My pleasure! ;)

So yes, I'm from the EU, specifically from Portugal, I thought the Ronaldo statue would give it away but maybe its too obscure a joke for that. (I don't even like football)

... ahemm...
Anyway...

I think there's two ways to try and fit Steem into the system. One, as a currency. The other, as a company.

I don't know if it's something about PoS systems in general but having stakeholders as the basis for the whole system sure lends itself to be put into the company category.

• Steem provides a service, of data storage and processing power, and for that to happen witnesses are paid in Steem points every time they produce a block.

• In Steem, everyone is a stakeholder.

  • Witnesses are high priority stakeholders because they assure the IT infrastructure necessary for Steem to exist. So they get rewarded in liquid points (STEEM) to spend on Amazon AWS instances and the like.

  • Users are by default, Low Priority Stakeholders. Stakeholders of low-liquidity SP to be exact. And that SP is channeled to the reward pool. They also provide value to Steem as a company by investing in it with EUR or USD or BTC, and are rewarded for producing data to be put in storage. The more value the data has, the better the reward, in theory.

• The reward pool is a way to redistribute the dividends of all the assets at stake, as an incentive to continue production.

• There's internal regulations and codes of conduct. This is seen from the perspective that code is law. That...code is just a matter of notation and is otherwise as universal as any other set of rules. Breaking the law in the Steem blockchain is called hacking and is pretty much frowned upon.

• Is there a contract? Code is law so, code is contract. We agree to the code. We don't sign anything but we don't really have to, to break the contract we simply stop using the code.

• Do we work for the Steem blockchain??? If so, is this a cooperative!!?!? Yes and yes/maybe. We produce content and witnesses provide infrastructure. Should we be paid a salary then? No, it's not in the code. We're paid in Dividends as stakeholders.

• Steem is/has a trademark. (I think?)

Should we ignore these peculiarities and charge on with defining Steem as a currency? Or...should we not, and consider it a company? These are all great questions in my mind and I don't have an answer yet.

As for the "paying yourself dividends", well, the code allows it...but the code also allows flagging if you push it. The decision to allow or forbid these behaviors is left for the users to make.

Isn't the "currency" thing a bit of a fad anyway? :)