I think the more pertinent issue here is the lack of censorship and the immutable nature of posting here. Your content isn't subject to review and evaluation based on the nature of your work. Furthermore, it can't be deleted and scrubbed from existence, because it is permanently engraved in the block chain.

Based on what I've gathered from your work, you aren't out for a quick buck. Obviously we all have to put food on the table, but your mission isn't to get rich. It's to protect people, and provide them with the means of defending their rights. Your personal story and the information you provide are compelling and engaging, and I personally believe you should be well compensated...

But I also think that Steem/it has more to offer than financial rewards. It is a platform where freedom of speech is more than a cliche. Its value is far deeper than a quick buck.

### For the first question I think it's a matter of too much Steem being produced daily.

The system is adding more than 1 million Steem tokens every day. 90% of which is in the form of Steempower. So it's not all liquid but anybody following the markets can see that there are [201 million Steem](http://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/steem/) in existence. Whether or not they're all liquid might not be apparent or matter to the average trader.

The great news is that the issuance of new Steem isn't written in stone. See [this post](https://steemit.com/witness-category/@fyrstikken/the-calm-inflation-proposal-and-the-additional-advertisement-proposal) by @fyrstikken for one example of proposed changes to the system.

The TLDR version you can tell other people is: Steem isn't growing in popularity at a pace matching the issuance of new tokens. That hurts the price despite the innovative technology it represents. There's promise in recovering the price with a vastly expanded user base or a reduction of Steem inflation.

Also worthy of note is that rewarding authors and curators is a novel idea which won't ever go away even if the champion of the idea isn't Steem in the future. Steem could be the MySpace to some upcoming platform that "drinks it's milkshake!"

*Edit: Proofing my writing I think that comment comes off like I'm not hopeful about Steem's future. The technology is very ahead of the competition. I'm bullish but anything can happen.* 

### The second question

Yes it could hurt your brand through false correlation. You may be right to explain in a post that the correlation is the post value to the Steem value. If you want to measure your popularity number of upvotes per post is more relevant.

Would be a great asset if you or anybody wrote a piece explaining that nuance for the folks out there.

Peace.

Sometimes the best response is to ignore them.

>Is false correlation devaluing my brand?

You were overvalued to begin with.

In my view the rewards are not so important and comparing with myself and the Steemians I am mostly in contact with, $40 is a very high reward. I make cents or 0 on my posts and many others "make" the same. So $40 or anything over $1 is in my world success on Steemit.

The price on cryptocurrencies fluctuate alot, that also goes for Steem. On top of that, I think you and the rest of the Dollarvigilante related succesfull people, got ALOT of whale attention when you first came here, therefore the $5000 reward. The marked balance out over time, just like people mining bitcoin in 2009, are billionares today, and later its hard to make a profit on bitcoin mining.

You can link this comment to your fans, maybe they get a bigger picture from this comment.

Steem on!

Lasse Ehlers

Well, I'm no Steem Geek. But it seems to be when you have more sellers than buyers the price is going to fall...

It also seems to me there could be an incentive for large Steem holders to "dump" it and drive the price down in order to buy it back at a reduced price later.

This is done all the time on other markets, it even easier here because of the transparency. You can keep an eye on your fellow stock holder and be sure they are still dumping. The more you dump the lower the price.

Then one day, you buy it all back as fast as possible and try and be the first one to do so :)

JP Morgan was good at that....

1. In July, I remember there were people complaining about unfair distribution of Steem Power. They have chance now. Of course, Steem could fail. Devs or insiders may run away because of this price drop. So far, I think the devs have proved their ability and we have clear roadmap, the development speed has been very fast, so it's not time for them to abandon this project. The price of STEEM the currency is not the unit of measurement when you invest Steem the platform. It's MVEST. How much money one put it thus how much MVEST one has now? That should be the question. The value of MVEST has been dropping, but if upcoming features are real, I think MVEST is undervalued now. So, when the price go up again, complainers are less likely to bring up the distribution topic.

You should watch berwicks last anarchast interview with Dan. Several people have said something along these lines: the market cap grew a bit too fast, making the company basically too overvalued. When you see a huge spike like that, you generally see it come down. Now the market cap is much more reasonable around 20 million. I think it will go back up as the platform grows and becomes worth billions. Im powering everything up right now for that reason.

I think Steem was overpriced and posts were getting far more than the market is used to for such a small site. It may be too low now, but this is a whole new world and nobody really knows the value of a site with no advertising.

The number of visitors is dropping according to stats I've seen, but it could all change if some 'celebrities' sign up and bring their fans. It's going to be interesting to see what the fans expect to get from Steemit.

It's early days. Development is on-going and it could all change. I'm excited to see what happens.

Here is an article that should help explain the price situation:
https://steemit.com/technical-analysis/@timcliff/historical-mvest-to-usd-price-chart-steem-power-has-not-lost-value-over-the-long-term

Regarding the popularity, I think the main thing that people need to understand is that we are still in beta. The site is missing some key features that mainstream users expect to be there on a social media platform. Also, there are still some kinks to work out as far as "fairness" and influence/reward distribution. I think the people that can see past the current issues, and see Steemit for what it will become are the ones that are sticking around.

Once the site gets built out into a full blown social media site with all the bells and whistles, I expect the recruitment and retention problems will solve themselves.

Who are you calling STEEM Geeks?
_maybe the ones who have commented here. :)_
I suggest @timcliff's post showing how STEEM may have been too overvalued and correcting back towards previous value.  From there it may grow again.