There is a lot of attention paid to the price of STEEM but few focus upon STEEM itself and what makes it different.

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When looking at the cryptocurrency world, we find it breaks down into a few different categories.

The first are the transaction tokens.  While all tokens can be used for transactions, a few specialize in it.  The Bitcoin family of forks, which includes Litecoin, along with Monero and ZCash fall into this.  They exist basically for the ability to transact.  They are a currency in the traditional sense.  Development, for the most part, is built around it incorporating that into what is being built.

STEEM fits into the second category.

Here we find something that is application or platform specific.  There are abilities with what is being developed that far exceed just conducting transactions.  Other currencies that align with this are Ethereum, EOS, and Tron.  The goal is to build a platform that has monetization as a component yet it is not the main one.

Here is another way of looking at things.

If you start the year with 1 BTC while doing nothing to it, what will you have at the end of the year?  The answer is one Bitcoin.  

Taking a look at STEEM, if you start the year with one of these, what will you have 12 months later?  

Unlike Bitcoin, you will have more than one STEEM.  At a minimum, if you power it up, part of the inflation rate will be paid meaning 1.015 (roughly) SP will be held.  

The other aspect to this is the fact that SP enables one to operate on the Steem ecosystem, thus earning more tokens.  Sure, one could get involved in faucets or games of chance involving BTC to grow the account.  This would result in a larger amount at the end of the year.

With STEEM, there is a collaborated effort taking place to expand the applications on the platform.  This is key.  The token is automatically tied to every application created on here.  A developer of a gaming application could just as easily pay in LTC as BTC.

We also see the Upvote Economy forming.  On Steem, upvotes have value based upon the SP held.  This is another vital fact  people overlook.  STEEM is distributed out of the reward pool based upon the collective VP used during the time period.  This means that payouts do not come from another wallet.

What I mean by this is if I get a 100 Satoshi payment, that comes from someone else.   That person's wallet held the tokens and now it does not.  The double entry booking shows a debit in my wallet and credit in the other one.  Obviously, this is compensated on the other end by advertising or whatever other business model they are using.

On Steem, the payments from upvotes are delivered by the blockchain.  Thus we have a consistent flow of tokens being paid out to the community.  Part of it pays the holders of SP in the form of inflation.  The Witnesses are rewarded for their efforts to keep the blockchain going.  Finally, content creators and curators also share in this pool.   

We see a tendency for people, especially those outside the cryptocurrency world, to cite Bitcoin and then lump all other alt-coins together.  While this is technically correct, it does not tell the entire story.  Not all alt-coins are remotely equal.  STEEM is one of those that carries with it many different aspects that the general population is overlooking.

In my opinion, this is okay for now.  We just keep doing our thing and expanding.  Development is key right now.  In a parallel to the early days of the Internet, we still have not seen the web browser yet.  This is how early this all is.

I hope people read these worlds and give it some thought..  Many of the tokens that are ranked in the Top 30 offer very little.  They are hyped which is good for their price.  Sadly, for them, they are absent development.  The use cases simply are not there. 

Not so with STEEM.  Each month, we are seeing the number of applications and use cases growing.  As more tokens are created, thus drawing more interest, the scarcity of STEEM will grow.  SP is going to be a very valuable commodity down the road.  Basic arithmetic shows how this will be the case.

Using the 15 SP delegation that Steemit Inc puts out with each new account, the minimal amount necessary for 40K transacting account is 600K SP.  However, if we look at the same numbers but with 10M users, we see 150M SP is tied up.  

With a little over 300M available, this is slightly less than half of all STEEM.  Of course, this is just the minimum required.  Accounts grow over time meaning those ten million accounts will end up with a lot more SP (collectively).  

Go one step further and do the same thing with 50M accounts.

And before anyone says no way, keep in mind that 50M users on the Internet is nothing.  Plus, this is not 50M users for one application but, rather, for a suite of applications that will number in the hundreds.  Just ponder the fact that @threespeak is actively targeting YouTube accounts with over 1M subscribers.  This single application could bring over 5M accounts just by itself.

In my mind, this is the future path of Steem and what is going to get the price of the token heading upwards.  The fact that STEEM is ranked so low is only a temporary condition.  When we run the math, it is easy to see how this is the case.  At some point, the ability to transact is going to be required by millions.  This is all tied to Steem Power.

It is something that we cannot get around.  This is also what is going to make the token very valuable.  Steem only needs about 10-20 applications that people want to use and things will take off.  I foresee that happening in the next year.

The pace of things is going to increase quickly around here.  Get ready.

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