Aha, so it's a way of covertly converting their enormous wad of SP in to cold hard bitcoin without powering it all down.
The whitepaper of Steem admits that the “proof-of-brain” reward system depends on being able fool most of the users into doing more effort than they will be equitably rewarded.
Yes, the ruse. I had a few socialist friends when I was an undergraduate. I never read as much Marxist theory as probably should have (as a philosophy academic), but I did have enough intoxicated discussions of economics with those guys to reasonably channel what their take on the ruse would be - that it's not unlike the treatment of labour under capitalism in general. Now, I don't know if I'd go this far, but it does seem that people with the most ardent, but least critical, belief in free-market economics are those mostly likely to be taken in by this strategy.
It was that sort of thing I was thinking about when I responded to @littlescribe regarding our good friend Jerry Banfield - tldr; I suspect some of the ways he talks up the steemit community are intended to present us as 'bag-holders' to a certain class of prospective investors and/or condition us to exhibit that behaviour.
As for the SMTs - anyone with half a brain must be able to see that they are indeed intended to drive demand for STEEM. What mystifies me is that people see this as an endorsement of the success of steemit and DTube etc. I think it could be reasonably interpreted as just the opposite. While I (hopefully) have your attention, I may as well as voice the question that I can't let go of: What happens to the value of an SMT (or all SMTs) if the value of STEEM drops ?
RE: 25 Reasons Steem Will Replace Bitcoin as #1 Cryptocurrency by 2021!