Unsustainable STEEM/SBD Prices

I know I'm probably beating a dead horse at this point, but let's talk for a minute about Steem's recent breakout. At the time of writing, it is just over $8 USD, having nearly 10x'd up from a month ago. Chart from coinmarketcap

Steem Backed Dollars (SBDs), supposedly single-sidedly pegged to Steem prices and supposed to remain around $1 USD, have been elevated for an even longer period of time. They shot up to a high of $15.19 USD before slowly falling, and now have risen back to $10.21 USD. Chart from coinmarketcap

This is GREAT for STEEM

There is no denying it. Between STEEM (1.97B) and SBD(45M) combined we have a total market cap of over 2 BILLION DOLLARS and it wouldn't surprise me at all if we saw that number rise considerably in the near future.

Why is this happening?

There are already a number of articles about why Steem has been undervalued. I won't go into too much detail but the main factors are:

• STEEM remained relatively horizontal while other Altcoins jumped, indicating it had room to grow
• Smart Media Token (SMT) release hype
• The STEEM blockchain is the most active blockchain by transactions/second ^{(my favorite)}
• The content produced and consumed on Steemit is worth 2 Billion Dollars

Four great reasons for Steem's rise to success. Except for maybe that last one. Actually, that last one might be the worst reason of all.

Wait, what?

Take a look at the front page. Here's a screenshot of the Trending section for the biggest Steemit tag (Life) right now.

I'm using a Chrome extension to help visualize the payouts directly to the authors in USD. We can see that people are making some serious bank off of Steemit. Hell, I've been here a month and my account+potential rewards are valued at over $2,500 USD.
But now let's take a closer look at the posts, and the number of views received.

Post	Views	Profit	$/View
1	1,181	$5982.48	$5.06
2	1,125	$6010.46	$5.34
3	370	$3381.29	$9.13
4	534	$4144.43	$7.76

Now, don't get me wrong, I know it's more complicated than that. There are whales, long term supporters, people set on autovote, and a whole bunch of other nonsense. These are also some of the most successful posts, and I read them in preparation for this article. I mean no disrespect to the authors and enjoyed their content. But was my eyeball worth $5+/article? Was the time spent worth over $25/total?

Let's talk it through

An average Reddit post on the Top page gets 75k+ upvotes, and we can assume somewhere north of that in terms of views. The author ends up with $0 USD, for $0/view. When Facebook bought Instagram for $1 Billion USD, they payed $28/User. Not $28/View, but $28 for the rights to control the platform that those users viewed images on every day perpetually. Hell, my views these last few minutes were worth that much! Where is the money coming from?

It gets worse from here

This is some of the best content I could find- and I still think it's incredibly overvalued. Don't get me started on that haejin debacle or some of the conspiracy loonies making thousands of dollars off of this platform. Buy a bot vote and you can make shitty content seem lucrative. Here, I'll even bash on my own post.

I spent $4.63 SBD promoting that. It got 8 views, and 8 votes, and I will end up making nearly $100 off of it. I even self-voted it like the piece of trash I am. What the hell, steemit?

Conclusion

There is some crazy hype train of Blockchain + Social Media afoot here. The system is primed for abuse and we are making large amounts of cash off of content that quite frankly doesn't really deserve it. People are producing some terrific stuff, but the amount of views, of meaningful interactions between producer and consumer, are dwarfed by other interfaces like Reddit, Youtube, and Facebook.

How do I feel about this?

Well, on one side I'm very happy. I'm making some pretty good cash. On the other side, I'm a little ashamed. I don't think my work is worth this much. I certainly don't think my upvote is worth 40 cents. My only explanation is that we're experiencing what the first adopters of Bitcoin experienced- the feeling of getting rich for next to nothing.