I've encountered people lamenting what they perceive as lackluster price action of STEEM in recent weeks. While it is correct to note that STEEM has fallen hard in the last couple of years relative to BTC, I don't think it makes any sense to try and ascribe meaning to short term price action. Only a month ago, BTC was priced at $5,000 and STEEM was 50 cents. Now STEEM is about 30 cents and BTC is nearly $6,000 and eyeing further gains. The soft roll-out of MIRA, a crucial piece of the Steem infrastructure allowing for a drastic reduction in node operating costs was recently announced. It didn't register at all. The short term price action is simply random noise.
The current dip is a buying opportunity, especially if it continues any further. There are clear signs of spring in the entire crypto market. November may have seen the capitulation event the market was anticipating. The next Bitcoin mining reward halvening is estimated to happen 381 days from now, in May next year. Bull runs have usually followed the halvenings that take place every four years. As the rest of the crypto space tends to follow Bitcoin and be quite sentiment-driven, there is no reason to doubt that STEEM, too, will post a new all time high probably 1-2 years from now.
It certainly is the case that the Steem ecosystem is more robust, varied and developed than ever before. With MIRA now complete, the next goal for Steemit Inc will be to get SMTs finally done. But we already have Steem-Engine and all the wonderful developments taking place on it, including tokens on a side chain.
There is absolutely no reason to get worked up about short term price action. Part of the reason why Steem's rank among crypto projects has fallen in terms of market cap is the introduction of plenty of new projects. Much why Steem has fallen back can be put down to past mismanagement by Steemit Inc, though. But even that shouldn't worry us excessively since the survival of Steem is pretty much guaranteed by the cutting edge work done by Steemit Inc in creating a set of interfaces (MIRA) to allow the blockchain to be stored on cheap SSD mass memory instead of expensive RAM on RocksDB, a high-performance database engine created by Facebook - without rewriting the blockchain code.
The whole space is characterized by immature technology and even more immature products. The astounding fact that a project whose rank in market cap is 60 on Coinmarketcap is able to have the most traffic and the most used apps in the entire space is a testament to that. And even the most used Steem apps have daily active users counted in the thousands. By the standards of the centralized world that's microscopic. The largest centralized platforms are larger by six orders of magnitude. The race, if you can even call that since this space is up against legacy systems in countless fields instead of each other, has only begun.
