I hardly think that paying for AWS or any other servers or amassing the technical skills necessary to mine (in whatever way that is possible) comes at no cost ... In fact, it's quite risky as there is no known market at the time and the entire venture is speculative, and, as such, those people are securing the blockchain at a potential loss.
And can you define 'a lot' -- maybe in terms of percentages? Is this more than 5% but less than 15% (combined)?
Also, what happens if someone decides to purchase STEEM at these low prices (or possibly even lower ones) and becomes vocal (meaning, they decide to do what they want with their stake) ? What's the difference between buying it and earning it from mining rewards?
It's important that any kind of young community includes only people who share a common vision and are willing to work for it.
Cryptoprojects are suffering from delusion that everything should be decentralized as much as possible even in the beginning. But it's very rare that random people who don't have anything in common can work effectively together.
It would be much better if a small community ruled the whole project when it's still young. There would be very little drama and other stuff that will distract developers from doing the important job. Over time the decision making power can be distributed to a wider group of people when the platform matures.
I have written about this earlier: How to design efficient and resilient DAO
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I like how you used the opportunity to respond to my questions.
/end sarcasm
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What happened at launch of Steem is irreversible, so it's not very interesting to think about it anymore. Individual cases are all different. For some 15 % might be too much and for some it's not an issue at all.
It's better to use this case as an example to see what works and what doesn't so we know in the future what kind of problems are possible when launching a new chain.
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