Hi everyone,

Merry Christmas to everyone and Happy Holidays. Most of you might already know, Steem has a lot of potential. Steem has been underestimated and overlooked. Steemit which is built on the Steem blockchain is one of the most searched websites in the world and continues to grow. Just to give you a better perspective on the situation, Bitcoin's all time market cap was over 300 billion and Steem has not even passed a billion. So, if you think that you have missed the boat then think again. As you also probably know, there are a lot of projects out there that have not even been completed and are purely based on future speculation which have a much high market cap than Steem and I am also referring to some of the ERC-20 Tokens with the smallest market cap that still have a bigger market cap than Steem, that's just ridiculous. I would consider those projects currently overvalued, full of hype and have tremendously less activity than Steem. Before I continue further, this is not a financial advice, I am stating my perspective and opinion.

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The Future of Social Media (Steem to mainstream)

On the other hand, an entire social media platform (Steemit) that is still at it's infancy is being used on top of the Steem Blockchain. Bitcoin has just recently become mainstream and is continuing to grow awareness with more and more people finding out about it. Bitcoin's popularity will help the Steemit platform become mainstream. Just imagine if all the people that use Facebook become aware of Steemit. " As of the third quarter of 2017, Facebook had 2.07 billion monthly active users" (Source Credit). If Steem had half of those users, all of you know that $1000 dollars per Steem wouldn't be an unrealistic price. Of course, there will be those of you that will criticize Steemit and might not find it as user friendly as Facebook is currently but keep in mind that Steemit is still in beta and has a lot of room for improvement. And, let us not forget that Facebook didn't start out perfect when it was "The Facebook". With all that said, "One of the primary goals of Steem’s reward system is to produce the best discussions on the internet."(Source Credit)

(Image Credit) Edited by Generation

Performance and Scalability with Steem Blockchain

Most of you early adopters reading this are probably ahead of the game. But, for those of you newbies that do not know:

Steem does not have any transaction fees
Steem can handle 1000 transactions per second without breaking a sweat so to speak. Bitcoin and Ethereum can handle 7 and 25 transactions per second respectively. Now do you see what we mean when we say that Steem is undervalued? "The Steem network is built upon Graphene, the same technology that powers BitShares. Graphene has been publicly demonstrated sustaining over 1000 transactions per second on a distributed test network. Graphene can easily scale to 10,000 or more transactions per second with relatively straightforward improvements to server capacity and communication protocols"(Source Credit).

Concerned about Inflation? Don't worry, here is the information from the white papers below:

Current Allocation & Supply

"Starting with the network's 16th hard fork in December 2016, Steem began creating new tokens at a yearly inflation rate of 9.5%. The inflation rate decreases at a rate of 0.01% every 250,000 blocks, or about 0.5% per year. The inflation will continue decreasing at this pace until the overall inflation rate reaches 0.95%. This will take about 20.5 years from the time hard fork 16 went into effect.

75% of the new tokens that are generated go to fund the reward pool, which is split between authors and curators. 15% of the new tokens are awarded to holders of SP. The remaining 10% pays for the witnesses to power the blockchain." (Source Credit)

Organic Discovery

A lot of people are encountering Steemit through Google Search and other search engines. According to the white papers of Steem: " Most cryptocurrencies generate little value for those who are not actively using the network. Steem, by contrast, generates content and encourages users to share it. This content gets indexed by search engines 30 of 32 and ultimately will bring value to a large number of passive users. This search traffic creates organic advertising for the Steem network and grows the network effect." (Source Credit)

Steem is currently leading with the most transactions per day, as of 12/24/2017!

If you still have doubts...

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Here is Hive account@steemitblog explaining how both Ethereum and Steem were able to reach 1 million transactions per second and for Ethereum this was 60% of it's network capacity while Steem used only 1% of it's network's capacity. If you want to read his blog click here. Also if you want some raw statistics shared by Hive account@arcange click here.

Here is some more information from Hive account@acidyo about Steem and his thoughts on it.

More Awesome Things

With Steem being an open source protocol, this allows developers to build many other social applications that reward users in Steem. And, there are already some that have been built, including Hive account@dtube (for decentralized videos), Hive account@dsound (decentralized audio) and Hive account@dlive for decentralized streaming. Steem has a great community that continues to grow and bring in great talent and quality content. I have covered only a fraction of the information there is out there about Steem and I am welcoming you to explore the rest with your own research.