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I believe that if Bitcoin tanks, Steem will see massive bloodshed, too.

STEEM may die as a speculative shitcoin just like Bitcoin is, to be honest. But I don't think it will die as a utility coin. As long as the chain runs, there will be some demand for it. The content on Steem created by its users is what ultimately makes it valuable, not some despicable speculative negative sum game like the entire crypto market in the last ten years. What makes it valuable to create content on Steem is the freedom from censorship. You should try using Quora, for instance. Nasty censorship on a daily basis. It's bullshit. I will always continue to post to Steem regardless of the monetary value of the rewards, at least by cross posting from elsewhere. Why would people stop using Steem just because it doesn't pay? Billions of people use social media every day without getting paid at all. The very concept is completely alien to the vast majority of people.

If STEEM drops below 1 cent, it will be unprofitable to maintain a witness node even for justin. That's -50$*20 per month unpaid costs for witness servers . Of course he can easily run those for 50 years, but as a business man don't you think he would likely look for something more profitable?

If Justin bolts because STEEM goes below 1 cent, it will be only good for the ecosystem. Getting rid of Justin under any circumstances would be a cause for celebration.

According to @aggroed, running a full node costs $20 a month after MIRA was implemented. That's a like cable subscription.

More importantly than the right this second discussion is that MIRA seems pretty close. MIRA allows nodes to run with data that's currently stored in ram to be stored on hard drives. The difference in cost for that is staggering. A full node would drop from 512Gb of Ram to closer to 8 or 16 Gb. The server would go from something like $650/month to something closer to $20/month. Witness nodes are gonna be less. So, now run the math again. If it only costs $20 a month and yeah you probably run 2 for $40/month as long as you can make more than $480/yr there will be people willing to donate time to run them. Post MIRA the discussion of closing my witness starts if steem hits 0.004 cents per steem.

See: https://steempeak.com/steem/@aggroed/steem-is-dead-or-is-it

I see Steem at 3 cents only if Bitcoin touches 1k dollars.
In terms of STEEM/BTC it steadily grows last weeks (as most altcoins do).