There is a lot of whale power down inventory that is hitting the markets and this creates a downward pressure on the price. Considering the rapid growth in userbase and the many internet celebrities that are now posting, it would seem that the price should be rising. However simple supply/demand imbalance creates an artificially low price.
Put yourself in the whale's shoes. You have a paper wealth of a million dollars+ and if this is your first million, good advice is to grab it while you can. Most people will never get a chance to bank that much money. So you might envy them, but you cant blame them. And what this does is push the price of STEEM down. Hard to say how much, but could be 2x or even 3x, but I think this is a good thing as if the whales didnt sell then the STEEM would stay too concentrated in small number of people and the more people who have invested in STEEM, the better in the long run.
Also, this whale powerdown inventory cannot last forever. In fact, 2 years is all that it can last and my guess is that a lot of the whales will stop their powerdown well before they convert all their steem power. What this means is that over the next 2 years, the amount of available STEEM from the whale powerdown will gradually disappear.
And once this onetime whale sale is done, there really cant be any more such inventory. So, in the short term the STEEM price may stay around here, maybe drop, maybe go up. The steem power will still hold its value in BTC though, so during this early period I am putting most all my STEEM into steem power: 5.825 STEEM vs 30,360.695 STEEM
Over the next two years there is the combined effect of the userbase growth and reduction of whale sale and reduction of the first year 300% inflation, so it is quite likely that STEEM price will actually go up over the 2 year timeframe. My bet is that powering down in 2 years will lead to a much better overall result than powering down now, but dont tell the whales that! we need that cheap STEEM to be distributed
James
I am testing the graphic just to see if it works, it has nothing to do with this post