Why The Steem Community Is Financially Valuable

The price of STEEM or any cryptocurrency is very much based on speculation and not real world use and value creation at the moment. The kind of value creation on Steem that can be expected to bring in cash flows and allow for a fundamental value for STEEM to be calculated would be the monetized attention of Steemians with accounts or internet users just consuming the content without accounts. That would be advertising and marketing done on chain (like @coingecko by participating constructively as a member of the community) or off chain as ads show by front ends like Partiko or Steemit do. Or it could be paid services making use of the properties of the blockchain.

Steemians, of course, are the owners the chain profiting from activities on it like any business owner getting dividends. Relative to the size of their stake, and I dare say relative to the value of their content, authors do get a very large share of the token inflation. 75% of the total pool goes to content creators and curators. That part of the pool is split 75/25 between authors and curators (upvoters of content). 15% of the entire pool goes to holders of Steem Power and 10% goes to witnesses. It should be noted that the entire token inflation is steadily decreases about 0.5 percentage points per year until it reaches 1% at year 18.

The question often asked is whether authors and curators on Steem are creating enough value to justify the high inflation rate and all the tokens falling into their hands. The question usually pertains to the value of the posts created. But I think that's too narrow a view because, at three years of age, Steem can still be said to be at a stake distribution stage where communities are built, models of decentralized coordination are established and the foundations of the ecosystem as a whole are laid down. We are all beta testers forced to put up with all the discomfort and nuisance of being in the middle of a work in progress.

As we have seen on stateofthedapps.com, Steem is superior to all other blockchain projects out there in terms of actual use of applications built on it. If you are a web developer who wants to build a DApp, it is no use to build it on a blockchain that has no community to speak of or is severely curtailed in its ability to scale. Steem suffers from neither problem. The marketing of Steem should not be left to the DApps. Instead, Steem should be marketed to developers! That's because there already is a community of tens of thousands of unique daily active users who has a penchant for jumping on any new app even remotely interesting to test it to exhaustion and to provide the developers with valuable feedback. At this stage, this is what the primary value proposition of the community is.