You will not find me complaining about monetization of ones content. My involvement in the @devcoin project from its very early days should be a testament of that.
A pyramid scheme is when one needs new investors to keep payments coming to those on the top for the scheme to continue. That is exactly what was attempted here. The word attempted is used because it is my feeling that once the buy ins to HIVE from all those selling off their STEEM is finished that there will be little demand for HIVE and it will fall to dust. That is one category below shit coin. That is what happened to @devcoin with the same sell pressures. You can get the details of it starting at about 4:10 of the following video if you are really interested in my thoughts why HIVE is doomed to be the AOL of DPoS.
https://hive.blog/cryptotealeaves/@novacadian/cryptotealeaves-episode-2-this-is-not-financial-advice
Look, most HIVE is not held or even bought by any active participants on this platform. It's not even powered up. Out of the entire virtual supply of about 379 HIVE, the vesting fund makes up only 137 million HIVE. There exists about 200 million liquid HIVE. About a half of that massive amount of liquid HIVE is on exchanges. The use case of those tokens is to serve as vehicles of speculative trading against Bitcoin for the purposes of growing one's Bitcoin stack. That is the highest value use case of HIVE or, in actual fact, of nearly all other altcoins as well.
Hive is a system that transfers value from altcoin speculators who are trying to grow their Bitcoin positions to recipients of HIVE inflation in one form or another, be it author rewards, curation rewards, witness rewards or whatever. Said altcoin speculators are the "victims" here, not the newbies or anyone posting to Hive and getting the rewards while growing their stake without necessarily or usually buying a single coin.
In fact, I'm beginning to think the real scammers are the people who are active on Hive while screeching it's a pyramid scheme thus scaring off newbies who might become their competitors in the game of amassing tokens that an entirely separate group of people, speculative traders who never power up their coins, gives value to. That's because too many of those people appear far too intelligent not to understand what I just wrote in this an many other comments.
The only new coins going to the speculators which you speak would be, largely, from the token grinding V.22.2 Cabal selling off their vast gains to pay for servers, expensive meals and tokens with real value. How about we revisit this discussion in a month or two and have a look at how HIVE has dumped or mooned at that time.
Oh yeah my scam has been being planned over the last 4 years and is now finally ready to be enacted.
Piss off asshole.
Sure, and the point is that they're not going to be sold to some hapless victims of a pyramid scheme, namely the rest of the active user base here. We get most of our coins in exchange for activities just like this, which is paying for doing fun things billions of people do for free (or actually in exchange for giving out there data).
The price action will be driven by Bitcoin. If you want a best guess as to where HIVE will go, follow technical and fundamental Bitcoin analyses. Some analysts focus on Bitcoin vs. altcoin market analysis as well.
If Bitcoin goes to the ground, we're fucked. If Bitcoin moons, the altcoin market will follow with some delay.
I never claimed it worked like that. Besides, I wasn't entirely serious. I think there are many who do not really understand this system even among more seasoned users. But I suspect there are some people who actually don't want the Hive user base grow, particularly among the content creator set. I once talked about this with someone on Steem a long time ago. That person asked what the benefit would be for most content creators if Steem actually gained many more users. The answer is that in the short term, most content creators might actually lose quite a bit, unless the price rocketed following news of the growth, to which she replied she wasn't hoping for growth. The most irritating case was a known Steemian who had earned enough on her content to buy a house on them after which she quit and went on to badmouth the platform.