Note: This post is a response to a post entitled, "Steem Passed Ethereum's Number of Transaction and Will Pass Bitcoin Soon"

That post can be read here: https://steemit.com/steemit/@clayop/steem-passed-ethereum-s-number-of-transaction-and-will-pass-bitcoin-soon

While there is a good bit of activity on the Steemit platform, it does not appear many people are using STEEM or STEEM DOLLARS as currency. Let's take a closer look at the numbers from the above-mentioned post:

Bitcoin Transactions:222,146

Ethereum Transactions: 37,900

Steem Transactions: 116,208

The main issue here is that Steem counts various non-financial activities as transactions. For example, roughly 80,000 of Steem's "transactions" are votes on content. Another 30,000 "transactions" are comprised of posts, replies, and edits. This sort of activity most closely resembles the mining process in Bitcoin. When you look at actual money transfers on the Steem network, the number drops down to the 2,000 transactions per day range, which isn't anywhere near what Bitcoin is doing.

There appears to be a good bit of activity on the Steem network, but it's unclear if it makes any sense to compare this activity to Bitcoin. This would be like comparing activity on Reddit with activity on the Bitcoin network; it's a comparison of apples and oranges.

This is not a dismissal of Steem, but it's important to realize that Steem is not becoming a bigger network than Bitcoin in terms of financial transactions. Bitcoin has a critical use case in terms of regulatory arbitrage, which is why so many people use it as a payment method. Steem does not need to compete with this use case to be successful as a project. It would probably be better to compare Steem money transfers to Bitcoin transactions and Steemit.com traffic with other social media websites.

As a side note, there does not appear to be much financial activity on the Ethereum network either. Most of the transactions on that network appear to involve mining payouts, developer test transactions, and deposits or withdrawals at exchanges.





Kyle Torpey is a freelance writer and researcher who has been following Bitcoin since 2011. His work has been featured on VICE Motherboard, Business Insider, NASDAQ, American Banker, RT’s Keiser Report, and many other media outlets. You can follow @kyletorpey on Twitter.