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In case you didn't see - I am offering a $10 SBD reward to the best answer to my questions in this post! Details here:  

https://steemit.com/contest/@yabapmatt/free-usd10-sbd-guaranteed-for-best-answer

So far there are no replies...seems it's very difficult to give away money on here!

Amount of users double, than yes, we will have to share the reward pool with more but don't forget that double amount of users will also grow users who want to invest a bit and that will push price up.  If Steem is 3$ instead of 1$, reward pool will be triple.  It is around 10% a year which is the inflation rate for that reason.
I invested seriously in the last months as i really think it will go to 3$ very soon.  The platform is very addictive and userbase is seriously growing.
In maximum half a year, all crypto inestors will bounce their head saying why didn't we see this one coming :-)
Hope that answers your questions a bit, ask me more if you want to, no need to send me SBD, cheers

Hi @yabapmatt,
Welcome to steemit.
These are interesting questions. I guess I don't have a better answer than what @bubke gave, since I am not really knowledgeable about the block chain system.
Good luck in finding the answers you want and sharing them with the rest of steemit users :)

Very pertinent questions. In fact, I'm also searching the exact answers to these. Do update here when you find one.

Let me share my understanding so far. 

1. Yes, Steem is an inflationary token with 9.5% APR as on HF-16 in last December. This rate decreases by 0.01% every 2,50,000 blocks or about 0.5% annually. In 20.5 years it will get stabilized at 0.95% annual inflation.

2. No, it isn't paid out instantly to items included into the block. Since the payout period for all posts & comments is about 7 days, the Steem is added to the total reward pool and a potential reward is assigned to posts for which the no. of vesting shares / Steem Power is used to vote / downvote  proportionately, according to the transaction written in a block. Current Reward Balance at the time of writing this comment is 699030.589 Steems and total vesting shares are 376629998005.335737 VESTS.

3. Very true. Currently about 43,000 Steem is created daily. A new block is created every 3 seconds. But as I said in point-1, the total amount of Steem being created will decrease every 250,000 blocks. But only until mid-2037, not forever. 

4. You are also right when you say that reward pool of Steem per active user will decrease with the increase in size of active user base. But this certainly does not mean that your upvote value will decrease from $1 to $0.5 if the userbase doubles up, In fact, it will behave just the opposite i.e. your upvote value will *increase*.  This is what is called network effect. Today Steem is worth just about $1.25 whereas Bitcoin is worth about $4,000. So you may ponder a little as why is Bitcoin worth so much? What is so unique about it? Isn't Steem better?

You need to understand the value of a network. I'll quote a paragraph from Steem's recent Whitepaper, which will help you understand this better:

>Steem recognizes that the value of all user contributions (posts and votes) is greater than the sum of the
parts. A single comment is worth next to nothing, but millions of curated posts is worth many millions (or
possibly even billions) of dollars. A single vote provides little curation value, but billions of votes is very
effective curation. Content without curation is of limited value.

So not only this platform can sustain but thrive. 

Hope it is of some help to you. Did I miss to answer anything?

I was starting to type an answer and the read some of the comments which I realize say everything I was thinking!  It looks like since you shared this link on my witness post you have some amazing replies by several people I recognize as comment regulars on my posts!  What helped sell me on investing here is seeing how helpful people can be!  The more user growth the more demand will come for Steem leading to a nearly certain price increase to at least $10 if not $1000 which would equal the valuation of Facebook.

Take away the $, just as the difficulty increases in mining bitcoin or another altcoin, the value would INCREASE if not double every few years.  

If that did not make any sense, let me know and I can elaborate.