Recently Bitcoin has hit 17 million milestone, only 4 million coins are left to mine. Bitcoin is deflationary currency with caveat. Bitcoin is inflationary in our lifetime. Last BTC will be mined around 2136 long after the deaths of all living human today.
However, BTC's mining or production has decreasing rate so is for STEEM. However, it decreases 50% over four years.
Similarly STEEM's inflation rate now 9% after four years it will be 7% which is 22.22% decrease.
But STEEM is design for exponential growth. It is about to have 1M users. Next 20 years 350 millions STEEM can be mined or rewarded compared to current supply of 255 millions.
However, in next 20 years STEEM users can increase to 100s of millions if not billions. If we consider that STEEM will attract Reddit lever users which is 230 millions then in next 10 years each user can have only 4 STEEM each (i.e. considering 400M STEEM supply). It is a very interesting number scenario.
Since there around 100 millions STEEM held by STINC and early developers. There are roughly 30 members who holds more than 500K STEEM, 230 members 50K STEEM and 1400 members 5K STEEM. Next 99 million users have to vie for 150M new STEEM. This scenario will easily drive STEEM's price.
Therefore, though STEEM's production rate may be higher than BTC, but it has potential growth of 100 times simply due to its use cases or utilities.
By the way, STEEM blockchain can house all kinds of decentralized applications (DApps)-- video hosting- D.Tube, sound hosting- DSound, twitter like app @zappl, porn hosting- Dporn, Instagram like app APPICS and Steepshot.
Entrepreneurs and developers are making alternative of all kind sof Apps every day on STEEM blockchain.
Therefore, its user growth is not over hyped. It just need few greatly successful Apps.
Blogging site Steemit has ranked 1000 in Alexa ranking couple of times. D.tube is getting attentions of heavy users of Youtube.
One of the interesting features of STEEM blockchain is the staking feature (i.e. DPoS) which provides voting power to the stakers. Therefore, heavy users have to invest (e.g. buy STEEM) to have more influence similar to buying Ads or SEO expenditure for online businesses. This will drive STEEM's price too.
Considering its high inflation rate of STEEM to BTC, STEEM has multiple use cases to drive its price. One is staking that is described already above. It can work similar to BTC as store of value and transaction.
In fact STEEM's transaction scalability, cost (i.e. free) and speed much better than BTC. Therefore, it that sense it is BTC competitor too.
Due to delegation feature STEEM is already popular among the Investors for Passive Income. It is a competitor to PoS based mining currency such as Smartcash, NextCoin etc.
Finally, in future when hundreds of SMTs will be released, it will work as trade pair for them similarly BTC is for all cryptocurrencies.
Image sources: Most images are open sourced (e.g. Pixabay, Wikimedia etc.) with Creative common license. Some images are used with due courtesy to respected owners.
Thanks for reading.
@riseofth
Cryptominer since 2013, occasional trader and tech blogger