I don't mean to be derogatory in any way, and personally I like the STEEM concept quite a bit, however I see the market price of the coin continuing to decline for a number of reasons:
- The dilution is very high. About 800 coins are generated every minute (1.15M per day). Granted, 90% of every newly generated coins go to STEEM POWER holders, so they are protected a great deal from this inflation. However, the overall inflation rate is a significant concern for investment purposes. A lot of folks that are truly just investors in cryptos are doing so as an overall monetary base inflation hedge. There are significant and unknown risks stemming from the inflation being seen in other, um, more traditional "assets" around the world, which are showing some inflation "strain" (to put it nicely). So an asset with significant inflation doesn't really fit the bill.
STEEM will dilute 35% just over the next month alone
- Those holding coins outside of the ecosystem (steemit.com) do not enjoy this benefit. If you want to invest in STEEM you need to buy it and hold it in the website. Many crypto investors like holding their own coins, after all, the blockchain is a peer-to-peer technology so having a third party hold you asset for you involves trust (MtGox anyone?)
It's not that I don't trust the STEEM TEEM. It's just that I have no choice. For others that may affect (limit) their total investment stake, in my opinion.
- The market had an inflection point and run-up where the market-cap briefly soared to over $400M (it is now at ~$250M). My interpretation here is the market had expectations of value creation that aren't currently being borne out, at least in the manic short term way that markets often want things to come to fruition. For example, if someone is blogging about a vacation to Peru that might be worth $5 in advertising on a Wordpress type of blog, and it makes $4,000 here, there's clearly a market mis-match in the valuation of content. Now, perhaps there is market mis-valuation on the end, i.e, perhaps the Wordpress writer who does a fantastic job to only end up with $5, should've made more like $100, but even then there is still an order of magnitude difference to be explained.
- The market may have expected more user sign-ups once the market cap soared and neared half a billion dollars. This may be the market reflecting the ability of the team to execute, which matters greatly with a cryptocurrency that's tied to a project.
A >10X run up starting around July 11th is remarkable but there's a hangover-esque downtrend currently in play
In short, the market is basically asking "Where's the Beef?"
I don't mean to be a Debbie Downer. I'm drinking the kool-aid quite bit and have a stake here as I do in other projects. I think the peer-to-peer microfinancialization of blogging and content creation on the internet, a capability that cryptocurrency technologies obviate, was inevitable, even if the mechanism was somewhat slow to materialize. However, one has to weigh the upside of the kool-aid (transformational nature of the vision) with the reality of the value-add (which in this case is content).
But, hey, you'll never read any of this anyhow, because my position will not be popular with the important upvoters (whales) that have a big personal stake in remaining Positive and Sunny 24/7...