From the start I was fascinated by the vicious circle that the base concept of Steem is. The more Steem rises, the more users it attracts (more network effect), the more the price would rise and the more users... a vicious circle.
It was hard to see at the beginning that so many whales were cashing out, harming the price and stifling the price and demotivating its users, which stopped promoting it to their friends.
In May 2017, when many whales had cashed out entirely (in the middle of December 2016 the rules were changed and whales could dump everything in 3 months time), the price rose and allowed the vicious circle to start again.
After the initial price explosion in May 2017, a crash followed, as always... in this case much attention went to Bitcoin getting to new highs, because of the dumb money that came in, like from bankers and newbies who were watching CNBC and other MSM news outlets. Steem was not able to achieve new highs and so attention faded and the price came down again.
But Steem tried to get more interesting, like introducing linear voting, which laso lent a voice to the long tail, not only main-stream articles. Also the little man had a say in what was interesting. Not only the whales.
Now the vicious circle is back. Stronger than ever!
With a 2 billion marketcap Steem is giving its creators 200 Million a year as rewards... this is really unprecedented! And it will attract many more users who want to monetize their blogs.
Censorship in Europe, Venezuela, USA and China will give this platform more active users than ever. Facebook is on a deleting spree... It is really only possible to give pro government-policies opinions on Facebook, Twitter and Youtube. Everything else gets blocked or demonetized.
Now Steem also has several Video-Sites like d.tube... Everything is setup just right... No transaction fees, 1.5 second transactions, no bottle-neck and a quick using user-base... ALMOST EVERYWHERE I LOOK EVERYBODY STARTS TO MENTION THEIR STEEMIT ACCOUNT!
This is the only website which attacks Facebook and Twitter with crypto directly... Synereo was said to be a contender, but this seems not to be the case...
And now as well Smart Media Tokens (SMT's)
Oh man... are we set up for a ride... this can go to a 50 Billion USD MarketCap quicker than we think, and if Steem pays out 10% of that, 5 Billion a year it will be like a vacuum cleaner... Millions of users will fight with their articles for these 5 billion USD a year.... that is what I think... But then again... the average population is to dumm for cryptos and just ignore it out of stupidity... but with so much media attention on cryptos, I think this time also the stupid sheeple will not be able to ignore Steem anymore...
What do you think?
Disclaimer: this is as always no investment advice... just my opinion.