Bitcoin is over 10 years old. Steem you are saying needs 8-12 years? You mean like Myspace? We don't have 8-12 years in a competitive market. I'm with you that Steem is important but I think more emphasis needs to be put on making Steem profitable/sustainable.
Cryptos we all agree on anyway so no one is going to debate that here. But I also think cryptos (including altcoins) should focus or put emphasis on making sure that their platforms or their products not only produce value but actually create demand for the token so that the ecosystem can grow.
Developers are great but only can take a social network so far. I can write code myself but there are more things to do than write code. Most people who write code don't only write code.
Don't you remember the early days of the internet, or pc's in general or dotcom campanies? They were laughed upon for many years in the beginning. Look where it has come to now. The same exact thing will happen with cryptos in a few years. Steem is not even a toddler yet... 2 year old blockchain with a developer team of 20 people at max.
I was a part of those early days. I was also a part of the early days of peer to peer, of crypto, etc. My point is that just like with Dot Com there was a time when many companies existed with no emphasis on profit for the shareholders. What happened to those companies and which ones survived until now?
I get your point about sharholder value, but in the beginning you were talking about how waiting another seven months for SMTs seemed unbearable or some kind of horrible for you as a shareholder who is only earning 20 bucks per day right now.
No, I always expected a wait. But I do think if you promise shareholders (Q4 2018) and then announce a delay (Q1 2019 testnet) then of course it could spook the market. It's so far though not having much impact one way or the other on the Steem price.
I also never said it's "horrible for me" or said I earn $20 a day; you came up with that. But sure, I would say the more Steem Holders can earn the more people will want to hold. Not just earn from holding Steem but from posting, the reward pool, or any other kind of interaction with the platform. The whole point of holding a token is either you think it's going to go up over time or you want to use it to earn $ or do something productive.
Steem allows people to add value currently but the reward pool isn't growing. As a result the community (not just me) is complaining. They say the reward pool is being exploited, or blame it on bots, but the truth is the reward pool hasn't been growing. Vote selling and bots are a separate issue but connected.
And one of the main problems is retention. People who join Steem post a few times and then leave when they see $1 or so as their reward. It's because the reward pool is shrinking and so the whole situation is unsustainable no matter what you do.
So while there are more accounts than ever (people tend to create accounts when it's a bull market because the rewards are higher) it would indicate to me that if the rewards are higher the rate of growth for Steem would increase.
So we look at it from that perspective and we can see the larger the reward pool the faster the growth of the whole ecosystem for everyone. SMTs can't come soon enough but what to do while we wait for SMTs?
What is the plan after HF20? No ideas to solve the demand problems? Even putting promoted posts on trending could help.
SMTs and communities have unbelievable potential in the mid to longterm. But with only 60k active users u can't expect miracles over night. The tokenization of forums and chats of giant websites could revolutionize the web as we know it.
Next thing that needs to be focused on will be scaling though. To run a full node is unbearably expensive now, because it needs 1 TB of RAM, that's insane.
No. You don't seem to understand how the reward pool works. Actually we recently hit a new alltime high. Never have been more tokens paid out before. Don't get confused with all the SBD that was printed (and worth 5$ each). It is just that the tokens are worth so much less right now that it seems unattractive. When you say reward pool you actually are talking about the worth of the tokens paid out (in Dollars). Yes, we had 5million before, and yes it is now down to 737.000 again. So we lost 85% of that, too. But it will rise again when BTC rises, because STEEM rise with it.
check out steem.supply to see how the reward pool grows and shrinks independently from the worth in Dollars (of it).
What I understand is the whole ecosystem rests on one token (Steem). If the Steem token and Steem Power have low demand then there is no fuel for growth of the reward pool or anything else. You can build in scalability to welcome a billion users and that is fine. I agree with HF20 and that mission but at the same time what happened to the promises of gamification? What about generating revenue? What about producing an actual demand for the Steem token right now? Not in 2019-2020.
Communities would be great but they haven't given a release date on that. My point is Steem tokens and Steem Power are a bad long term hold. If that is the case everyone will earn and sell immediately while powering down rather than powering up. Look at the stats to see which accounts are powering down right now. As a result the downward pressure on the price of Steem creates a rush for the exits and over time Steem price in BTC terms always trends down.
This isn't ideal.
Anyone powering down and selling in a bearmarket is not smart in my opinion. Unless you bought your Steem for a few cents you will always lose this way.
To me it is irrelevant who is powering down and selling. We need fresh money form NEW investors (a lot of it). The big whales are kinda irrelevant as they will not grow the value of STEEM more. They are already fully or kinda fully invested.
No I'm not talking about the worth of the tokens paid out in dollars. That is exactly why you're missing my point. I'm talking about the worth of the tokens when sold or bought for BTC. This isn't about the dollar value for people who are all in on crypto (long term crypto investors).
And in terms of the worth in BTC the value doesn't grow. Yes you can say the value in USD went up only because Bitcoin went up but that doesn't show me there is demand for Steem independent of Bitcoin which is what I need to see to know the market is fairly valuing Steem.
The USD price is irrelevant because you can't buy Steem on Coinbase right now.
Token worth in camparison to BTC can only ever grow in a BTC bullmarket. That is because the percentage gains in "good" altcoins exceed the percentage gains of BTC by far.
And don't you see a problem if a token can only grow if BTC grows? That means the ecosystem as a whole is not sustainable and literally is merely an extension of the success of BTC.
The problem is Steem has a huge ecosystem (one of the biggest) yet the market cap isn't even top 15. Dogecoin and a bunch of others are higher in market cap in both USD and BTC terms (however you want to look at it).
So how can I ignore the market cap of Steem going down? If what I'm saying isn't a big deal explain a market cap of $263,671,229 USD (only 40,582 BTC !) for the most mainstream platform in the entire crypto ecosystem?
The market cap should be in the billions. Projects which just launched have a market cap in the billions and they don't even have 100k users.
have you heard about emotional vest?
something that has this much energy, innovation, leadership stake, holding duration, and many other factors including ego....has real lasting power
don't discount the emotional vest of steem users, even those who are in active have either 1. not powered down 2. powered down but not sold 3. powered down and sold only part and still check steem dapps periodically
and one of the strongest evidence, those who were given loads of free alt-social-media coins who were minnows or at best few dolphins that supposedly moved onto another crypto to become equivalent of large Orcas there....are still here! explain that...
Steem will likely be the continual goto case study and value mimic of BUIDL in the next 5 years, like it is silently now to the 6 competitors i'm following now