Hey Steem!
It's been a wild ride the last few days, so I wanted to compile some data for you so that everyone has a realistic understanding of Steem's value and where Steem is going.
As of July 13, 2016 there are:
98.937 million Steem, however of that amount there are
96.831 million Steem in the vesting fund (Steem Power that will take 2 years to power down and convert)
396,000 Steem Dollars
21,493 registered users
So in reality there is 2.106 million Steem that is available, potentially liquid, on the market (98.937-96.831), excluding the conversion of Steem Dollars and inflation. If everyone decided to power down their Steem Power at the same time, at most 931,000 (96.831 million/104) per week would be added to the liquid supply, excluding Steem Dollars and inflation.
The reason why the price of Steem has shot up so much, from $0.32 to $3+ is because there is such a limited amount of Steem on the market (2.106 million). With some media attention, people rushed into the market to get Steem. If all 98 million Steem were on the market, the price of Steem most likely would not have gone to $3/Steem. However, because there was only 2.106 million Steem available, the price shot up exponentially.
When you look at market data on various websites they state that there is an available supply of 80 - 90 million Steem @ $3.40 per Steem with a ~$280 million market cap.
The market cap is extremely misleading as it does not discount the 96.831 million Steem that can only be withdrawn over a 2 year period.
It is my estimate that the market cap of Steem is more likely in the $7-20 million dollar range, if that.
Let's look at it another way. At the current available liquid supply of 2.101 million Steem @ $3.40 each, the market cap of Steem is actually $7.143 million. Assuming that everyone powers down at the same time and all 931k Steem get put on the market in a week, then there will be 3.032 Million Steem in a week, or 5.825 million Steem in 4 weeks.
Even if the price holds at $3.5, the available Steem would be $20.3 million, and it would take 4 weeks to get there.
So what are other metrics to value Steem at?
If you compare it to Reddit, the valuation of Steem would be somewhere between $350,000 - $1.5 million.
Reddit has:
$4 billion dollar market cap
234 million users
The value each user produces is: $17.09 ($4 Billion / 234 Million)
Steem has 21,493 registered users.
If each one is as valuable as a Reddit user, then the total value of the Steem platform is $367,315.37. Even if you say that people have multiple accounts on Reddit and divide the number of user accounts by 4, and multiply the value each user creates by the number of Steem users there are, that gives you $1.469 million in valuation. Even if you say that a Steem user produces 10 times the value of a Reddit user, that still only gives you $14.69 million valuation. Nowhere near the $280 million that market data websites are giving you.
In conclusion, I think that the market valuation data websites are giving us are bogus and should be re-examined. Journalists should not be saying that Steem's market cap is $280 million, when the current available supply is less than 3 million Steem @ $3.40 per Steem. The exchanges need to discount the locked up Steem.
In addition to that, the price of Steem is currently very overvalued when you look at how many users are actually using Steem. Unless you are a speculator and are expecting big things to come from Steem in 1-5 years.
I simplified this and didn't really go much into inflation, Steem Dollars, speculation, future innovations built into the Steem price, and other variables. However I do not think that this takes away from the message.
What do you think market websites should set the available supply of Steem to be? What is a good way of evaluating the real value of Steem?