You've read the White Paper closely and have taken the time to analyze and formulate good questions! I've been here a while but I'm only able to comment on a few points.
5 People who vote also get rewarded on an article. When they get paid out is that also 50% steem dollars and 50% SP?
Voting (curation) rewards are paid only in Steem Power, from a pool of 25% of the value of a post. Commenters are paid in Steem Dollars and Steem Power, same as post creators.
11 Can you start/stop "powering down" on a weekly basis?
You can cancel a power down at any time, even before the first actual weekly power down occurs. Last time I checked, here on steemit, when you choose to power down, you power down your entire SP balance. But I understand there is a command line tool available called CLI_WALLET that lets you power down any part of your SP balance.
As for sustainability, the idea is for Steem Dollars to become an accepted form of "money" similar to what is beginning to occur with Bitcoin, and there will be continuing demand for it as its utility increases. This can be aided by real world vendors accepting Steem and/or Steem Dollars as payment for goods and services, as well as by new apps being created as side chains on the steem blockchain which use Steem as their currency in some form.
That's my thoughts, and my opinion only. I hope others weigh in here.
I agree, if you could use Steem to purchase real things outside of the steemit.com platform then there would be less unloading Steem, which would make the ratio of incoming/outgoing exchanges perhaps more healthy and sustainable. I suppose we need developers to create apps for vendors to easily except Steem payments and consumers to easily carry around their Steem wallet on their phone or to shop online.
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Ah okay thanks for the clarification on both questions.
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I think I can respond to the final thoughts on investment.
Steem does not require continued investment. It simply requires market actors and speculators to see value in it. This subjective valuation , along with buying and selling, is what provides Steem with its market value. If no one invested, Steem would still be printed and could still be valuable because much of the Steem that is created is automatically being created as vests in the form of Steem Power. For example, Bitcoin does not require investment; but similarly, people have to perceive it as being valuable based on its properties. With this in mind, I can see Steem, or a crypto-token like it, being more valuable because of the type of system is is created within.
Lastly, Steem does not require investments because it is being mined and created anyway, regardless of who is investing out of their own pocket . But one of the beautiful things about the platform is that everyone who uses the system gets a stake in it via curating and writing articles. So the system automatically creates investors out of people without them necessarily having to reach in their own pocket.
In my mind, if is all about the subjective valuation of Steem, and not of any kind of investment "backing," other than the auto-investment programmed by the system.
Thanks for your post. I appreciated the questions, and for some I hope others take the time to respond. I hope I helped.
Lastly,
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