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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.