Steem is Dead!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! or is it?
Ok, a few people have been mentioning Steem is dead to me recently. So, I want to clarify a little FUD that's out there and try to bring my perspective to the FUD.
First off, Steem is really hard to kill. The only way I see it dying is if the price of running a node exceeds the proceeds of running that node either for a long time or drastically for short times.
Boring witness math
Right now a top 20 witness makes 110,000 steem per year or something in that vicinity. Each Steem is worth 33 cents right now. So, witnesses are earning $36,000 per year. I run two witness nodes (and pay for half of the minnowsupport rpc, but that's separate from this). My nodes cost $120/month each. So, that's $240/month. So, that's about 3k per year. The price of steem has to get down to 3 cents before I start asking myself "do I even want to run a node here?" Maybe some of the backup witnesses would stop hosting Steemd by 3 cents, but I don't see enough leaving to stop the chain until Steem hits 3 cents. At that point it's not immediate either. I have liquid steem I don't think I'd kill my witness just cause it isn't profitable for a while. I was losing money when it first started. It can lose money again. Witnesses could also change the reward pool to ensure that there's enough money for the basic infrastructure.
RPCs cost more and maybe we could see the number of full RPCs drop or maybe even many of them stop, but in that case i think more people will band together to cover partial costs and Steemit has some cash. They may make decisions I don't always agree with, but I don't think they'd let the project die over RPCs as long as they could afford to, and they have some runway.
MIRA
More importantly than the right this second discussion is that MIRA seems pretty close. MIRA allows nodes to run with data that's currently stored in ram to be stored on hard drives. The difference in cost for that is staggering. A full node would drop from 512Gb of Ram to closer to 8 or 16 Gb. The server would go from something like $650/month to something closer to $20/month. Witness nodes are gonna be less. So, now run the math again. If it only costs $20 a month and yeah you probably run 2 for $40/month as long as you can make more than $480/yr there will be people willing to donate time to run them. Post MIRA the discussion of closing my witness starts if steem hits 0.004 cents per steem.
Steem from that end is pretty unkillable. It takes a calamity to kill steem and make the chain stop and this project completely die.
Loss of people
So, the next Fear is that Steem is running out of people that will stick around and this whole enterprise is doomed. Whales are selling, price will go down, no one will post, and even if the chain is still going the whole ecosystem is basically dead.
Some aspects of that are happening, and the price of steem vs BTC has never been worse. So, I can't outright dismiss it, but
there were 400k posts last week
4M votes
49k accounts transacting
4k new accounts created
the least net amount of steem powered down in 2 months (260k powered down below what was powered up)
Side lined
Eve online has a pretty funny idea. They think they never lose players unless they die. They just go on break. Same is true here. Human behavior is pretty predictable.
Price is high Madlib: Hi (synonym for friends), it's great to see everyone one. For the past while I've been experiencing (random excuse for leaving). It's kept me gone, but now I'm back to keep my discussion of (random blogging topic) alive and well. Great to be here, and don't forget to follow me!
Price is low Madlib: Hi (synonym for fuckfaces), you guys can eat my (sexual body part). This platform doesn't even comprehend my (self aggrandinzing adjective) ability at (random skill). You don't appreciate me and now I'm the fuck out. (entitled sign off)
My point is that people don't actually leave. They just stop posting when they don't think it's financially worth it. When it is worth it they'll all come back.
Tree Rings
I think it was @demotruk that spoke about this as rings on a tree. Every season as the tree grows it gets rings to mark the growth of the inhale and exhale of life. Steem has really thick rings. It's thick because:
Distribution makes for high amounts of sell pressure
people come to earn, when earning potential is high they flock, when it's low they leave in droves
SBD makes steem more volatile than any other crypto. At the lows we're adding 5% inflation in a year due to conversions at the high we're paying out premium SBD.
In order to improve the cycle
We need a better distribution which is already happening to some extent.
We need people who buy steem to invest rather than just earn it to cash out, so we need businesses they can park steem into
We need the crypto market cap to rise and Steem will float with it
We need the Steem Alliance functioning with coordinated efforts across the ecosystem.
We need less reliance on Steemit to do stuff and more community driven work and hype
My actual prediction
Bitcoin has already bottomed. A bear trap is forming. It's going to knock the price down again and shake out the last of the weak hands before rebounding in the face of the impending halvening. When it rebounds it's going to 100k in the next 2 years.
Steem is going to lag behind bitcoin and the rise of other altcoins. Eventually the other sexier and better hyped projects will get saturated and investors will go looking for bargain alt coins. Steem will be sitting there with big doe eyes. The price will start rising, and the rising price will attract bloggers and investors and the pendulum will swing the other way hard are fast. By the time BTC hits $100k steem will be $100/steem or more (before 2022) and the people that hodled through this or buy some at 33 cents will see something like 30,000% gains on their investment if they have the balls to hang with it to the next ATH of btc.
If you agree with that assessment then you should be dollar cost average buying in right now with what you can afford in case this analysis is wrong and the biblical flood is actually approaching (ie buy a little at a time rather than blow your wad all at once).
Anyway, that's not financial advice and all that other disclaimer shit. It's just how I see it and I hope it helps provide a non-fear based perspective from a optimist.
YES.
I'd like to add one more: those who're still here (probably around 10K human beings as we figured out in this thread), are highly committed. So while the whole market kinda experienced a recession, the Steem network did as well. The weak hands - as you called them - have left, and that's not an issue.
Those who're participating in this ecosystem right now, are 100% or even 200% comitted both to Steem and crypto in general. They're true enthusiasts, creators, builders, multipliers, ambassadors - all in one. They are strong enough to push Steem to the next level when the time has come.
#DYOR and Steem on 🤙
The Steem ecosystem is doing even much better today than when we were ATH!!
Very true, but very few notice coz they're measuring with a USD stick ;-)
We are the crypto veterans.
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Great to see the perspective of not only a witness but an entrepreneur that has really put skin in the game! These a certainly encouraging metrics to follow! Thanks for sharing!
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Just think about how many times BTC would die!
I'm full bullish on STEEM too. First target is 10K SP that won't powerdown anytime, and I'll see from there. 20% off the first aim!
I've been powering up Steem since I started. Granted I haven't been earning it as fast as what I could have been, but I see it as more of a retirement fund 25 years from now. I was buying in when it was USD$5 and the price drop last year scared me off buying more with my limited FIAT for the time being.
But I also see the current price as an incredible bargain and an opportunity to really invest heavily in the platform for when the price does eventually climb again. (Not financial advice, just opinion).
I assume you meant GB rather than Mb of RAM/Disk.
I have also said that it is hard to kill Steem as long as we have witnesses. It kept going when Steem was 6c and some of us did well from that.
I do think Steem is struggling to grow. We get thousands of new accounts each week, but the number of active users is not increasing. We just passed 2000 dolphins, but it's been almost there for months. Minnow numbers are also not really growing. Thousands of accounts are powering down if they have not done so already.
Many of the new accounts seem to be created as potential bots. Steem will not be social if it is all bots.
I have seen dissent over groups like @SteemFlagRewards when people feel they are unfairly flagged. That is why it has to be done with care. They have to give guidance on why they do it. The last thing we want to do is put off good people. I know some people feel they are entitled to whatever rewards they can grab through vote sellers etc, but we all have the right to adjust rewards up or down. In some cases that does not happen as most will be scared of retaliation by some big accounts.
Getting some big names on board would help. Dlive got PewDiePie and they are catching up with Steem on Alexa rankings. If we can just get niche communities such as #comics, music, knitting, whatever to migrate here it might create network effects that would produce growth in real, active users.
If the witnesses, whales, orcas and dolphins want to see a return on their investment of money and/or time they have to help build the community. That can be via voting, delegation and other donations. It has been said we need a bigger 'middle class' with enough SP between them to ensure the rewards are spread wider.
Steem is imperfect, but there is nothing else with the same potential right now. Competitors are bound to arise (Dan's new baby?) and they could easily steal the limelight from Steem.
Steem on!
Somebody needs to build an app on top of Steem where the economics of the internal token or coin are more aligned with community building. The Steem economic system is a macroeconomy that is good at producing and distributing coins based on activity that is not necessarily social. Websites such as steemhunt and steemstem, and possibly others I have not seen, are examples of how to do this.
Steem's macroeconomy is not perfect but actually works fine, but it is like expecting your bank to fund a social club - you can, of course, use your bank to fund one :-)
Steem is a framework to build things on. It isn't 'fair', but then neither is life or the capitalist system. What we do have is freedom and that has value.
I don't pretend to understand all the economics, but the balance could shift with SMTs/tokens and if there were far more users with some SP. I'm interested to see where it goes.
I'm not sure encoding "fairness" would work anyway, but having enough feedback loops that attenuate behaviour that is damaging to the chain is entirely feasible. Most people obey their laws most of the time not due to a sense of fairness but a fear of retribution; if encoded, that's just a negative feedback loop.
As you say, Steem is a framework, and more than SMTs I hope that SCOT fulfills its promise of being a more flexible tool so that some projects will "reframe" the rules so that their communities can thrive with little or no interference from the underlying blockchain economy.
I'm also not saying it will be easy - but it's worth another experiment in crypto-economics.
There are also some non-economic social issues, such as the ease of keeping in touch with friends, but this article was mainly about financial issues.
People will work around algorithms. It's up to people to determine where rewards go. Flagging/downvoting is part of that, but many people will just not do it and in some cases you have to fear big retaliation. Another aspect of the freedom of Steem.
Yeah that is the point. Using a new account with a little SP is useless and your vote count nothing.
Some are migrated to EOS or just have a blog with crypto donations
I also think Steem will eventually go higher. Not to 100$ though. That seems impossible. I think 10$ is a reachable goal. But hey.. no one knows really.
Bruh... FB has 4 billion users. Steem can reach $100 steem. When people realize their participation is worth something they will change.😁
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bro it is possible i think 100$ is small target... crypto has only 190 billion market right now.. when money will come, steem will also rise
$100/STEEM? I'll settle for $5/STEEM. But mostly I just want the price to go down so I can become a dolphin. Or orca. Or whatever it is that is at 5,000 STEEM. That's the way to do! I think with all these great dapps building on STEEM, people that think STEEM is dead are awfully naive. Actifit, Partiko, Drug Wars, Splinterlands, and all the ones gaining traction as we speak. That's pretty dope and already way more impressive than some crap like NEO or BTG, which are both way higher on the crypto market cap league tables at the moment. But that will change. Slowly, but it will change.
And all these new tokens thanks to steem engine =)
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When moms start giving their kids steem for lunch money we will have made it.
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@remind-me on 1 January 2022
Hey @adasq, I will notify you on January 1st 2022, 12:00:00 pm (UTC)
Later! ( read more... )
I didn't know about this. Sweet!
I bought Steem when it cost $ 2. I also bought cheaper and if it drops even lower, I will probably buy more.
It's the only cryptocurrency I need and I'm not just thinking about selling at a profit. I want to be at least a dolphin in this paltform.
Do not lose faith in Steem. You need to look at this project in a long-term perspective.
I believe in Steem and it will not change!
These two Paragraphs say it all and I believe it to be the Truth. I am close to hitting the Two Years Milestone here on Steemit and more than half the People that started with me are no longer here on Steemit. Scratch that as I do see them Post once a Month which pretty much shows they want to Earn STEEM but since STEEM is at around 35 cents they don't feel like Posting.
Personally, I am loving this Bear Market as this is the Opportunity to get myself some more STEEM so that when the Bulls arrive I am all set to Ride the Waves.
Totally! When STEEM is cheap, I want to post MORE not LESS.
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