The image shows a steem engine on fire as it plows through an active lava flow. I generated the image with Night Cafe. Courts have ruled that AI images are close to public domain. Feel free to use it on your burn posts.
Here is the raw file:
https://juggleball.com/steem/a34burn.jpg
AS FOR THE PICTURE: I wanted an image of a locomotive encased in flames as it plowed through a lava field. I wanted the passenger cars to be flame free. Night Cafe produced an image of a relatively unscathed steem engine with the passenger cars in flame.
I know for a fact that all the pretend passengers were lying on the floor of during this passage and that now fake people were harmed in the creation of the image.
My current plan is to generate an image a day and then write a related post. I will write about burning STEEM
On Burning Steem
Authors can burn some or all of the author rewards for a post by setting the beneficiary to @null.
For this post, I decided to send 50% of the rewards to @null. Here are the settings for this post:
I will burn half the rewards and power up the rest.
So, if this post received 4 STEEM; then the curator would receive 2 STEEM, the author (aka me) would receive 1 STEEM, and the @null account would receive 1 STEEM.
The @null account cannot spend its STEEM. People consider the STEEM transferred to @null as burned. It is not counted as part of the market value of STEEM.
One can also burn STEEM by transferring to @null. You can transfer STEEM to @null with a post in the memo and SteemIt will "promote" the post.
The main difference between transferring to @null and setting a @null beneficiary is that transferring reduces the current marcap, while the @null beneficiary reduces the future marcap.
I guess I should explain.
The rewards come from interest on STEEM. SteemIt will mint new STEEM when it pays the rewards seven days from now.
CoinGecko said that the price of STEEM was $0.1531 when I wrote this post. The reported market cap was $72,761,614. CoinGecko thinks that there are 475,255,480 currently in circulation.
This number increases with time.
The interest is actually a good thing. The whole reason that people participate in SteemIt is because users want to get some of that interest.
Burning the rewards reduces the growth in the market capitalization.
If this post received 4 STEEM, then the system would produce only 3 STEEM in interest instead of 4.
My settings shows that I automatically stake the rewards.
In this case, the burn is not being taken from STEEM destined for the open market, I am burning STEEM that I would otherwise power up.
The burn won't affect the amount of STEEM on the market. It reduces the amount of staked STEEM. Is this really a positive thing?
Does Burning Author Rewards Improve STEEM?
Steem curators have limited voting power. A full upvote reduces voting power by 2%. The VP regenerates at 20% a day. This limits curators to ten full upvotes a day.
When curator upvote burn post simply because they are burn posts; the curator effectively denies the reward from an author.
This is not necessarily bad. I've engaged in curation sessions in which I didn't find anything to upvote.
We do need to ask the question: Are authors receiving excessive rewards.
There are some huge imbalances on STEEM. Some authors are in voting circles. They seem to be receiving excessive rewards for the quality of their posts.
Imagine a fool who simply posts an AI image a day. How much is that worth?
Are AI images even worth the bandwidth they consume?
Of course I often find myself in a late night curation session where I still have a few upvotes to make before going to bed.
NOTE: an account called "play poker" drops low value post at 1:00 AM my time. I some times upvote them because I had some votes left from the day.
This brings me back to my original question. Is the act of denying author rewards a good thing?
I've seen numerous authors leave the platform simply because they felt the reward was not worth their effort.
Of course, authors are more likely to sell their rewards than curators. Upvoting authors that dump their rewards puts a downward pressure on STEEM.
Curators aren't blameless. Curators have been known to sell their rewards. Are authors lesser Steemians simply because they are likely to cash out faster than the curators?
Conclusion
I generated an image then wrote some paragraphs about burning. Burning STEEM can affect the amount of STEEM floating on the market which might help improve the price.
I could leave by noting that the [buildawhale account on HIVE] runs an automatic burn post. The account has burned hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of HIVE. Truthfully, I don't know if it has has a positive effect on the price of HIVE as both STEEM and HIVE have recessed market values.