Alright, so even though its Thursday today and I still expect him to flag this post instead of upvote it, I thought it would still be a good idea to let down some facts about Steem compared to other platforms and cryptos through some free-writing.
The currency and blockchain
Many of you are probably already aware of the technological advantages of Steem's blockchain to the others. Some may say its because its DPoS and you don't have to mine it through GPU's to create and validate the blocks, but there are also other DPoS coins out there which are slower than Steem.
The blockchain should in theory be able to handle around 180k transactions per second from an old post of @steempower and according to blocktivity.info which shows the current 700k-800k daily transactions only being 0.25% of the blockchains current limits. If you want to compare this with other PoW coins, they are left in the dust considering Bitcoin can only handle around 7 transactions per second and Ethereum about 25.
Then there is the distribution, many say that due to Steem being launched and relaunched and making it hard for people to mine its distributed unfairly. Yet they seem to ignore that Steem makes distribution fun, you can use your Steem Power to distribute the new coins onto contributions you find have value through votes. Even if the distribution might have been a bit unfair at the start (as are most due to low amount of people hearing about it) Steem is still constantly growing in supply and redistribution. The growing supply is also a factor in the price of each coin, looking at other coins that have already hit max supply or are close to it - it shouldn't come as a surprise that the price per coin might remain the same for now, the growing market cap is more important to look at. I am certain though that with the growth of users and investors it will catch up on the supply and increase the demand of the new coins being distributed and price will start going upwards fairly soon, after all the blockchain can handle it pretty well.
Usecase
Its also not a surprise to many of you that Steem is the best gateway for newcomers into crypto. After receiving your first payouts you can start experimenting with sending transactions, trading and investing even without having placed any fiat money of your own into it for starters. Many other currencies require you to do so, either by buying ASIC computing power which if the code were to change from PoW to PoS (like Ethereum is about to) it will render those computers useless. Ethereum let's you do that through GPU's but there is a big percentage of people that don't have high end Graphics Cards or don't want to burn them out by mining. This is why Steem is so different cause it let's you mine by being active in social media and contributing to the platform in any way you can and seems valuable to others.
Not only can you mine Steem while at the same time doing something other than waste electricity to solve mathematical equations to keep the blockchain safe, but it also incentivizes you to do so through curating posts.
The censorship resistant features of the blockchain have already proven how powerful it is compared to other platforms that are pushing their users away by censoring their content or demonetizing it. The era of middlemen services is nearing an end and its time users get to make 100% of what they should, the ability to send transactions with absolutely no fees will surely help their case.
The Future
The future is looking really bright for Steem. A great development team scaling the blockchain and making it ready for mass-adoption and growing constantly to help out with the workload.
Many fail to realize how young this project still is compared to the other giants out there, but the wisdom of the crowd and the improvement of interaction and teamwork by the Steemit team with its users has increased my hopes a lot more that this will become a huge success.
We have come so far already without any incentivized marketing strategies, once the rest of the world finds out about the advantages and pace of improvement of Steem they will be DDOSing the website naturally leading to the other front-ends getting more activity as well. :)
I've been into blockchain for over 4 years now starting of course with Bitcoin and then moving over to alternative coins. Of course the main drive in the beginning were the bigger gains, but over time you got to know the technology and see the potential it had. Bitcoins drama with censorships and other shady activity lead me to focus on altcoins even more and I am glad to have invested most of my time in Ethereum and other alts instead giving me a good track-record of placing my value in the currencies that later shot up 10-1000 folds, and I don't intend to break that record with Steem. :)
I showed this r/ethtrader post which was a quote from Travis Patron on Twitter to my roommate which he posted onto Instagram. He called me and thanked me for probably the 5th time a few weeks ago that I got him into Ethereum back when it was hovering around the 1$ mark. This quote is from March when it was around $10, but it proved to come true now a year later.
I believe that Steem will overshadow it, not only make individuals millionaires, but also giving them the power to change lives of others through the platform and I personally can't wait for the day we have millions of users here and thousands of tools, front-ends, usecases and so on. :)