and leaves only the whales swimming in the pool. When the guests leave the Steemit, it's over, and even the whales go home.
Why potentiate that outcome, when to do so you're potentially disabling a 20k% return? Because, as BTC shows, that return is only a fraction of the potential return to the investors in Steem.
So what stakeholder influence exactly is needed to augment those two traditional avenues, and how will basing VP on SP, and all the problems that result from that, benefit those investors whose fortunes it threatens?
Sorry, I disagree with your premise. In my mind (and a lot of people's minds who have invested in SP), having influence based on the SP you buy adds value and is a reason to buy.
Just saying you disagree does not inform me of how my premise is flawed. Which point do you disagree with? I asked a couple questions, which you don't answer.
My premise is that Whales stand to make enormous capital gains from price appreciation in Steem, only if Steemit achieves nominal growth, which will only happen if new accounts are drawn by high quality content, and retained (and motivated) by a rewards system that doesn't create the perception that it is largely being mined for profit, and unfair.
Whales stand the most to gain from appreciation in the price of Steem, and the most to lose from the rewards system being gamed for short term profits, rather than used to drive long term growth in Steemit.
In fact, it seems to me that those investors most doing so (mining curation for SP) show that they are not confident in Steemit's long term success, and are therefore taking profits now, because they suspect capital gains won't happen. Since the code allowing financial manipulation debases content creation, and this threatens Steemit's long term success, they have reason to feel that way.
Lastly, tying the VP of whales to their holdings of SP causes them to be strongly motivated to mine curation for SP out of fiscal responsibility, and this directly replaces their curation that best supports the growth of Steemit. If they want to support Steemit in ways other than curation (and they demonstrably do, in droves) they have all the options to do so at will.
It is the link between VP and SP that ties their hands, and deprives us of their curative voices.
Please specify where I fail to understand, so that i can understand better.