Many Steem members see Steem tokens as undervalued. I believe that the tokens are fairly valued and that a dramatic rise in value will depend more on being able to establish Steem as the currency for multiple social networks rather than just Steemit and Steemit type properties?
Specifically, Steemit is a cool platform however if the Steem currency is going to reach the masses it appears that being able to utilize Steem across social networks would be the ultimate win for Steem as a currency. I own Steem Power because I believe that this can in fact happen because of the following reasons:
Steemit is the one social currency that is being heavily tested in a social environment giving it a huge advantage over other currencies such as Reddcoin, a social currency that will be used for tipping across different networks--- I also own some Redd.
Steemit already has a vibrant and growing community of users, some of whom will take the Steem token and build the next generation of social platforms.
Steemits current platform is easy and fun to use.
My concerns with Steem as a currency stem from one basic fear and that is, the abuse of the voting system by Steem users to earn Steem without proper merit. This is essentially the same problem that Google has had with their algorithm based on backlinks. Backlinks for Google were seen as a natural way to determine the most relevant content on the web. While this system makes sense it also opened up the door for manipulation of the algorithm. The result was, and to a large degree still is, that site owners were able to either purchase or manufacture large numbers of backlinks to their sites, resulting in spam content at the top of many of Google's search results. I was able to do this with a site called BlogCatalog, in the mid 2000s by getting every blogger to link back to the site. The result was we received almost 1 million unique visitors a day from Google - until they figured out what we were up to.
If Steem is going to be hugely successful the community needs to do whatever it can to stop the manipulation of votes and comments. While Ive only been on the site for a few days now I already notice many postings for vote and comment exchanges. As a member my tendency would be to join these exchanges however being that I want to see Steem succeed I won't participate in those type of schemes as the best way for Steem to succeed is to figure out how the community can be incentivized to focus on voting up and commenting on quality content. If this is achieved Steems currency will be adopted by more social networks as they will see that by adding a micro-earnings system that incentivizes their user base they will both encourage more user engagement and improve the quality of community contributions.!