For me, Steem is like a startup that raises funds from investors to pay their expenses.

There are people around that interpret this as a ponzi scheme which, of course, isn't even true if that startup only paid for the good of their boss. A startup that only pays their employees and doesn't work on its growth will simply disappear from the market leaving the investors at a loss.

In the case of Steem, the investor does not just pay for development and earns a share of the startup, he also earns more power to benefit from the platform directly. If he only was an investor, he'd make a profit from the growth of the startup, but in the case of Steem, he can even benefit by means of posting, curation or by providing liquidity.

That said, an investor of Steem has inherently more possibilities to profit from his investment besides the potential growth of the ecosystem.

One more thing regarding the STEEM token:
For me, the STEEM token is merely an on-/off-ramp token for SteemPower and SteemDollar (the latter having its own ramps into USD directly soonish). Technically, it should be the cheapest to buy SteemPower by using the internal markets from STEEM while you can only exit SteemPower via STEEM. The SteemDollar is kind of uncoupled from all of this except that it is backed by actual STEEM (which one could obtain at any volume by using 'settlement'/'convertion').

That all said, we have three tokens on Steem:

• a liquid, crypto token with free floating price and high dilution (STEEM)
• a less-liquid crypt token with free floating price and low/no dilution (STEEMPower)
• a liquid token with variable supply but stable value that pays interest (STEEMDollar)