The STEEM token is 12 cents. That seems to be a magnetic level for the token right now. But it's perilously close to single digits, which is a price level we have not seen for a long, long time. So what do we do now?
STEEM is just as promising as it was 2 years ago at this time, if not more. It's just that the speculative component of its token price is no longer there any more. And the supply of tokens "out in the wild" right now is limiting any potential for price appreciation.
Well, sadly, what I said was going to happen in this post and this post is contributing to the price decline. The amount of token supply that was locked up in bidbots has to go somewhere and anytime we get a little run in the token price, like we did a few weeks ago when STEEM got into the low 20s on a massive pump, that bidbot money comes out and squashes any kind of rally. Let's face it. Those bidbot accounts got rich. And for nothing. They basically forked some github code and rented a cheap VPS. They didn't contribute shit to the community outside of locking up a whole shit ton of STEEM, which propped the price of STEEM up.
We basically just have to let that stuff work its way out of the system. That could take a long while. According to @penguinpablo's recent post, we're staring at about 95 million STEEM still on exchanges. At current prices, that's $11.5 million of sell pressure that could come out at any time.
I really don't get why people store their STEEM on exchanges. They could turn it into STEEM POWER and earn 15% or so with some easy-to-setup auto-votes, but I guess it is the siren song of those random 20+% pumps (and the 3 month unstaking process) that keeps them staying in liquid STEEM. I get it.
All this bad news, and what did I do? I just topped up some more STEEM! I just couldn't resist getting a little more at 12 cents.
Why?
Well, for one I'm a glutton for punishment, I guess. Second, I'm a big believer in DCA (dollar cost averaging). Third, I'm a sucker for a good passive income story and even without writing any posts for the last week, I got 4.222 STEEM in curation rewards. That's a pretty nice bit of return for doing not much of anything except rewarding writers that I already know are doing a great job.
Fourth, I looked at the recent Alexa data. Even though it tells a sad story in general over the past 90 days, I do think maybe we might be seeing some normalization of the previous downtrend. Take a look:
I know this data is just for steemit.com, but most of the tribe sites have the same trajectory and even worse rankings. It's depressing. But you see down there on the bottom right? Maybe, just maybe, the bleeding has stopped. For now. At least we can take solace that the Koreans love STEEM.
But @taskmaster4450, as always, is here to make you feel better with his five reasons to like STEEM in the long run post - SMTs, Communities, Steem Engine, 3speak, and Splinterlands. While the first two are coming out of the StInc camp, the last three are community-grown projects. The strength of the community development squad is really one of the most encouraging signs of long-term STEEM bullishness.
We just have to wait. Let the developers develop. Let the old bidbot operators see themselves out. Let the community continue to triage itself. At some point, this will all be over. STEEM tokens will be distributed more fairly and among those users that are most loyal to the platform. If we can get that STEEM POWER staking ratio up above 80%, I think we'll start to see some sustainable price moves.
Even with that, I'm hoping we can stay above 10 cents.
What do you think?