Best Cryptocurrency to Invest in? Analyzing Steem from an Investment Point of View and Sharing The Multiple Profitable Opportunities Presented by Steem Blockchain
Steem is a truly peer to peer, zero fee, and 3 second block confirmation blockchain. With regards to its fees and transaction speed, it beats almost all blockchains. Even after implementation of technologies like lightning and sharding, Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains will still be inferior to Steem in performance. Additionally, Steem blockchain can implement such technologies too. Read more about Steem's superiority in this article later. The purpose of this article is to analyze why Steem may be the best cryptocurrency to invest in and the article supports its purpose with many solid reasons.
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Image Source: Canva.com (designed by me)
Steem blockchain is fast becoming the most rapidly adopted chain in the world. There is so much to this project that it deserves more attention than it gets. In this article, we will see what Steem looks like from an investment point of view. Listed below are some features of Steem as an investment. The heading on profitable opportunities contains multiple ways in which investing in Steem can earn you dividends unlike any other cryptocurrency. Stay tuned.
Simplest, Yet The Securest Wallet
Your Steem wallet address is basically your username on the blockchain. It can be as simple as your name. Mine is @ilyastarar. If anyone makes a transfer to my username, it reaches me within 3 seconds and it costs nothing. Despite the simplicity of its wallet address, the blockchain offers multiple keys which can perform actions allowed via the particular key only. The Steem wallet also offers multiple ways in which your assets can be stored. Two of these ways are the securest storage protocols offered by any cryptocurrency. Here are some features of Steem wallet.
- Steem offers an account recovery like no other crypto does. If you have created your account through the normal signup process and the @steem account has created it, this means you are eligible for an account recovery in case anyone were to get a hold of your private key.
- If you convert your investment into Steem Power, it will take 13 weeks, and 13 equal installments, to convert back to liquid Steem. It means that if any hacker was to gain access to your keys, he will have to wait up to a week to be able to steal only 1/13th of your Steem. Meanwhile, you can recover your keys through the process above and secure your investment.
- Even if you wish to keep your investment fairly liquid but safe, you can keep it in the Saving account in your wallet. It takes 3 days to get your Steem out of savings and make them transferable.
- As an added layer of security, you can always login to your wallet (website) using your private posting key. Even if the posting key is compromised, it cannot be used to make transfers and you can easily login using Active or Master key and get your funds secured.
I would invite you to read the post by @acidyo in which he explains why Steem wallet is the securest of all. A comprehensive guide on Steem keys and passwords will also help you in realizing how secure this blockchain is.
Steem Is The Most Utilized Blockchain!
One way of looking at cryptocurrencies is the Coin Market Cap website. It simply tells where money is going in the cryptocurrency space and what is the share of market held by different projects. We know Bitcoin and Ethereum as leaders in market share. But are they leaders in the blockchain space? To determine that, we will have to look at cryptocurrencies in a different way. We should rather look at the blockchain technologies behind these cryptocurrencies to see their value.
If we look at the activity on the various blockchains, we can see how fast they are and how much they can scale. Scalability and speed are two fundamental requirements for any blockchain to provide sustainable value to its users. There is an interesting website called Block'tiviy which tracks activity on the blockchains and lists them in order of performance. Steem is at the top of their table.
There is a chart which shows transactions on the most active blockchains in the last 7 days. It is interesting to note that Steem blockchain has 109 % of all the transactions happening in the blockchain space.
And if you click on the little info circles in the table, you can see that Steem is using only 0.14 % of its total capacity right now, with 1.7 million transactions in last 24 hours alone. For a comparison, Ethereum did 0.676 million transactions in the last 24 hours, using its 100 % capacity and 14,000 transactions unconfirmed as of writing.
When compared to Bitcoin, Steem is 2445 times undervalued based on its activity. It's probably why Weiss Reports have been giving Steem the highest ratings recently. You will find the blocktivity website interesting so open the link above in a new tab and see it for yourself.
Steem is Bringing Mass Adoption through Amazing dApps Already!
Functioning services and media website have been built on top of Steem blockchain already. The tokenization of online media, social sharing and even open source contributions places it way above other blockchains in terms of blockchain adoption by masses. Common folks are joining Steem blockchain through the multiple platforms and getting rewarded in cryptocurrency is what fuels adoption.
Here are the most commonly used services built on top of Steem.
- Steemit.com is where you are right now (if not reading from Busy.org or eSteem app). It was the first app built on top of Steem blockchain and is the primary implementation of all the code. There are close to a million accounts already created via Steemit and more are expected to join. Steemit has an interesting reward system and most people can earn through it. You can simply have a look at the payout of this post for an example.
- Busy.org is clean interface built to enhance the blogging experience of Steemit. Many people like to use it for content creation. It basically does what Steem does.
- Utopian.io is an an opensource contribution platform where any Github repository can receive open source suggestions and multiple other things. It helps build a better internet and softwares. The contributors are rewarded in Steem.
- Dtube.video is a video sharing platform built on top of Steem and it has already attracted some very popular YouTubers. It pays so well that video content creators cannot resist it.
- Dlive (decentralized twitch), Zappl (decentralized Twitter), Steepshot (decentralized Instagram), dMania (decentralized 9GAG) and so many more are receiving huge engagement.
Can you sense mass adoption coming to blockchain and cryptocurrency through Steem based applications? If that was not enough, Smart Media Tokens (SMTs) is a protocol which would enable entrepreneurs to create multiple businesses and tokenize them with custom tokens. Steem will be used an investment instrument in the creation process and thus have a chance to go up in value. The who Steem community is anxiously waiting for this to happen.
There Are Uncountable Ways to Earn Dividends with Your Steem Investment!
Previously, cryptocurrency projects have allowed only three ways of earning more coins. One is mining and the other one is staking. Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS). Steem allows literally uncountable ways of earning more coins on the Steem blockchain. Interested in knowing what proof Steem uses?
- The Steem blockchain has a unique Delegated Proof of Stake algorithm. Just buying Steem and keeping it a wallet doesn't earn you more coins. To be able to have influence on all the platforms powered by Steem, you need to power up your Steem into Steem Power. Steem Power is basically your vested share in the blockchain and you can use it in many ways. I will explain quite a few.
- On the front-end of things, Steem rewards Proof of Brain. This post is done using my brain and it will be rewarded according to its quality and outreach. Content creation gets rewarded. If you have some time and some interests to talk about or discuss, it can earn you rewards.
That was technical side of things. Let me share with you some of the most common ways of earning more coins with your investment.
1. Curation Rewards
When you use your influence to upvote someone's content, he or she get rewarded. But you get 25 % of that reward paid to you because you curated that content. The more Steem Power you have, the more Steem Power you can earn as curation rewards. For example, if you have 100,000 in Steem Power, your single vote will be worth $16.31 and you can give 10 full votes in 24 hours. So, you can literally reward people, even your own self, with $163 everyday. You get 25 % of it credited as curation reward so you get more than $40 worth of Steem Power everyday or $14,600 worth of it for a year. And these are just curation rewards.
But there are some interesting things to take notice of.
- The vote value $16.31 means $4 worth of Steem for you as curator, 6.116 Steem Dollars (worth more than $2.5 each right now) and another $6.116 worth of Steem Power (that's how the reward system works). So the simple $16.31 is actually worth $4+$(6.116x2.5)+$6.116 = $25 right now.
- If the price of Steem doubles, the value of your vote will increase massively. If the price of Steem Dollars increases (which it has to above $15 recently), the whole equation becomes thousands of dollars everyday.
If you find it hard to curate manually, you can choose some good authors and vote for them automatically using services like SteemAuto or SteemVoter. You will keep getting curation rewards without even logging in to your wallet.
2. Author Rewards
If you have time to share your thoughts or knowledge with the community, you can not only use your own vote for yourself, the community votes for you too. You can earn author rewards corresponding to the effort put in and the people reached. It is one of the most amazing ways of earning cryptocurrency and that is where my 2000+ Steem came from, and also the 800+ Steem Dollars.
Curation and author received by @ADSactly. Multiply every amount with $2.5 and you will get what the account earn in less than 4 days. I am imagining tens of thousands of dollars.
3. Delegate Your Steem Power and Earn Daily Dividends
Without losing your ownership rights, you can delegate your Steem Power in a host of ways to earn dividends. A service called @MinnowBooster offers a Steem Power leasing market where you can fill lease requests and earn Steem.
You can delegate you Steem Power to any of the promotional bots like @postpromoter, @buildawhale, @smartsteem, @promobot, and many more and earn a share of their profit (they normally share 95 % of all Steem earned with their investors) as per your percentage share of all investment.
4. Sell Your Vote Automatically
If you wish to keep your Steem Power with you but do not have time to be online or curate manually, you can easily sell your vote to services like @smartmarket and @minnowbooster. I have made a comprehensive guide on how to do that and both services are covered in detail. They will send you 85 % of whatever they earn from vote buyers. In addition to the payments, you get 25 % curation rewards on all votes thus sold.
5. Earn Interest on Steem Power
Just by holding your Steem wallet, you can earn interest on it. The rates may fluctuate. It does not matter what you use your Steem power for (curation, vote selling etc.), you will be eligible get this interest.
These are just some of the ways which can earn you thousands of dollars every month. With a rise in Steem's price, everything multiplies. There is so much to look forward to as the Steem project reaches the value it deserves and it is no less than top 10 in my opinion.
What Do You Think About Steem?
After reading this post and based on your own knowledge of Steem, cryptocurrency markets and investment opportunities, what do you think about Steem as an investment? Where do you see Steem going? Although I do not claim to be a financial adviser, I did share my reasons why Steem is going to go big in 2018. Over the weekend, I shared story from 2064 in which I described the Steem revolution and how it happened over the years.
It would be interesting to know how you evaluate Steem as a cryptocurrency and where you see it going. Do share your thoughts in the comments below. Share this post with potential investors so that they can see if investing in Steem makes sense to them. Please upvote it for visibility so that more people can see it.
You did not mention one thing : Inflation. From my personal experience, the inflation compared to others like BTC or ETH is low. So that gives you advantage to react to the market sentiments before loosing too much.
It would be interesting if you share some numbers.
Cool... thanks for the insights! I haven't been on Steemit for long, but you pretty much hit the nail on the head for the majority of the reasons I chose Steem & Steemit.
However, I wonder if you could give me your take on something:
There are some whales here earning serious money (all good... it happens in the real world too), but the manner in which they are doing it is slightly questionable (according to some/the majority). Now at the risk of starting up "THAT" conversation that's already being covered and addressed by 100s of other posts, let's assume it's perfectly fine what they are doing (it's all 100% within the rules/boundaries of Steem/Steemit anyway).
My question though is this: If just a handful of people can flood the market with SBD/STEEM cashouts, isn't that gonna push the price down? It looks to me a case of "1% controlling 99% of the wealth" (and hence the market), and if I was a serious investor (I have invested fiat into STEEM, but at a level what these guys are generating from just 2 posts), I would see that as a serious risk... not so?
i.e. in short: What is preventing 5 or 10 or even 50 people just dumping and crashing the whole system?
There is a serious bebate going on about if in the community. Not only a debate but also a battle to put an end to this because what these few accounts have been doing is too dangerous for other investors. I have taken a $30 flag from the person concerned for speaking up.
I think the community has responded to the stupidity of one person, or a few of them, and more people will join. I agree with you that too much power within a few hands is never good for any market or business. Let's see. Luckily, there's a lot to look forward to.
No profits comes without risk. Big profits need big risk. So far i feel comfortable within steem system . With more time passing more people (and whales too) will open their eyes. And those raping the pool will loose their battles. I trust in power of masses
Me too. I trust in the power of free market to make its way towards porgress. We are a community here and that is the strength of Steem.
hmmmmmm, that doesn't fill me with too much confidence... but yeah, I too remain cautiously optimistic.
It's a new system and has a lot of room to improve. There's so much to handle at the moment. I am sure things will look far better months from now.
There have been quite a few chances for anyone that is looking to have a huge cash out to sell their coins at this point. There will always be people looking to exit the market, but if there is sufficient value for new investors, then there should also be new demand.
Well... aren't they maybe just that greedy that they're hoping for it to go higher (people were hodling, even buying more, BTC at near $20K)? They clearly are greedy... exploiting the system to the max with the max posts/self-upvotes per day, #99 upvotes on friends' posts and a variety of other exploits to extract SBD/STEEM... and there's more and more people doing it. For now, while I'm sure it does have an effect on pushing the price down, it's not catastrophic... but what happens when we have 50 large whales doing the same?
Again, I'm not judging the "greed"... Technically it's 100% within the rules of the game. So if I weren't worried it's harming the system it would almost be admirable.
I'm just questioning my putting all this effort (and investing fiat into bots and campaigns/systems etc.) on a very vulnerable platform.
i.e. Where is this "if there is sufficient value for new investors" coming from? Would serious (new) investors only see this as nothing but a cash cow for a few and they are too late to join the party, and therefore step away.
I'm no pro in traditional markets, let alone crypto markets... so I'm legitimately curious about how all this might work, and where the value lies for potential investors. Maybe I'm looking for a reason to convince/reassure myself :-)
It should be assumed that all of the ‘rewards’ are going to be cashed out - whether it is from “whales” rewarding themselves, or minnows collecting their rewards. From an investment/price perspective, the main item of concern is that the demand is keeping up with the supply from the newly created tokens (inflation). If you compute the amount of daily rewards that are generated, and compare this with the daily volume of the tokens traded - you will see whether it should be of concern.
There are users abusing the rewards pool. Sure. That has been happening since the very beginning in various forms and will probably always continue. If you can’t see the value in the platform despite that issue, then I am not going to try and convince you..
Oh no... the value is definitely there... and very evident. I'm just worried that it might be short-lived. i.e. It's going to take me a very long time to get anywhere near the point I'm able to start actually cashing out, and I'm just concerned that by the time that happens the house of cards has collapsed.
NB: I'm not saying Steemit IS a house of cards, literally trying to read up, and ask more veteran users, why it isn't one.
P.S. The rewards cashed vs volume traded is a great example, and I'll go investigate that a bit more.
Anyway... Thanks for taking the time to respond with detailed/informative answers... You've given me some great new homework to go do.
In my opinion, the Steem Power system helps lend some stability to price. Most large accounts are invested in SP for all the reasons posted here, meaning any dumping is somewhat controlled by being spread over several months. More importantly though, large stakeholders selling is actually what most of us want, and see as beneficial to the long term health of the platform. That divestiture is the main path toward broader and more equitable distribution.
Ah... good point! The selling off by large stakeholders does have a silver lining: preventing them from becoming even more powerful and controlling (and thus making stock available to new investors). However is the insane rate at which they are generating and cashing out new rewards not bad for the system... i.e. just flooding the market with stock and ultimately pushing the price down?
The daily trading volume of STEEM and SBD is a lot higher than the new rewards that are being generated each day.
Ah! < insert lighbulb icon here > ;-)
I think this is a systemic risk, but I believe more than 40% of Steem is controlled by Steemit Inc which ideally should have the best interests of this platform in mind. It's just like the stock market, in any company, the promoters hold a huge amount of shares, followed by some major minority shareholders. If any of these guys dump their stock, the price goes downhill. This is a market risk one has to take.
OK, but is the constant "dumping of new stock" (i.e. generating and claiming rewards) not just going to get worse as more and more whales jump onto the bandwagon? ... and the problem is that there is no reason for them NOT to want to do so.
Well, u have to stay invested if you want to remain a whale, which should ideally increase Steem price, so that's a positive
thanks ilyastarar great post... but i have a couple of questions
Thanks people I would appreciate any help
There is a link to buy in your wallet page (the link to the wallet is found under your profile picture). It uses BlockTrades, which will let you trade ETH for STEEM.
Your wallet address is just your account name: chidimicheal
great help Mr timcliff.. I followed your step and i got redirected to blocktrades.. but i don't understand the conversion rate coz i have only a 100$ worth of ETH how much steem power can i get for that??
it only showing ETH to STEEM.. please help anyone??
1 STEEM = 1 SP.
You can use Blocktrades as @timcliff mentioned. If you are interested in alternative, you can buy Steem from cryptocurrency exchanges (Binance, Bittrex, Poloniex etc.) and send it to your Steem wallet here. Then simply power up. Steem/Eth pair is available on Binance. However, you can sell Eth for Bitcoin and then buy Steem from Steem/Btc market as well.
Steemit account wallet is your Steem wallet and @chidimicheal is your wallet address (Steem username).
thanks Mr. timcliff and Mr. ilyastarar.. I appreciate. God bless you both for the time..
You are welcome.
i hodl btc and steem only
Amazing and very interessing post thank you for sharing
resteemed and shared in the steemit
I'm looking forward to our next post
It's a no brainer for me. Simply because of the amount of daily use I put into this blockchain. I'm in it for years now, not only because of the money I've spent to power my account up, but the content I've been creating.
I love the investment in MYSELF and combine with the outlook for Steem longterm, like I said...It's a no brainer!
Yes, agree, no brainer. If only steemit UI could get away from that pre-windows3.11 look and functionality.
My wish #1 is if I could get a chance to mute/ban certain tags. I am sick of those meme's and dmania
It will improve only when the team is big enough to handle all the stuff going on. Steemit could have been a lot better but for the SMT development. I think SMTs are priority and Steemit will have to wait.
I have avoided using certain apps to keep my blog clean. I had another account for memes but with the kind of content I do here, it is difficult to manage more than one accounts.
A no brainer for me too! I never add Steem, SBD and SP to my portfolio because I do not want to ship money out. If I can, I will invest more. After some hiccups are over, I hope to be able to invest in Steem more. Content wise, I am glad with my efforts so far.
You are going the right way and I wish you good luck!
Appreciate that sir. And appreciate all the content you are putting out for us to learn from. Big year ahead for us all :)
I think it's hand down Steem cos of its promising future.Though there is still much work to be done to make it more user friendly, then the party can really begin.
Of all the blockchains I know, steem has the working functionality easiest to explain to regular persons, because the apps are similar to those they have used every day for years.
Being already in many ways superior to other blockchains allows people who guide the evolution of steem to think with more clarity to the future, without being strapped by various issues they need to fix asap.
That's why I feel confident in Steem (the crypto) as a good long term investment.
The fact it can be obtained in so many different ways is just another proof of a well-designed ecosystem, which is about to go to the next level with the release of SMTs.
Thank you for a very well thought-out blog post!
I was at a conference last week, and one of the presenters mentioned that Steem might be the most important crypto. Has most transactions, and easy to obtain. The platform is there to actually use it as a currency.
Awesome! Great to know that Steem is finding a name in the spaces which matter for cryptocurency. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks for sharing! A link to your post was included in the Steem.center wiki article about STEEM Tokens. Thanks and good luck again!
Thank you so much! Proud to have my work in Steem wiki! :)