Many people still are very skeptical about STEEM, so let's look at the most likely scenarios and see what they would mean for your investment into the STEEM ecosystem:
Worst case scenario
Severe STEEM blockchain vulnerabilities / hacks crashes blockchain.
Results:
- Making the STEEM blockchain unusable
- STEEM / STEEM DOLLARS/ STEEM POWER that's locked up in the blockchain becomes worthless
- The public almost completely lost trust in the STEEM experiment
- The developers might still find a way to start a new blockchain and give users back some of the value
Scenario 2
Market price of STEEM goes to $0.01 (or a fraction of that).
Result:
- Investors lost almost all of their initial investment
- SteemIt social network still has value as it still pays out users for content creation and curation
- New investors will come in and drive the price back up
Scenario 3
Market price of STEEM goes to $0.50.
Result:
- Investors lost a fair amount of their initial investment
- SteemIt social network still has value as it still pays out users for content creation and curation
- New investors will come in and drive the price back up
Scenario 4
Market price of STEEM stabilizes somewhere between $1.00 and $5.00.
Result:
- Investors lost a fair amount of their initial investment
- SteemIt social network still has value as it still pays out users for content creation and curation
- New investors will come in and drive the price back up
Scenario 5
Market price of STEEM keeps growing for the next 10 years (similar to Bitcoin).
Result:
- Investors make insane returns on their initial investment
- SteemIt social network has very high value
- STEEM blockchain has extremely high value
- New investors will keep coming in and the price will stay steady or grow even higher
Conclusion
STEEM is a fantastic high risk-high reward investment! The risks are acceptable for the potential returns that are possible.
Another interesting subject that many of you might not thought about yet is that when it turns out that certain settings of the economic system of the STEEM blockchain aren't sustainable, there is always a way to democratically vote for a better implementation! An example that comes to mind is making STEEM deflationary when there isn't much growth in the number of new users coming in.