The above picture is an accurate representation of the price of steem right now. There are millions of steem sitting in exchanges right now. That's just the liquid steem.
Above that are the millions of steem power sitting in oligarch accounts.
Since the price of Steem doesn't seem mature enough to be rigged yet I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's a fair pricing mechanism. That means supply and demand should determine price along with irrational exuberance.
Right now there 84.7M of the 178 million steem power that are out there sitting in the corporate account . If the corporation needs money and they can't get it through funding where do you think they will try to get USD? They will power down and sell steem. So, 47% of the total steem is sitting in one account. That feels like a lot of downward potential energy.
Now, the top 25 accounts (including ) hold 70.7% of the steem power.
Top 100 accounts hold 84.5% of all the steem power.
There are 106k accounts. That means that that 0.09% control 84.5% of the Steem Power. That's not even including the steem and steem dollars, which only makes the picture less egalitarian.
The nature of a startup is that you don't want your money tied up in the start up indefinately. You want to be able to remove it and get paid. You probably slaved away with shitty hours and a shitty salary. What you're waiting for is cashing out. These guys want to get their USD for their work. Steem is cool and all, but at some point you want a house and a car and to stop steeming in your mother's basement like all the other broke Millenials so you have to get USD!
The oligarchs are going to sell. Now, because there is not a line of investment bankers all waiting to purchase steem, you can't buy it with a credit card or with any standard investment approach, and there are no institutional investors in the steem itself that means the people that are most likely to buy it are the 7k active users. That leaves each active user having to purchase 145k steem to get us back to a $1 range. Maybe I'm a fool, but I don't see that scenario passing.
I'm waiting for the post from Ned or Dan where they come out and say "here's our plan." Because without that kind of public leadership I don't see the price moving anywhere but down. Now, just cause they say something doesn't mean it will help the price. If they come up with a bad plan it will only make things worse.
On a long enough time line assuming this thing doesn't implode there is upside potential. However, too many people are pissed and don't want to keep making uncertain wages that Chinese farm peasants would decline while whales sit around circle jerking their friends' posts higher and higher. Valuable posts in this community are much more tied to who you know and who regularly backs you rather than the inherent quality of your work. That pisses people off and unrecognized bloggers or worse yet talented bloggers with hundreds of likes and no value to show for it say "fuck this." That's only going to get worse as the value of steem goes down and fewer and fewer people think "you know what? I should sit around making fractions of a steem worth fractions of a dollar because I don't understand economics." In the short run the price of steem seems really likely to drop as the massive weight of $156M steem waiting to get cashed out seems way too powerful for the 7k broke ass active users in the community.
This is when the community is at maximum risk. You have to hope that enough people think "hey this $0.01 steem is a good long term investment" so that people start buying faster than you can say "I'm leaving this fucked up steemocracy."
When the price dips below $0.10 cents I'm probably a buyer. I mostly think the price will drop to $0.01 at some point in the next year if things stay the same so even at $0.10 I'm not in the game as an short term investment. I guess I hope that maybe the silent leaders at that point figure out a way to drum up some cash to save this biatch.
Some folks like this platform a lot and want to see it succeed. Those are the people that I think are most likely to put money in the pot now. They aren't savvy investors. They are cheerful people that value holding value in this place more than they value smart financial investments (or they read the situation differently than I do). They basically keep the price floating where it is now. That's good from a moral point of view, but at the moment I think it's a bad financial plan. There are still some good investments out there that don't take you 2 years to recoup.
I'm not a financial planner. This isn't advice. I'm just sharing with the basement dwelling broke ass Millennials (I haven't seen a Rockefeller post on Steem yet) why I'm not shoving my own savings into this thing... yet.
Other than that... everything is awesome.