if STEEM was worth $0.00, would you still be here?
I think this question is a bit of a paradox. If people are here, then STEEM will be worth something. How much is anyone’s guess, but it will be > $0.
The only way STEEM would be truly worth nothing, in my opinion, is if the blockchain was no longer operating, in which case none of us would be here, because there would be no here to be.
The Steem platform has two things that give it value (again, in my opinion):
It is a place for publishing censorship-resistant content. That in itself holds value for some people, so there is a group of people who would use the Steem platform regardless of the price of STEEM. Then, the fact that it holds value for some people means that STEEM will have some value > $0.
Value derived from usage of the Steem platform is distributed to the users through the STEEM token. So, even if they don’t care about the censorship-resistance piece, some people will be incentivized to use the Steem platform in order to realize the value they create with their content that traditionally all goes to companies like FB/Google/etc.
If STEEM is going to survive and grow, the answer to the above question has to be yes for the majority of the users.
I don’t think this is true. I think the growth or decline of the platform is driven by either a virtuous or vicious cycle. If the price of STEEM goes up then more people use the platform which pushes the price of STEEM up and so on. The opposite effect occurs when the price goes down.
Starting the virtuous cycle is a “chicken or the egg” problem - you can’t get more users with a low steem price and you can’t grow the steem price without more users. This is the same general problem that applies to all sites or services whose value derives from the network effect.
The way that STEEM got past this problem is that the price of STEEM was driven up along with the general blockchain/crypto craze. Money poured into the token with no regard to its actual value or how many people were using it (though it actually does better in this regard than most other cryptos, but i digress...).
So that jump-started the whole process by just magically creating the chicken, you might say (or did it magically create the egg?), and the rest followed from there.
Despite the recent decline in prices, we are still very much within the virtuous cycle. What we need to do is avoid an event that kicks off a vicious cycle to ensure the continued growth of the platform and value of the token.
Many things could kick off such a downward spiral - technical issues, changes in the overal crypto landscape, competitors, etc. Some of them we can control (like technical issues) and some we can’t. So my goal has always been to try to both bring in more users, and simultaneously try to increase the price of the token to keep the virtuous cycle going as long as possible.