Breaking Out Into The Mainstream?
Steemit traffic continues to climb. It's gone from nowhere to a traffic ranking of 8,799 in the US in just a few months. We can see an impressive growth trajectory so far. It's still very early, but it appears Steemit is poised for explosive growth.
Steemit vs. Bitcoin Content
It's interesting to compare the active interest in Bitcoin to Steemit using traffic numbers. Steemit dominates all the Bitcoin content websites below in bounce rates, daily pageviews and daily time on site. Steemit's traffic ranking in the US is second only to Coindesk. That's even more impressive because many of the Bitcoin websites have been around for years, yet in just a few months Steemit has surpassed most of them in the US.
Most of these websites have a narrow focus on Bitcoin and digital currencies, but that's precisely why Steemit has mainstream potential. People with varied interests and from all walks of life are gravitating towards Steemit to share their life and passions and to be rewarded for their contributions.
Steemit vs. Bitcoin Continued...
There's a lot of skepticism about Steemit as you can see here and here especially from Bitcoin 'maximalists' and those who might be worried that Steemit's success will undermine Bitcoin. If Bitcoin advocates rely on the idea that Bitcoin's first mover advantage and the network effect is the main competitive advantage of Bitcoin, then they should certainly pay attention to an ecosystem with the strongest growth trajectory. If anything Steemit can give Bitcoin much more exposure than it would have ever had.
Perhaps it's better to think of Steem Dollars as a convenient payment layer that complements Bitcoin. Bitcoin is undoubtedly one-of-a-kind and is often considered digital gold or a reserve currency that holds all the other blockchain ecosystems together in our digital world.
Bitcoin advocates that try to promote Bitcoin for payments and as money encounter the same obstacles gold bugs run into trying to promote gold as money. Will the average person want to spend gold or Bitcoin in today's economy? I see these assets as a safe haven. Store of value. An investment. Insurance. For now under Gresham's law 'good' money like Bitcoin or gold will be removed from circulation and 'bad' money will be used instead.
On the other hand Steem Dollars can be useful today as a medium of exchange because the dollar is already familiar to everyone around the world. They also can't be limited, frozen and don't require banks just like Bitcoin. With Steem dollars users won't incur the mental transaction costs of spending something entirely new and volatile like Bitcoin, especially when people have to count in Satoshis (ie. 0.000001 Bitcoins). But yes, yes. Bitcoiners and gold bugs are all waiting for that dollar apocalypse:
But no one really can predict when and if that will happen. Perhaps you can ask a numerologist or get a tarot reading. In the meantime, it's probably a good idea not to count on a total collapse. Even if there were a hyperinflation, dollars may still end up being the monetary unit of account. A friend of mine remembers the days growing up in Vietnam when there was hyperinflation there. His mother invested in gold and his family made out extremely well relative to everyone else in the village. He felt rich because he was one of the few able to eat chicken every once a while while everyone else ate rice and noodles every day. His mother traded gold for tobacco or bags of rice, but the exchange for most goods & services were still made in Dong, the Vietnamese fiat money. It just took a lot more Dong to buy things. Finally there are huge differences between something being possible, something being probable and something being probable & imminent. Libertarians have been waiting for a collapse of our dollar since the 70's and I used to think like that not too long ago, but it's good to keep an open mind about the various possible scenarios of the future. Lastly the Steem ecosystem can change the target monetary asset from Dollars to Gold or Bitcoin in the future so there is some flexibility in the system.
Account Growth – One Million By Year End?
Lastly here is a chart on account growth from Steemle.com:
We can see the impressive trajectory and if we do some rough math we get One Million by year end if the growth rate continues along the slope!!!
[Calculations: If we extend out the growth linearly we have a slope of roughly 2000 accounts per 31 days or 64.5 in total account growth per day. There are 144 days until the end of the year so 2000 accounts/day +144 days x 64.5 accounts/day gives us an estimate of 11,288 accounts created per day by year end. If we take the average new accounts per day from now until year end to be (2,000+ 11,288)/2 we have an average of 6,644 new accounts per day until the rest of the year and an account total of 956,736 (6,644 x 144 days) by year end. We add that to the 50,000 accounts we currently have and that gets us just over one million by year end. BTW if the growth rate continues we can very well be close to 10 million by the end of 2017... but it's way too early to project that far ahead. I need some of the mathematicians here to confirm my projections here or perhaps someone who knows Vedic math.]
Remember the real growth rate will likely be choppy with ups and downs, surges and plateaus, but if the community and Steem team focuses on improving the user experience, on viral growth and gets some publicity, we should expect to get to one million users by year end. Some kind of referral system would turbocharge Steemit and will probably ensure we hit the mark. Of course with a referral system, the biggest challenge is to minimize sybil attacks and count only quality referrals. Fortunately Steemit can use stake and reputation as measures of quality.
Conclusion
It's still early, but the traffic & account growth remain on an impressive trajectory, and engagement remains incredibly high. Steemit dominates most Bitcoin content websites. If Steemit maintains it's trajectory for account creation we may see one million accounts by year end. It's still too early to project how fast Steemit can grow and there are still a lot of challenges that remain ahead before it becomes a household name. It'll probably be a roller coaster ride, but Steem could very well be the first cryptocurrency to make it mainstream and that should bring joy to anyone who's been involved in this space for a while. It would be great if everyone came together to help make it happen. Bright days are ahead...
Especially for all you libertarian and anarchist gloom and doomers...... =P