RE: Steem 2020 - Reducing Inflation To Less Than 2% APR

I think it is a complicated discussion. On one hand you want to make sure investors benefit the maximum, on the other hand, this blockchain is based on the social factor and most apps are too. So, without users which are going to consume the apps and games even though they invest relatively little into the actual STEEM POWER it is impossible to sustain the eco system and investors are going to lose interest too. Most people who are here today would be gone tomorrow if STEEM would stop giving them rewards which are actually worth something. And, making sure an SMT has an actual value, especially for smaller communities is going to be extremely difficult.

I think cutting the author rewards without having a sustainable model would be the death of STEEM.

On the long term more sustainable ways have to be found, using the advertisement rewards to sustain SMTs, backing SMTs with real use cases (payments for apps etc).

But, I think on the short and mid term this is not a discussion worth having. After SMTs arrive and after we saw the first SMTs which were able to sustain their own prices we should have this discussion.
Else, this will just lead to people leaving and not anyone coming.

As other people pointed out, there is so much more to people investing into a cryptocurrency than just the inflation it has and I believe the #1 thing we should be worried about is having real world use cases where people buy STEEM to spend it in the STEEM ecosystem (apps, games, etc) and the apps themselves invest part of this STEEM for RC.

I don't think anyone really knows for sure what investors value and what would cause investors to "lose interest too". However, we can say with reasonable confidence that what we are doing now isn't working very well on that score.

I'm not even saying I'm all in favor of the OP's idea, my reply was more about how I think it could be done most reasonably if we were to decide to do it, rather than whether it should be done.

My view is that as the cryptocurrency marketplace has matured and competition increased, investors have become more aware of inflation and more discriminating. There is stronger competition out there that has low inflation or no inflation and what you could get away with in 2016 or earlier doesn't really fly any more. I can't prove it certainly, nor do I claim to, but that is my view. Yes, those other factors (adoption, use cases, etc.) all matter too, but all of the competition are pursuing those as well. They're not a differentiator.