Sorry for the delay responding. I didn't see your replies 'til this morning. For some reason there were no notifications.

My question would be, with the overall steem ecosystem weaker than it was in the prior years (in terms of users, usage, and overall activity, as well as price) and showing no signs of getting stronger in the future, what can we do that will increase demand for steem going forward to make some of these numbers you posted remotely possible?

To me, there are two basic areas:

(i) The ecosystem needs to be fun. People do social media for free, so clearly it's not all about rewards. Development and curation focus are needed to increase the fun ways that are available for people to spend their time here. We need to build the intangible attention economy aspects of the ecosystem. Things like:

• Immediacy - priority access, immediate delivery
• Personalization - tailored just for you
• Interpretation - support and guidance
• Authenticity - how can you be sure it is the real thing?
• Accessibility - wherever, whenever
• Embodiment - books, live music
• Patronage - "paying simply because it feels good"
• Findability - "When there are millions of books, millions of songs, millions of films, millions of applications, millions of everything requesting our attention—and most of it free—being found is valuable."

(ii) Post ranking/curation needs to be better aligned with content contributions. "Quality" is a nebulous concept that I try to avoid, but as a general rule, posts that attract the most eyeball-minutes should get the most rewards. Unfortunately, investors here have decided that they will direct a substantial portion of the rewards to posts that get nearly zero eyeball-minutes. That's a pretty big obstacle to attracting and retaining new social-media participants. Why would new authors want to stick around under those circumstances?

Also, this wasn't on my mind until yesterday, but we might also add (iii) Extending the payout life of a post might help with user retention (if curators take advantage of the ability).

> On a side note comparing to bitcoin - Bitcoin has seen a massive surge in demand over those time periods while simultaneously seeing the rate of inflation reduced. So we have to be careful not to interpret that a cut in the inflation rate actually makes the price go up. Without demand reducing new supply does nothing.

Well, reducing new supply does something - no matter what, but I agree that it might not have the same effect as we saw with BTC. My main point was that we can expect things to be different in the future, because we've never seen daily supply constrained in the way that it's going to be. We can only guess what "different" is going to look like.