STEEM Protocol is undervalued as a Networking Ecosystem. It's perhaps overvalued as a "Market". Lets look at the basic definition of a "Market" and a "Network". There's indeed an important distinction.
Market - a place where you can buy, sell, trade, advertise, and promote.
Network - A group or system of interconnected people or things.
In looking closely at "market" and "network", there's an important distinction to make in regards to, "interconnectedness". The network is interconnected. The Market is not. This might seem like a minor thing....and it's mostly been a point that's been dismissed in our business world...
In all actuality, the "interconnectedness"....that which makes a Network a Network...is kind of a big deal.
The Value of every single thing is a direct result of it's "network effect". A person or thing's value is the direct result of it's "network effects".
There's a popular saying,
You're Network is your Net Worth
If we look around the world - we can find countless unfortunate examples of poverty and inhuman standards of living. It's a real tragedy.
Part of the reason why we have such disproportionate distribution of resources throughout the planet....to a point of it's bad....where much of the animal and insect kingdoms have gone extinct...
The reason is that we've relied upon market monopolies for the distribution of goods and services....while ironically discounting and disregarding "Life"...You know....the interconnected network here which makes up and defines planet earth.
Networks become more and more valuable - the bigger they get. It's like their real value is "exponential scalability"....the ability to expand.
Just think about that for a moment.
A network that is good just gets better as it scales/expands. It becomes exponentially more valuable.
On planet earth today...we've designed our economic systems around having these controlled and regulated market monopolies. Hmm. In these market monoplies around the world...they are not so expansive. In fact these markets in their nature are mostly, deliberately designed to be exclusive at the cost of being too expensive for the majority of participants.
We're deliberately not even including most of Life in our "markets"...which ship be networking protocols...like STEEM, Bitcoin ...and other crypto's.
Point here is this - It's the people/things in the network that determine/create the value.
Value can be defined in various ways according to consensus.
Markets are designed to work in compliment ...as a point of accommodation for the Network.
We're in our infancy here with STEEM and humanity here in terms of what It means to be a participant in a global decentralized network.
We're so use to existing in controlled and regulated monopolies that it's almost difficult to see and understand the exponential value of a global decentralized Network powered by the people for the people.
Before crypto - we've never really had a global networked money system.
It's a massively important point.
The Steem global networked economy...is also a communications network...the implications here are tremendous.
In some ways I'm still wrapping my head around the potential here.
CHEERS TO AN EXTRAORDINARY 2018
STEEM ON