Insprired by @whatsup's article here I thought I'd expand a bit on some reasons why anybody would buy STEEM and where this could go.

Price relevance

I found this relevant because there's been a lot of complaint about the price of STEEM, so the question is: are there reasons for the STEEM price to go up?

Obviously, STEEM is also subject to the huge price slash in crypto of 2018, but there's more. STEEM has been falling relatively to many other cryptocurrencies and going down on coinmarketcap.com as low as rank 42 yesterday, before it turned up a bit again.

NB: I know I've been ranting about market cap in crypto a lot, so why am I citing CMC? Basically just to indicate how STEEM has been performing relatively to other crypto, not in absolute terms.

This whole thing seems really weird - Steem is one of the blockchains with the most adoption and an active user base, so wtf? What can we attribute that to?

Inflation

At first, there's the apparent 8+% inflation in 2018. Any inflationary cryptocurrency would suffer in price, and if Steem didn't grow, a dilution of the same order of magnitude would be ok.

But it seems that there's more than that. As far as I can tell, most newly created STEEM tokens are being (or remaining) powered up, so out of the 8% new tokens, only 2 or 3% would be sold (maybe someone who has some stats on this could share them).

Too few people are buying

It's clear that basically too few people are buying. Yeah, but the overall market has that problem. So, what's special here?

Pretty much nothing, but if we look at a few other examples, they actually do have reasons to buy more of a certain token because they could do something useful with them.

What's useful about STEEM?

I guess right now the answer is: ROI. You can generate interest on your investment by selling votes. Ideally, this would give you an ROI (in STEEM) that's higher than 8%, so from an economic perspective, you should be able to get a return of 4-5% in USD. Fair enough, but is there anything else?

Sure, you can give rewards to somebody else rather than just selling votes. Is that a strong argument to go buy and power up some STEEM? I wouldn't be so sure, maybe some very altruistic people would.

Apart from that, we've got Dapps like Steem Monsters. You need STEEM to buy packs. Alright, this should bring up demand, but on the other hand, the @steemmonsters guys will have to sell the STEEM / SBD at some point to cover their costs, bringing the market back down. Are there any Dapps that would bind STEEM on a longer-term?

If you've recently bought STEEM - what was your motivation behind that? It would be great to have a collection of convincing arguments.