The issue is complex, but we believe that focusing solely on lowering the supply and burning is not going to work because STEEM does not really have an intrinsic value yet.

One aspect of why the price of STEEM is low is because of the community itself, more specifically large investors. The goal of PoB was to act as a catalyst to attract more users, which will eventually reflect on the price of STEEM. But currently, most whales and large accounts use an elaborate system of vote circling. Instead of being able to reward a more thriving blockchain by supporting new users, we have basically the same individuals extracting value and just hoping that something will happen and go out before the ship sinks. Any solution that does not include figuring out this issue will simply tighten the grip on the Average Joe. People will keep farming and force the price down again to take advantage of any bump in the price in the future. If we should consider STEEM as a simple way to store value such as XMR or BTC, for example, then we are better off just scrapping the social aspect and redirecting the reward pool to SP holders.

The other thing is that we are assuming that the price will rise because there will be more people buying STEEM. We are here assuming that there will be more investors buying STEEM. Yet other chains are outperforming us with the same supply. If we take measures in the suggested direction and the price does not rise, then this would mean fewer people will be able to be curated. And fewer people will be incentivized to post here due to a very low return compared to before. This would be like shooting ourselves in the foot.

We also believe we should avoid the appellation of burning to save the chain or forcing a burning percentage on x, it looks like we are sinking and desperate. We really do not want to give our user base on a golden plate to the competition. Lowering the print rate is easy. A fork could be simply pushed to lower the inflation based on a theoretical value. We could make the inflation as a witness parameter, which allows witnesses a better reaction to the market. We could also make the pool split as a witness parameter as well, and adjust some of it to be sent to @null. One could imagine if, suddenly, we told investors that from now on, your yield will be reduced by 25%. They will have a considerable urge to switch to another chain and subjecting STEEM to a huge selling pressure on their way out.

There are other ways that we still did not explore yet that can be used to burn STEEM without any forks. Communities could be leveraged by allowing and providing the needed tooling for people to advertise content in exchange for burning STEEM. Advanced solutions can be worked on to allow users to promote their posts by burning STEEM. Even a fork can be pushed to provide more solutions to burn STEEM. Such as something that was discussed before to allow users instant power down in exchange for a % fee that will be burned ... the suggestions are actually plenty. With this approach, burning STEEM actually means that you are getting a service.

In the end, one thing is sure: if the blockchain becomes an artifact, and there are no worthy products that bring value to STEEM as a utility asset, then no one is going to buy it even if the print rate is nearing 0. Burning and lowering inflation could be considered a lazy solution if the core issues related to why Steem should have value are not tackled in the first place. The thing is, tackling these issues means core development needs to start again.