RE: It’s so easy to become a millionaire with Steem
I know that everyone's all excited about the Steemit platform, but that's not how the economics work. Read https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@limitless/the-rise-of-cryptocurrencies for more details.
You will have to deal with both the speculative and transactional value of Steem. As it is, Steem is not very liquid and there are few possible ways to spend Steem. Cashing out is also very slow. Steem effectively acts more like equity in the Steemit system. I hope what you say is true, because in that case, I would be worth many many millions in 5 years, but I doubt that would be the case. I think that eventually many users would be able to make a humble freelance living off Steemit, but very few will be millionaires. Eventually the income distribution would resemble that of Youtube's. However, since Steemit is more decentralized and Steemit doesn't take a cut of your content unlike Youtube, it's possible that the earnings on Steemit will be in the ballpark of double that of Youtube. Still very good, but nothing crazy.
You’re math error is you presume I am writing about users who adopt Steem some months or years from now when the usership is orders-of-magnitude greater.
I wrote specifically about Steemians who do a specific action starting now in the month of July 2016 to maximize their compounding.
The Steemians we have now will only be a small fraction of the eventual userbase and investors of Steem; that is if Steem does prosper and succeed to the potential expectations laid out in this blog post.
Fair enough. I'm still uncertain, as the marketcap for Steemit was already $280 million a few days ago. Remember that Reddit was only worth $500 million in Oct 2014 when it had far more users than Steemit.
If Steemit succeeds (and it might fail entirely instead) it has the potential to exceed Facebook's $348 billion market capitalization. Please see my other comment posts for my detailed reasoning.
The net worth of the world is > $400 trillion. The global GDP > $75 trillion. If the transaction “fees” (the relative dilution of STEEM distributed to STEEM POWER) work out to be 3%, then we’d need $11 trillion of GDP coming through Steem at a $348 billion market cap. That does seem to be far-fetched although not impossible. But that does not include incoming investment flows if it is still growing, coming from that $400 trillion.
But there is another wrinkle to consider. That is the Steem blockchain is DPoS (proof-of-stake), so it means the stake holders could vote to change the protocol and decrease the inflation rate later thus paying less for blogging content; such as charging a flat percentage transaction fees instead of inflation and using that to pay for blogging rewards. Once the system has great adoption, it may no longer be necessary to pay (so much) for blogging as it may pay in other ways such as the derivative commerce.
I don't see a $46 token valuation. By the time that there will be that many tokens, the inflation would be crazy. Even if it's a $1 value per token, I'd consider Steemit a wildly successful company. We all love Steemit here, but let's not get too carried away with crazy hopes.