Over the past 6 weeks, we witnessed the price of STEEM go from $.85 to over $3.00. This is only the start of a much bigger move. My price target for the end of 2018 remains the same.
So where does my uber-bullishness come from.
Here are the factors:
A. Wall Street
The total market cap for cryptocurrencies hit $250B at Thanksgiving. Yesterday, it crossed the $600B threshold working its way up to $620B before pulling back last night. That is a $370B increase in only a little less than a month.
This is a force we cannot overlook. Over the next year, there will be a lot more than $350B entering. We need to realize there is at least another trillion, if not more entering this market. The impact of the last month will be exceeded by a minimum of 4. Throughout 2017 we heard about all the hedge funds opening up and raising money to enter this space. Recently, we saw the opening of the spigot and the funds starting to flow.
This will continue throughout next year.
B. Hard Fork Automating The Sign Up Process
This is huge. From what I am reading, the next hard fork (.20) is going to provide a significant upgrade in many areas. One that is vital is the overhaul of the sign up process. To prevent abuse, the process was initially set up to be mostly manual. We realize how inefficient this is when we see the approval taking a week. No site in this era can expect to really grow when it takes a week to get confirmation. We live in an instant gratification world.
Automating the process will enable the signing up of hundreds of thousands, if not millions a week. While we might not see a sudden on-rush of new members, it is helpful to know that the platform can handle the growth. Also, those who do sign up could be more interactive without the wait. I am sure part of the poor retention rate is people signing up and not hearing anything for a week. That would turn me off too.
C. Communities
Another benefit that is going to be provide at the next fork.
Communities has been in development for some time. While not a lot is known about the specifics, I was able to garner a bit of information by reading the plan for 2017 that was put out. In that article, Reddit was mentioned as the entity they are looking towards. I will admit that the reference was in terms of the monthly users and presumed retention rate. However, my conclusion is that the communities will be set up in a sub-reddit fashion.
No matter what the set up of the communities, there is no doubt what the present system is. Right now Steemit is just one big stream. A lot of posts are lost simply because it is dropped in to the mass of articles being produced. The tagline categories helps somewhat yet we know there is a lot of stuff in there that is misplaced. People often tag based upon what will get viewed as opposed to what their article is about.
Communities will enable this site to move even more into the social interaction arena.
D. Smart Media Tokens
No surprise, another outcome of the next fork (it seems that is rather important).
This is a real game changer. I touched upon the SMT protocol in a number of posts expressing how important this is. This is steem's ERC20. It offers the ability for content creators to develop their own token.
I was having a discussion with 
E. Growth Rate (500K Users)
I signed up towards the end of August. Therefore, I am just approaching 4 months on this blockchain. At that time, I was user number 318,000 and change. Recently, we just crossed 500K or an average of 45,000 sign ups a month since I joined. Stretching that out over a year, that is another 540K signing up in 2018 if the present growth rate held this linear form.
It will not. The reason for that is the growth rate, presently, is not linear. There were more people signing up in the 4th quarter of this year than the third. The traffic coming to this site is backed up by the stats from Alexa. Here is an up-to-the-moment snapshot.
Steemit is a top 2000 site worldwide and went from 1,000 this past weekend to 922. Yesterday, I wrote about the need to comment and how it makes posts longer which will help them to rank higher. Compared to this time last year, Steemit has a lot more articles and is a much bigger site. This will help the organic traffic finding the site via search. Looking at Alexa, we see more than 20% of the top 5 traffic sources coming from search. This outpaces the traffic from Facebook, Reddit, and YouTube COMBINED. Search is still the crucial component in gaining traffic on the Internet.
On Steemit we operate on a 6 day window. Post something today and you will get paid on upvotes within a week. After that, the post is closed. However, Google does not operate on this window. A post is up forever. As Steemit goes higher, certain posts, even from 9 months ago, will be weighted heavier. This helps their rankings. Since this site is dynamic (always changing) it is going to carry a great deal of weight with Google.
At this point, I do not believe STEEM is a speculative play. We are involved in a system that is evolutionary in terms of things building upon each other. Anything that takes place on here today adds to what was done yesterday. Hence, what we do tomorrow will be dropped right on top of this. When you have such a multi-faceted approach, things start to grow exponentially. The key is being able to see this.
For all the issues, since I joined, Steemit experiences roughly a 56% growth rate in 4 months. That is the type of rate that makes Wall Street managers drool. They assign absurd P/E ratios to companies like that. As long as the growth rate continues, it is a homerun. At this point, I think that growth rate will shoot up. I believe we will hit 1M subscribers by April, basically doubling what we saw since I joined.
Deals like that in the stock market make people millionaires.
This is what we are involved in.
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