I don't understand why you would buy Steem.
The only reason I can think of would be that you increase your Steem Power and therefore have more stakes in the game of finding content that you think will be popular and upvoting it early. Thus leveraging your influence and hence earning power.
Is there any other reason to buy Steem?
You can also buy STEEM tokens to trade on an exchange profiting from the swings in pirce...
There are a lot of people that just trade crypto currencies for profit.
Yeah I just don't understand what people are speculating on. Like what the price is effected by other than random opinion.
Speculate on the market price..
Use it as a currency to pay for stuff..
You also implicitly upvote your own posts. So with a lot of Steempower you have a higher chance to appear in the "trending" view and accumulate even more votes.
By now you'd have to invest real money to achieve this though. I tend to not recommend to do that, as this is the point where the sustainability of the Steem's economic model and its future success is debatable, i.e. there is a high probability you would lose your investment.
Ahhhhh....so that's how advertisers will get in on it. They buy influence or visibility. So people are buying Steem because they think in the future more people will want Steem (influence/visibility) thus driving the price up?
Perhaps this will work, perhaps not. The right balance will have to be found. If Steemit starts to look like a giant advertising pillar, people will leave.