To me the $25k figure is by large out of line with reality. Taking a snapshot marketcap value of all the tokens and dividing it by the number of users is a gross oversimplification from a trading standpoint. First of all, the whales hold most of the steem so the average value of a single blogger calculated from this has a huge statistical skew - even the so called dolphins here are often worth less than $25k.
Second, its impossible to cash in qucikly (powerdown period) so the marketcap is calculated based on a limited number of freefloat tokens (or shares in broader context), creating an illusion of liquidity and high valuation. In reality, it takes a small fraction of trading volume to alter the price of steem signifcantly - changing this valuation from $25k to $50k in a single day isn't very difficult, and it has happened before. Does this mean that over a course of a single day the market valued the same content at twice the price by the evening compared to the morning ?
Buying into steem in my eyes has little to do with the content quality and bloggers per se. It's more to do with the concept and the potential the platform holds. And this is what requires the developer's and communitie's utmost attention right now. There will be competition for decentralized, fair publishing platforms, and it might get fierce, to the point of FB and others taking cues from platforms like Steem.
In my eyes Steem's valuation is:
- overblown approx 8-10x due to low liquidity of the freefloating tokens
- derived mostly from the promise of future functionalities, decentralized market and reputation system that needs to be put in place.
- endagered by too high inflation rate i.e. there's no point in investing in superinflationary altcoins.