Have you considered the potentially artificial inflation to Steem's price by the SBD price pump? If SBD is being pumped artificially, prompting many to buy Steem to power up constantly, I see this as a large potential driver of the volume/escalation lately. Not a lot of Steem is traded on the markets relative to most other coins/tokens, so I think there could be some substantial impact from users eagerly/constantly using the internal market to swap for Steem at the 4-6x price break... I know that this has been me for the last 2 weeks. In turn, multiplied by many Steemians, it can blow up the buying pressure on a relatively small market in the first place.
Hope this is all irrelevant, but I think it's possible. Thanks for giving us some moonshot numbers to dream about, and backing it up.
Yes @steemmatt you are right. With SBD now worth $9.77, there are going to be plenty who find it a good time to switch into Steem. However that does not detract from the fact that Steem has a utilty value of its own in terms of curation power. That’s what gives it a value.
The recent price move may be the catalyst to attract the investment community.
A downside to steem is the limited number of places you can buy or sell it. You can trade here through the wallet, or you can trade on Bittrex - which has the most volume, or you can trade on bitshares. The spread on bittrex is less than 1% so that’s the place to go if you are in a hurry. On the other hand, bitshares has up to 9% spread which is great if you like to place a limit and can be patient.
I think this is all tied to the Bitcoin Futures games today and the Bitcoin network saga as Bitcoin Cash tries to manipulate/force itself on the market.