We Need More Utility and Burn Cases For Steem
Duh.
Well, but seriously. We just have have too much supply because of inflation and low demand. Looking back I am glad they added RC which requires Steem to participate on the blockchain which adds some value. Not a lot though since you have to really be doing a lot of transactions on the chain to require a large amount of Steem. If we can get more app developers on Steem there will be more need for RCs unless STINC delegates them Steem for free, but I think the community might finally be wary of new developers.
Still, what else could we start doing as a chain? I know we take pride in no fees on the chain, but what if we started charging 0.001 Steem for sending a transaction? That would only be $0.000157 USD fee per transaction. Or would that not be worth it simply for the fact that we can no longer say transaction are free on Steem?
It's difficult to think of burns for Steem. The only person who would be really motivated to burn Steem would be STINC since they have such a large holding and benefit from Steemit.com doing well. We could see more burn options come up with the ever elusive introduction of SMTs. There could be a certain burn price for creating them and upgrading certain features, but the tribes already do a lot of these features pretty well. And for the tribes the Steem Engine token is being burned.
Maybe Steem could in the future use some ad-revenue to buy back Steem and burn it as we are doing on Steem Leo. But in that case wouldn't the tribes be able to do it better? There is less overhead for the tribes and within 3 months Steem Leo already started burning revenue received through BAT. It's been 3 years for STINC and they so far they have only managed not to dump for one month. They are not in position to start burning and even if they were I'm not sure if they would. It would be a great fail safe mechanism for the future that would give investors a lot of confidence.
The original point of Steem is to create a decentralized social media platform that rewards its users. You can't be mad at people for selling Steem or any token. If Steem can't handle people selling at $0.16 then how can it solve this problem when the price is $1? Temporarily the price might spike because from what I understand there actually isn't that much liquidity of Steem. This would be okay but as we can see with this bear market since it is a social platform it is difficult to break the bear market sentiment. We need a killer reason for buying Steem.
You really can't print value out of nothing. Right now what real value Steem has is attention (can be profited through advertisement and isn't ready yet to burn Steem) and RC. I think there needs to be another major burn source. We need to create an eco-system in which people can sell as it was intended and not becoming a hodling competition for life. I do understand that people get frustrated when people sell at these low prices because there needs to be a certain degree of confidence for new money to come into Steem and we need the price to at least hold stable for a while, but again we should be able to handle people selling at $0.16.
I will continue powering up and buying a little here and there because I do think these problems can be solved. Progress can be made, but I'll be worried if the only real price discovery mechanism is growth. It would be great if Steem could be a little bit more stable and have some more enticing reasons for people to buy/hold. It's nerve wracking for investors to see that we are 98%.
Hope you enjoyed the post. Thanks for reading my ramblings. I'm sure a lot of you already have had similar thoughts so let me know what your thoughts on this are down below.
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I agree. Perhaps what I'm working on now is a step in the right direction.
I am working on a feature that could be added to Hivemind Communities called Native Ads, which I believe will create utility value for STEEM/SMTs.
More comprehensive details are on my blog.