Most of my Steem activity revolves around simply publishing my own content, or talking about ways to improve the user experience on Steem. I've spoken before at length about how I feel like this is the main barrier to us bringing on more users. The majority of the world has never heard of Steem, so they don't know anything about our economics or our problems.
Now even though I don't talk much about it, I am just as interested in Steem as an investment, and with new SCOT tokens entering the fray, I'm looking at those as well. Not only from the angle of it being a powerful tool for community building, but also as an investment.
The short answer is that these are all very high risk, and that's great, because typically the highest risk can also give the highest reward.
Without a doubt, after the dot com bubble burst, tons of people got rekt and there were plenty of people saying, told you so to the investors that invested in dot com businesses, but there were also those people that throughout all that saw something valuable. They cut through the noise and went heavy in on businesses like amazon or ebay. It would be incredibly risky to invest in something that's down in the dumps like that because it might just be holding on for dear life before a final death spiral, or it might be finding it's foundation for a future surge into maturity.
Because of the nature of crypto currencies, it's common that someone will literally just GIVE you the investment in their token, so your only risk is whether to pass up the immediate value they have at the moment of distribution. You don't need to risk any of your own money initially. In my mind, this is no risk.
I would say don't dump your tokens as soon as they're airdropped to you except I want your tokens, so dump away lol.
I'm not a huge stakeholder with Steem, but I'm not building my stake with the hopes of selling it one day for a huge return. I have an amount of Steem, or PAL, and now LEO, that I'm bringing in by being an author as well as a curator. My goal is for all of these tokens to become valuable enough that they would be worth selling some of my liquid earnings. If Steem went to $20, I wouldn't cash out my entire stake(I'd probably put some into stable coins to retain some of that value, I'm not stupid) I just wouldn't power everything up anymore, that's the ultimate goal for me.
Your Steempower/PalPower/LeoPower is your goose. You don't sell the goose, you sell the eggs. You feed the goose so it grows and can lay larger more valuable eggs. If you sell the goose, even if you sell it for a good price, you just got rid of the value generator.
Of course there is a chance that some huge pump could be the last pump before a major crash that you never recover from. There's always a chance of that happening. Therein lies the risk, but...
No risk, no reward.
