Great post. I was going to write something similar this weekend. I can't, for the life of me, understand why so many other altcoins are mooning right now while STEEM is going down. At the same time, it seems, bitshares only goes down. What gives? These seem to be incredible technologies with huge potential. What am I missing here? Or, maybe a better question, what is the market missing?
Is @dan simply too much of a genius, too far ahead of his time, to explain the advancements he's created? I understand this technology is incredible, but I can't fully explain, in simple terms how it all works. I've been trying for 7 months now.
I think there are many things, the ponzi FUD is probably one of the reason people are not touching steem, the fact that steemit inc owns so much steem is possibly scaring investors and also the lock period has done a lot of damage, basically an event that could have been done in a week which is the selling of early adopters/miners's stake took over 6 months so when you look at the chart it doesn't look pretty. I think the complexity of the whole system also played a part and the inflation was a huge mistake. I've talked to many people in crypto and they still think steem has 100% inflation...
I feel the same about bitshares. I've read a bit about it, but still don't understand it very well.
The currency is being distributed to people for their efforts, but if they want to use it for something, they need to sell it in the markets.
The price won't go up until we have genuine usecases for steem and SBD. Currently there is constant supply to the markets but not much demand, except some investors.
But couldn't the same be said for most coins? To me, STEEM has more of a genuine usecase than many other cryptos. At least Steem Power gives someone influence on a social media platform.
For most people, the influence they get is very little unless they can invest a huge sum. So they rather work for the influence, they write posts to get it. Unlike most cryptocurrencies, Steem can be acquired by other means besides buying or mining it. If you can invest by writing posts, why you should use your money?
This is of course a good thing, because it gives a way to distribute the currency to the hands of many which makes us closer to the network effect. But that is only a one part of the success.
The next hardfork will remove some of the natural demand for steem (smaller account creation fee), so that will make the situation even worse (not much, of course, but still a little bit).
If we want more genuine users for the currency, we need a marketplace or something like that.
If we want more investors, we need better marketing. Dan is great blockchain dev but marketing isn't his strongest feature. Unfortunately Ned isn't that great in that, either. For example, Ned's interview in Epicenter was failure. He had a great audience of blockchain devs and investors but he wasn't prepared to answer all the most important questions about how Steem was launched, some technical details about consensus protocol, etc. There wasn't even any effort to make things clearer in the aftermath – which would have been a great chance to try to understand why some people are skeptical about Steem and give them satisfying answers.
Big investors want to fully understand how their investment works. Currently it's very hard for people to get up-to-date information about Steem. One of the most important things is the whitepaper which hasn't been updated since the launch.