I know there is a lot of grumblings about the flaws of Steem right now - the bots, the spam, and so on. Fine.
But if you think about what the Steem blockchain has accomplished, it is really extraordinary:
Steem is, as far as I can tell, the first blockchain technology that has actually become a product or service that people benefit from and use in a major way.
Think about that for a second and let your mind be blown, my friends.
Even cryptos that are just currencies have not really produced anything useful yet. It's all potential. The grand papa of them all, Bitcoin, is not much more than a store of value, with a lot of speculation, at this point. And even Ethereum has not yet seen any any dapps be produced that are truly useful. Steem is useful and used by hundreds of thousands of people.
Steem has no transaction fees. That is pretty extraordinary. There are not that many cryptocurrencies that can claim that. In fact, I don't know of one (although I am no expert, and there probably are some). Even just using the platform as a simple payment system is very useful - there are hardly any delays, either.
Steem has a very large, passionate user base that is engaged and growing quite quickly. There are very impressive projects popping up left and right - just take a look at Utopian.io. It is absolutely incredible how quickly it has been built and grown! And that is just one example. Busy.org, chainbb, steemconnect...
The Steem blockchain seems to be extremely secure and stable, and has been operating and growing with barely any serious issues with quite some time now.
So....Why, oh why, does Steem have such a low value? There are TONS of alt coins that are little more than a simple blockchain, an intriguing whitepaper, and a lot of promises and potential, and they are WAY more valuable than Steem!
I simply do not understand it at all. Can someone explain this to me??
edit - I took the picture from this comment here