I like the idea of tipping, but I'm not entirely sure it will work. Would that mean people need to convert $10 USD into STEEM, then slowly tip that balance away? Wouldn't that be almost like a subscription model? Or am I missing something?

That is basically how the Brave BAT token works. You buy the token, then Brave browser splits up the amount (e.g. 10 BAT) each month across the sites you visited (if the sites registered with Brave). When you run out of the BAT balance, you have to buy more.

The trouble I have with BAT is will people continue to see it as having any value. Right now cryptos are hot. BAT benefited from superb timing of the ICO gold rush. People will hodl and prop up the price for now. But it's fundamentally tied to people depositing money into their browser so it can then be spent...and a browser that very few people use (I'm one of them). In the end, I just don't see people doing that. I did it to try the experiment out. But it's a hassle ... When my BAT deposit in the Brave browser runs out in 10 months, I'll probably stop (in all honesty). I just don't need another thing to do and keep track of.

So how does STEEM in a tipping context work? Would people ever put money into reddit or Medium so they could give it away to everyone else? What characteristics would STEEM have that make it worthwhile? What would maintain its store of value over time?

(I'm guessing that's a future post ... I'm definitely tuning in.)

Or would people simply refuse to dump money into a Steemit account each month because they'd be spending it right away. After all, that's what the rewards pool essentially tried to solve in the beginning -- it gave a way to attach financial value to people's participation without them having to buy in (although, buying in increases the ROI with Steem Power when used in upvoting, etc..).

I'm really curious about the tipping because I think the rewards pool creates a lot of complexity that has a bunch of side effects. On that particularly bothers me lately is the 7 days to $0, where upvotes after 7 days are worthless -- $0 to the author. Plus no one else can resteem (share) that post with others. It's a real hit to residual income on a post and makes it difficult to justify providing quality content that is effectively a donation to the Steem blockchain after 7 days.

7 days also makes a joke of curation -- where else in the real world do people stop curating content older than 7 days? Most of the time it takes at least that long to find the good stuff.

Without a reward pool, tipping greatly simplifies the math and authors could continue to make money off their older work if the work stands the test of time.

So I'm all ears. 👍