RE: What are the Economic incentives to buy and hold large amounts of Steem Power?

Cloning Steem is possible. It has been done before but not very successfully so far I believe. It's also pretty expensive to buy all the infrastructure yourself.

I fail to see why anyone would go that route though when you will be able to make an SMT for 10 sbd on Steem and utilize it in your application or community.

You do need access to RC's but you can lease them if you can't afford the STEEM straight up and increase the leases with the growth of the organization.

It's a much cheaper, easier and faster option.

And besides that, if you clone Steem you will have to somehow get your token on an exchange for it to become tradable. With an SMT your token will be tradable straight away and you will have access to instant liquidity.

I'm referring to large projects. Smaller projects and communities would of course find SMTs useful and prefer them over cloning. But look at Weku, Golos, Narrative,Whaleshares and there's another one that is picture centric, can't remember the name, but they forked Steem. Its really not that challenging for a business to launch one.

The point I am making is that price of STEEM is going to be directly related to whether people clone or make an SMT, unless Steem's community is so valuable to the business that they go with Steem. Currently, Steem's not big enough of a community for that, but it should be the goal.

Let's say STEEM got back to $1, in that case a video game company wanting to cover RCs for a million people would need at least 15,000,000 SP or rent the RCs. Who wouldn't clone?