What you are actually calling for here are lower market prices. You can't expect to buy in for 10 grand to a system with a 100 million USD maket cap and have a lot of influence.
A lower market price is certainly one way to solve the problem. And, unfortunately, its the default way, because if nothing changes to increase demand, the market will step in and create a price that reflects what people are willing to pay.
Value comes from utility. Real utility. People who think that something like bitcoin has the marketcap it has today because of speculation don't understand the economics of bitcoin, or where its value really comes from.
If steem had a chance to pick up a significant amount of value from speculation, it was gone weeks ago. Its been sliding too far for too long.
But even if it had picked up more than it did (and i think it could have with just a little luck), the greater fool game has to end at some point. At some point, you simply run out of fools. Especially with a currency that has such a high rate of creation.
You can't expect to buy in for 10 grand to a system with a 100 million USD market cap and have a lot of influence.
This is correct. The problem is that the marketcap is artificially high due to ninja coins. I get that this isnt something people want to discuss, but thats the state of the union. Too few people own too high a percentage of the voting market share that they never had to go into their pocket and buy.
Take all the SP produced in the ninja mine. Now figure out how much its really worth in sweat equity. The matket, sooner or later, will take the price down to a level where its really worth that.
I'd argue that it did, and it still has a lot of that value. It traded for months at a fraction of the current price, with not really much less utility (if any).
Sliding for a long time (and it hasn't even been that long) is largely irrelevant. Many coins slide for months or years only to gain in speculative value later, including Bitcoin.
I'm still not sure what you think you are going to buy in terms of influence for 10 grand. That just doesn't make you a big shot anywhere. At 1 million market cap that gives you 1%. 1 million market cap is unrealistically low by a pretty wide margin relative to a peer group. I think you're off base here.
I don't think it ought to make you a big shot. There's a whole bunch of real estate between five cents and a big shot. I don't know exactly where on that rather large tract I think it ought to be, but somewhere. The reason i use 10 grand as an example its that its typically as high as many people will go on a brand new investment. Off hand, i would guess a fair valuation would be somewhere in the neighborhood of a 10-20 million marketcap.
Bitcoin's gains in value are not speculative, they're based on utility. Specifically, they have been based on the DNM economy (early on) then investments from people in places like china, where money in a bank account isn't really safe (check abits most recent witness report for how we're doing with the Chinese).
There is really not a good example of a crypto (at least not that I know of) that has achieved long-term market cap growth just on the basis of price speculation (of course, there aren't many cryptos that have a long term history to look at).
I don't know... the 1000% price increase in early July, I'm sure some of it was pure price speculation. But to my way of thinking, a lot of that was about utility, or at least the perception of future utility. Making first real payout (which was the July 4th I guess) was a really really big deal in terms of the perception of the utility (or future utility) of the coin. I realize that's a sort of speculation, but its not pure price speculation. If speculation about future utility is what fuels an increase in market value, then there has to be a delivery on that promised utility at some point in the future, or the gains will be lost.
incidentally, on some level i think we agree. the following quote from your comment above is 100% on point:
Also, i think the new initiatives in the release candidate (besides the 5 vote thing, which is awful) like escrow and multisig are helpful with regard to utility. How helpful will depend largely on how easy they are to use.
@sigmajin I have to disagree with you that there is anything wrong with 5 cents. The whole idea of a system like this is to aggregate the votes from many people. If enough contribute their 5 cent vote, then rewards become very significant (especially after applying any kind of consensus bonus, even if not the current one). If it is just you voting and no one else, I'm not really sure how much that should be worth. $1? At that point after you have used 10000 votes (say 100 votes per day for 100 days) in a linear-weighted system, your entire investment would be consumed by rewards/dilution. This makes no sense.
Agree with you that escrows, etc. are adding potential value. If investors see that translated into actual (even anticipated) use, then it will be rewarded. That is the right direction to go here.