When it comes to the price of STEEM, it has become much more stable than it was in the past, but is still not gaining much, ehem, "steem".
What creates the value of STEEM? Well, I'm sure we could get into a decade of dialogue on all kinds of economic philosophies and policies, but lets keep it simple.
At the most basic economic level, Supply & Demand creates the Price of Steem.
So we have two metrics to work with to engineer the price of steem, or the direction of the price. Since increasing or decreasing supply will likely have a proportional affect on price, meaning it would equalize in value, we will focus on what creates demand for steemcoins.
What creates Demand for buying Steem?
Two things I will focus on that can be improved, that drive demand for purchasing Steem.
- Steem Power or Powering Up to have more power and stake earnings. - A Viable Reason to Buy Steem, but Diminished Comparitively to Other PoS Coins, in that you can also earn coins by creating content. This will be hard to improve because you cannot increase or decrease stake earnings, without equalizing the value earned, so the best way to improve Steems value through this metric is by improving the content and community, so people want to power up more than their content creation earnings enable.
- This is where I think the real engineering work can be done to improve and increase demand in Steemit overall, and it is Promoted posts. I think this needs a major rework, because most avoid the entire "Promoted" tab, minimizing impressions and overall visibility of paid-posts, which in turn lowers the steem bids for top spots, which lowers demand for steem.
What I would propose is an overhaul to the Promoted posts system so that ads are more valuable to purchase, perhaps showing promoted posts on other posts, intermingled on trends and other pages, so that people who want to advertise their products and posts can find a bigger reason to buy steem to do so.