We've all played this game at one time or another. Hop on Coinmarketcap and and look at all the projects ranked higher than Steem and wonder how they got there. It's all part of our innate tribalism to project ourselves higher than the "competition".

Dogecoin is still ranked in the 20s? WTF!

It's a perfectly natural response, although not a healthy one.

Personally I get to around the low 20s before I start questioning whether or not a project is more deserving than Steem. Coins like NEM, Maker, ETC, NEO, DASH, etc, are all solid blossoming projects with their own communities and unique consensus layers. Still, with the fear of Steem being bumped out of the top 100 that still leaves plenty more potentially empty promises to ridicule.

Personal bias.

As a programmer I always see dapp (smart-contract) platforms as superior to the rest. Why choose to be part of a community that can only transfer value when the programmable platforms have so much more potential? To be fair, there are a lot of reasons; the most obvious being self-defined. Most potential in this world never materializes and stays forever unrealized.

Invest in yourself.

Regardless, I've put in a lot of overhead here, and many others have done the same. Countless more are invested all over the cryptosphere. What does this tell us? That it isn't so easy to just jump from one community to another. Even if a new platform comes out that's completely superior to an old one it can never overtake the established paradigm without the power of a strong community to back it up.

A 'good' solution won't necessarily replace the 'good-enough' solution that came before it. This is especially true with cryptocurrency because all of them seem to be getting more decentralized over time. Many of the new and "better" coins will still suffer from massive distribution issues simply due to lack of time in the market.

Am I worried about the price?

Nope. Not really at all. My theory about Bitcoin is that it's 'secretly' doubling in value in a quite predictable manner. If we were to apply the same concept to Steem we should have fully expected to see a low essentially double the last one. We saw an all time low of 8 cents, perhaps we should have expected the next low to be 16 cents all along; everything going precisely to plan.

While I still think that Bitcoin could crash lower to $7500 over the next few months, I also think that Bitcoin has a way of propping itself atop the altcoin market. 'Altcoins' have taken such a beating lately and 10k is such a nice round number for unit bias that the new lows might be in already.

In addition, the low price of SBD signals that once again we've become oversold. I'm expecting some serious fireworks at the end of the year considering all the fundamental developments going on. These are the kinds of timetables we have to get used to. We would do well to remember that Steem hasn't even existed for the amount of time it takes Bitcoin to make a single bubble/bust cycle (4 years).

Bottom line: I won't be worried about Steem unless the price dips sub 10 cents. Even then, I will see it as a very risky opportunity. Steem's volatility has proven itself to be much stronger in both directions for myriad reasons. And that means when it spikes up, it spikes up hard any anyone who didn't buy will feel like they missed out on a massive opportunity. This feeling often cascades into even more wrong actions and missed opportunities. Don't be that guy. Don't go on tilt. Easier said than done.