RE: Can STEEM ever become a reserve currency?
I agree that STEEM already has a ton more to offer than most cryptos out there, it's the #32 crypto by market cap for perfectly sound reasons. So I don't quite see where the comparison with pump&dump coins comes into play.
The risk for further downwards momentum that I see with what I dramatically called "rampant abuse" is the fact that there's a big pressure to extract value from the platform rather than contributing to it.
I do see a point can be made that SMTs may be drawing in more permanent engagement and thus create value. I certainly do hope that's what we'll be able to see. I am just a bit concerned it will bring another wave of scammy SMT-ICOs like we see with tons of ERC20 tokens... where there's only one motive... value extraction.
Either way... it will be interesting to see it play out in the steem ecosystem. Let's hope for the best. While I might sound a bit pessimistic here, that was just concerning this little point I wanted to make... all in all I still believe we can make this platform grow into a wonderfully diverse and thriving platform.
I did make the comparison to show that abuse is not something that's putting downward pressure on the price. 99% of coins are abuse yet they have lots of volume and demand.
If you look at how much people are 'extracting' from steem each day and the daily volume of STEEM you will see that it's meaningless.
It would be interesting to see crypto currencies's volume that comes purely from utility.
Most coins would be at less than 1% of their volume. Even STEEM which is a very useful coin have almost all of its volume ( which is low) come from speculation.
Ok that's a fair point! But then isn't that maybe also one of the potential main reasons why the crypto markets are tanking generally?! And yes, that also underlines that the sky-high prices were driven by speculation primarily.
I guess there's only so much speculative capital that can flow into a market and the "supply" gets drowned in exit scams like bitconnect and the countless drained ICOs... where does that lead in a longer term? And how could such scenarios play out inside of the steem-economy with SMTs?!
I think we share similar concerns there
Absolutely.
As long as you have winners the capital will come, same concept as gambling.
There is one concept that crypto and the free market re-introduced to us which is to take responsability for our actions. I think it's a good thing.
That's an interesting way of looking at it actually. I hadn't seen this before, but it does make sense to me!
The responsibility is an interesting aspect, too. Because I guess that's what I feel is lacking a bit in this landscape. It's not a secret that many players go out of their way to avoid accountability for how they use their stake.