I would like to make this a short post, so I will get right to the point.
I personally believe STEEM has the potential to outweigh and outperform many other currencies out there in many different ways. I would just like to show the growth charts of a few different cryptos and compare.
The first will be STEEM up-to-date:
From it's time being tracked on coinmarketcap, it has made an impressive leap at one point in time, increasing in value by tremendous percentages. To be this successful, this early on, in comparison to a majority of currencies out there, is insanely incredible. Especially with such a large supply. The market cap within months shot well over 100's of millions of dollars. Meaning many people have much invested into it and it's value has risen over time. Considering the amount of steem out there and steem power, to be valued so high is amazing in-and-of-itself!
Let's look at the next coin, Litecoin:
As you can see, litecoin followed a similar trend as steem is showing and continued on that rise to reach an impressive 50$~ at one point. It started at a mere few dollars, dropped to near a dollar, then rose like a bat outta hell up to 50! What did it have that other coins didn't? Not much.. In fact, it was mostly just a larger supply coin that people looked at as just an alternative to Bitcoin. Something you could buy whole coins of and feel like they had better value than they actually did. What we see with litecoin is that after it's peak, it slowly dropped over time and then landed comfortably around 3-4$ for the past 6 months or so, with some highs and some lows in-between. Compared to steem, litecoin is nothing, it provided no special platform, no extra community (beyond the one created by it's users, no "official social home.") but it succeeded wildly for some and holds a place as a solid coin to hold but not so much as an investment now.
Now on to DASH:
Dash is still wildly volatile in my opinion and it's a hard crypto to tell what the future will hold. Lately the trend is up, up and more up though.. So maybe things are going on behind the scenes that's just being brought to the light. I would stay tuned and watch it. At $10, almost it's highest point since it reached near 15$~, I would say it's got potential still. Compared to dash, steem has much much more volume of supply, so for it to be over a dollar alone is astonishing and if it follows the same trend dash has, with a higher market cap, that means it's momentum stage could be insane and then over time, it's value would be mostly retained as more people buy into it and invest in the market.
On to ETH (Ethereum):
Now, Ethereum had a lot of hype about it before it was released, it supposedly had some new innovative form of something or other (I missed out on the ether wave unfortunately and have now found steemit, so I'd rather not switch to anything else anyways.) that drew a large investment early on and eventually soared to over a billion dollars in it's market. If I'm remembering correctly, Ether had some kind of smart-contract something or other that made it unique.. Regardless, it didn't have anything nearly as incredible as steem does and it performed wildly successfully, reaching over 20$ at one point. The supply is much closer to steem, but steemit is a much MUCH better concept to go along with a currency, so if steem can perform as well as ETH or better, it will be a bright future for us all! :)
I'm in no way a crypto-expert or anything, these are just some observations I've noticed while exploring the markets and each currency and I believe STEEM is THE future of digital currencies and true value!
Thanks for reading mates! If you have any input or advice, feel free to share! :)