I saw in @remlaps recent post that the idea of people burning Steem and/or SBDs is back in the air. I am going to suggest that it may be a bad idea for individual users to burn tokens.
As I said in a comment on that post: As I understand it, the usual argument in favor of burning is the assumption that overall market cap represents the total valuation, so eliminating some tokens from the supply should increase the price because overall valuation won't change. The analogy is presumably a stock buyback (or maybe some things that central banks do). But I think the key there is the buy in the buyback, the price goes up because there are buyers in the market. So sure, the thing disappears from the market, but I wonder if that's more of a side effect than a causal factor.
When individual users send tokens to null here on the blockchain, does that impact what people are willing to buy/sell Steem or SBDs for on an exchange? Maybe, if somebody has some sort of trading algorithm based on token supply or market cap. But for most people, what matters is the prices they can get on the exchange they're on, which is primarily affected by the buys and sells on the exchange, not whether some individual burned a token or there was a change in the total supply. In classical economics the beauty of the price mechanism in markets is that value doesn't need to track global information, it all works itself through in terms of what individual agents are willing to buy or sell for locally. So maybe it's not guaranteed that things that operate at the global level, such as tokens disappearing from the ecosystem, will matter to local markets.
I'm making my argument in terms of individual users. It might be a different story for a central agent. I mentioned a stock buyback earlier, and it's useful to think that through. A company has a weird relationship with its own stock. What would it mean for a company to own X% of itself? If it wanted to sell stock for money it could just issue new stock, so it's not valuable in that sense. And the control that stock ownership gives is useless to the company itself, because it can't have preferences independent of its (other?) owners. So it makes sense that when a company buys its own stock those shares essentially cease to exist. I think a similar thing would be true of a blockchain. So when the blockchain itself "sells" something like "promotion" then it makes sense for the tokens used that way to disappear. It is just not at all clear to me that individual users (especially those who are not whales) help anybody when they burn tokens. We'd probably be better off if individual users were powering up their Steem and using their increased power to reward good posts.
I could be wrong, feel free to make counterarguments. But it seems to me that there's just a vague sense in the crypto-spere that burning tokens will always increase the price and I am skeptical of that idea.