Why would you not expect the subscription fee to increase? The more popular Steem becomes the more access to the network is worth. Think of it like Paypal. Initially they paid people $10 to open an account, then transactions were entirely free for everyone. Then slowly various exceptions to free transactions were added to the point now where a huge portion of transactions now pay fees. Likewise Google. For years there were no ads at all. Then just a one line of text. Then a sidebar. Now there are sponsored search results that take significant effort to read through and ignore if you want to find the organic search results. The price went up. A lot.
Steem is much the same. Right now the network is almost worthless, except as a promise. If all you were buying is a subscription to the current network with its current users and no prospects for growth, a fair price of that would be approximately zero. Now imagine a future where almost everyone is on Steem and that is one of the primary vehicles that people use to share information, communicate, and exchange payments; what will it be worth to not be excluded?
Buying Steem Power now means you are buying access to the future network at something closer to the current network value.
Yep...and each each Google/PayPal there IT 10K or 100K start ups that failed, right. So chances are I will be losing money on average if I 'invest' like that.
Not necessarily. It is absolutely true that most of your investments will lose money. Not the same thing.
Also there are not anywhere near 100K startups that ever reach 20K+ users. There are certainly quite a few that do and then fail, but the actual number is much lower than 100K.
True but usually businesses with 20K customers at least have a monetization plan by then.
Anyway, I prefer to follow the actions and not the words of smart man like yourself... Early mining seem to have a much better odds than buying steem to power up at current prices.
@james-show Did you read arhag's post? There is a monetization plan. The plan is selling access to the network. That will cost significant money in the future, assuming the network is successful and desirable to access, and many people want to access it.
That doesn't make SP a good investment at current prices, but if you really wanted to know you would have to work out models of number of future users, how much their implied payments would be, and then discount back to the present. That's a valid way of doing analysis, not "No Monetization Plan! Stay Away!"
exactly how i conceived of it.