I have been privileged enough to have acquired a diversified portfolio of coins and digital assets, like Ethereum, Dash, Monero, Maidsafe, Steem, Bitshares and many others.
While performing analysis of my digital portfolio, I realized I had strongly underperformed Bitcoin. Had I simply bought and held Bitcoins in the past year, I would have had 270% gain in the dollar terms, however I came short of that by a hefty margin. What gives?
After some investigation, I've noticed that most of the top coins from a year ago have underperformed Bitcoin. The two notable exceptions are Dash and Monero, which have outperformed Bitcoin.
The core competencies of the fastest growing coins seem to be revolving around utility of payments.
As a thought experiment, lets imagine Steem was just a very practical and widely used digital currency.
@ned with 2 clicks, unlike BTC where I need to ask him for his long hard to remember, easy to mess up hexadecimal address or have to scan some silly QR code or something)I have always enjoyed the payment properties of Steem, however it never occurred to me that this is actually Steem killer feature, a gem hiding in the plain sight.
I think too much time has been spent on the blogging aspect of the platform, and some of us forgot how good is the payment side of things.
How cool would it be to have a Xapo like debit card, that is funded with STEEM/SBD, and acts as a bridge between digital and legacy real world?
What if we could pay for more things and services online with STEEM/SBD?
Can we think of any applications, other than blogging, that would tie in nicely with STEEM as transfer of value?
SBD
SBD is being removed from circulation, for financial reasons I wont go into for now. But basically, as the value of STEEM is USD terms drops, the USD pegged SBD needs to be destroyed to eliminate the risk of systemic failure.
Lowering the monetary base of the currency also lowers its liquidity on external exchanges, and the monetary velocity drops as less and less people have and use the currency.
STEEM
And as for STEEM...who in the world would want to hold a currency that keeps losing its value? How do we course-correct, and stabilize the price?
What are some practical things we could do now, to reverse the price trend, and allow people to save in Steem and sleep well at night?
Would a long period of price stability, coupled with growing usage and utility of the network be sufficient to kickstart Steem onto a path of becoming a major digital currency? How do we introduce what we have to the world?
