I have 100% of my money in cryptocurrency (mostly in bitcoin). I have not invested in Steem yet, but am growing more intrigued the more I learn about how the network operates. I came across a post that epitomized my Steemit investment concerns:
"A STEEM investor never has ownership over any of the content published on Steemit. For them buying STEEM is essentially a gracious donation to content creators."
It took me sometime to figure out why would anybody speculate that other people are going to speculate to give donations to content creators and up-voters. And it brought me back to that old "Does bitcoin have intrinsic value bs?"
Essentially, in bitcoin the miners are often liquidating their block rewards to the market because speculators and investors provide the liquidity to do so. Now in Steemit the content providers are effectively an extension of the mining protocol as far as the sell side of the market is concerned. Just as mining is an essential protocol to securing the bitcoin network, good content is essential for securing the user base and thus security of the Steemit network. So I have after much thought concluded that it is not correct to refer to investors and speculators as donors.
People bought bitcoin back in 2008 and 2009 because it was decentralised and censorship resistant. This is too. So, for much the same reasons people initially got interested in bitcoin, investors could get interested in Steemit. This could really go places....