THEN WHY DO I DO THE HODL YODEL?
(from newworldencyclopedia.org,
although Leon Thomas is more my speed-
the creator DOES have a master plan
whether or not I'm in on the plot)
Since I've been on Steemit (nearly a year now), I've watched the "value" of STEEM and SBD vary by over an order of magnitude (at least 20X)- this is still less volatile in absolute terms than Bitcoin has proved (something over 40X).
These are both from coinmarketcap.com...
These graphs would appear to belie my point- but that's partly due to sampling and low resolution over this time scale hides many of the convulsive twitches of the market. IIRC, one of the exchanges had listed BTC over $25K USD last year for a brief moment, and I thought one of our fellow Steemians had reported STEEM went over $15; those flash highs may have been close to coincidental, but STEEM seems to very roughly follow BTC like an undamped inductor driven by unregulated voltage- except for it's dramatically fast recovery from the last series of flash-crash.
Short-term volatility for STEEM is very high (40-50%), but applying a (pure guesswork) smoothing function yields an indication of longer-term prospects- and they look pretty good, a little better than BTC (2nd derivative certainly LOOKS greater)- but this could all be wishful magical thinking.
OTOH, with BTC's market dominance slowly and steadily dropping (a VERY good thing, in my book) the peoples' tendency to diversify will, I think, lead to much more stability in the entire sphere, especially as larger businesses shift to digital ledger systems in all their iterations.
What makes STEEM stand out from most of the rest of the crypto sphere is its valued-added aspect, though, and I'm hoping (with quite a bit of justification, I think) it and the others (like Gridcoin) that are tied to real-world value (content creation, curation, massively-networked research computing, etc.) intrinsically (not to rule out beneficial things like Doge, but that's a different model) continue a relatively steady and quite merited growth- and anyone, anywhere can participate if they have only a smartphone and internet connection.
Think I'm full of crap? By all means, flame this unmercifully.