so this investment sector is not dependent on what the price does.
Profitability of mining (bitcoin) is indeed greatly influenced by market cap, just as profitability of contributing (steemit) is influenced by market cap. Have you ever even mined any cryptocurrency in your life? That is pretty basic...
Incorrect. ASIC mining farms expand without worry about the price, because their costs are slow low. This only impacts how fast they can expand, but doesn't cause their prior investments to go bankrupt. It isn't thresholded the way payout incentives to blog are.
My even stronger point though is that mining doesn't collapse to a disaster if the price drops by 1/10.
This is not a stronger point. If price falls 90% then so does the profitability of mining (bitcoin). Similarly, if price falls 90% then so does contributing (steemit). They are very similar, yet you deny them being so.
Incorrect. Below a certain threshold price, people are insulted to blog for that price and it drops to 0. Mining is never reduced to 0.
For example, no person on earth will write a blog post for 1 cents. And nor person on earth will write interesting content for 10 cents, probably not even 25 cents. And no Westerner will blog with high quality for probably less than a few $ per blog post on average.
Yes it is because the users have to also figure out that the high payout rates which initially excite them are not average.
Who are you to decide what people will be happy with? You are not omniscient.
If we assume that the reason people are using Steemit is because of the payouts (since that is basically the only unique feature of significance it has), then we can safely assume that if payouts are too low then users have no reason to use Steemit. They already have Reddit which has greater usership thus more interesting and thorough discussions. Moving to site with much less reach has to provide some benefit that Reddit does not.
Legacy social networks pay them nothing. As long as they are getting paid something they may stay.
There is actually research on why paying too low is worse than not paying. It is an insult. Besides you've focused your users on that expectation of being paid something worthwhile. You've created that demographic by the very fact of promoting $500+ payouts for blog posts.
If some leave, then contribution profits go up for everyone that does stay. Eventually equilibrium is reached.
There are probably Indians and Nigerians willing to lower that equilibrium much lower than anyone else is willing to work for. Which already happened with CAPTCHAs. They will just bleed all the value out of it, because they don't have any incentive to respect any Nash equilibrium due to the incorrect design of Steemit.
My popcorn is ready. Let's just watch. No need to argue, we will eventually see the outcome.
Think of it as being the same as mining difficulty going down on Bitcoin. See my point? The economics of mining with hardware (bitcoin) and mining with contributing (steemit) work in similar ways.
I have now explained to you why your analogy is bunk.
Same with Bitcoin... The usership speculation is driven by the expectation usership and market cap will grow.
Bitcoin's market cap is not primarily driven by some need to not fall below a certain price otherwise cratering the usership.
I hate to break it to you, but there is certainly a "point of no return" that Bitcoin could fall to which would crater usership/interest/speculation.
Probably so, but it isn't 1/10 of the current price. I doubt even 1/100 would implode it. And I am sure that price drop would implode Steemit.
And no, people are not using speculating on Bitcoin with the expectation the market cap or usership will decline.
We weren't discussing speculation. You just moved the goal posts. We were discussing whether mining was thresholded to drop to 0 at certain drop in the price of the token.
I am so tired of having a debate with a person who is not intellectual enough.
Can we please stop now?