Well, judging by the price of Steem, I think the lottery is working out pretty well so far. Steem has gone from being worth nothing less than nine months ago to being valued at over $36 MILLION today. Not bad for a shoe-string budget startup that's just getting started.

If youre going to judge the lottery effectiveness by the steem marketcap, you have to use when the lottery first started paying as a starting point.

jul4, when they first started paying out, the market cap was 13 million. It took less than 5 days to get to the mid 30s, where we are at now. For most of the time we have had the "lottery" going, it has been declining.

Im all about being positive, but if youre looking for an unbiased price metric to guage the effectiveness of a particular strategy starting from day one block one can't work. It started out worth nothing. Now, its worth more than nothing. The plan works!

That said, there are other factors that effect price. I think the best way to guage the effectiveness of a lottery system to attract new content is to look at user growth and the change in the daily number of posts. those numbers tell a troubling story.