What If... A Glimpse of a Brighter Future?

Back in my early days on the Steem blockchain, there was optimism everywhere. Some folks claimed that Steem had ushered in a Gift economy and others used to play a sort of a "what if" game. "What if Steem got as big as Facebook?", "What if Steem got as big as Bitcoin?" You get the idea. Big hopes and dreams, not yet tempered by cold-hard reality.

In retrospect, there was clearly some irrational exuberance going on there. Steem was #3 on CoinMarketCap, and some posts were receiving tens of thousands of dollars in payouts. But reality always wins in the end.

Recently, it feels like the opposite. We're so used to the Trending page being flooded with spam, the difficulty of finding interesting content, and the price of STEEM hanging out below the haircut price, that there's not much optimism to be found. Even the people who are diligently working to make the blockchain a better place can't hide their frustration that the current set of problems seems intractable.

So, today I'm here to inject a dose of optimism. Yes, there are problems that shouldn't be ignored or sugar-coated, but the only thing that's permanent is change, so let's look at some reasons for optimism, and then play one of those "what if" games that I mentioned.

Reasons for optimism

1. After a 5 year dry spell, development is happening again. Not just through the SPS, but some other independent developers have landed here, too.
2. 57% of SBDs are locked away in the Steem DAO, so it seems like inflation will almost certainly have to drop back near scheduled/manageable rates in fairly short order (Scheduled rates are in the neighborhood of 5.9% and falling).
3. A potential solution exists to the problem of spam from the voting services. Oh, and by the way, this also solves one of Steem's oldest pain points for authors. The 7-day payout window. The @thoth.test account has made #lifetime-rewards a reality for 4 months, now. I'm not typically one to "toot my own horn", but if you pause and think about it, that is a BFD for the platform - or at least, it should be. Some authors have been receiving rewards - this year - for articles that were written almost a decade ago.

So, yeah, we're not ranked at #3 on CMC any more, and no-one's getting $50k for makeup videos these days, but there are signs of a possible change in direction. Borrowing from Nathan Rothschild, maybe right now is the time to blog when there's blood in the street^😉.

So now, let's play one of those what-if games. A few weeks ago, I made a spreadsheet to see what STEEM's price would need to be for the blockchain to be a mid-cap, large-cap, etc... Later, I went back and updated it to see what would happen if Steem grew to the size of some businesses in the blogging and social media space (with the current virtual supply size). Let's take a look at those results, based on some informal web searches and AI queries:

Firm	Users	Value Estimate	Steem Price
Medium	60,000,000	$600,000,000	$1.03
Substack	50,000,000	$650,000,000	$1.12
Wordpress	409,000,000	$7,500,000,000	$12.93
reddit	1,200,000,000	$27,000,000,000	$46.55
Twitter	600,000,000	$41,000,000,000	$70.69

So, let's pretend that Steem was priced only as a social media site with no blockchain attached, and let's remember that Metcalfe's Law suggests that social media networks gain value in proportion to the number of users squared.

Under these assumptions, if we get 50-60 million active (organic) Steem users, the price of Steem would be around one dollar. Get to half-a billion active users, and it's anywhere from $13 to $70. A factor of seven increase for getting to the size of Medium, and a factor of 86-467 for getting to the size of Wordpress, Twitter, or reddit.

It's clear that none of the "investors" who are currently feeding the spam machines can hope to achieve that level of ROI with their current strategies. They're stepping over dollars to grab the pennies - so to speak. At some point - sooner or later - they'll start paying attention to the dollars or market forces will demand that they hand their influence over to other investors with better insights. Weak hands fold, strong hands come out on top, and reality wins in the end.

And that price speculation is not even factoring in all of Steem's features as a blockchain or its social media features that can't be found on other platforms:

• zero-cost transactions
• fast settlement
• account recovery
• beneficiary rewards and curation rewards
• escrow operations
• community funding for projects
• zero-cost data storage (via custom_json)

I'm definitely not a pollyanna and it's undeniable that the current state of affairs is challenging, but in my opinion there's still some room for a bit of optimism towards the future. We just need to see the possibilities.

What is the one single thing that anyone can do to make STEEM more valuable and lead us into that future? Maybe it's this. Do what I can at this very moment to make the Steem ecosystem into a place where people want to spend their time and attention.