An economy doesn't exist and certainly can't grow without spending. Consumers spend for products, services and goods. Businesses offer them. That's how the capital moves from the ones that has it to the one who can offer what you need.
If an economy can't exist without spending, does hodling make sense? Well, that's a tricky question and it depends who you ask.
I've seen a post recently urging bitcoin hodlers to start spending their holdings, in order to trigger the next bullish movement. Hmm! Knowing a bullish movement will make each bitcoin worth more in fiat money, who will start spending their bitcoin?
Hopefully enough, because that's the only way to grow the crypto economy.
The funny thing about bitcoin is you can either hold it or trade it, and that's it. Not enough of an economy to say you can spend it, especially if you have loads of them and would like to spend them on everything instead of fiat.
Holding bitcoin gives you hope that it will reach new peaks some day. But you can't really use it while you patiently wait.
Meanwhile there's a coin kinda far away from the spotlight of the top market cap. Maybe that's good, maybe that's bad, we will see.
But on Steem, the hodlers of the token use it every single day. They grow their stake just by using it. And they have plenty of choices how to use it too:
- manually curate content
- create their own content
- get rewarded for coding/development/design/etc. on utopian.io
- stay physically active/fit and be rewarded on actifit.io
- play games and earn more rewards (Steem Monsters and DrugWars)
- try their luck gambling
- possibly a few more I missed from this enumeration.
And the passive way to use it:
- automatically curate content
- earn a share from various projects' profit/revenues by delegating SP to them; as an alternative, receive upvotes for delegation
- interest on vested STEEM Power
All that makes the usability of STEEM for hodlers skyrocket by comparison with the old bitcoin.
If we count in the State of the dApps rankings, we realize how well our dDapps are performing in the crypto world, and how used they are by comparison with others.
See how 5 of the first 10 dApps (or 6 of the first 11) are from Steem? See how the first two are from Steem (Steemit.com first and DrugWars.io second)? Yet STEEM market cap is much lower than EOS with 1 dApp in the first 10 and Etherium with 4 out of 10.
Many STEEM also exchange owners internally, from one account to another, through the use of the user-friendly wallets (see the market of Steem Monsters for example), and they are not reported on any exchange for daily volume, because they are not on any exchange.