There is a great deal of talk about where the cryptocurrency world is going and what blockchains are the best. As many of you are aware of at this point, my view is simply that Wall Street is on the way and is bringing a lot of money with it. For that reason, and my understanding of how Wall Street works, I believe that BTC will get the lion's share of the money. Wall Street sales take the path of least resistance and, in this arena, that is Bitcoin. I make this statement knowing the challenges that Bitcoin has and the fact that it is not the best blockchain, especially to be digital money. This is a fact Wall Street does not care about, hence, my conclusion.

Of late, I am expressing my bullishness for STEEM. In fact, I am super bullish. Of the coins that I hold, STEEM ranks only behind Bitshares as the one I am most high on. As I delve deeper down the STEEM rabbit hole, I love what I am finding.

Today I am going to mention a few of the differences with STEEM versus ethereum. The last 11 months witnessed an incredible jump in the price of ETH. It went from the $5-$6 neighborhood all the way to close to $500. I do not think anyone can argue with a 90-100 times jump in 11 months.

Personally, I see 2018 as a time when STEEM makes a similar jump. ETH was able to capture a lot of money from the publicity it received as the leader in the ICO market. More tokens were brought out using ERC20 than any other protocol. This publicity led to a lot of money entering the token. At the same time, ethereum did an excellent job promoting itself as a faster, less costly version of bitcoin. From that perspective, it is hard to argue that ethereum is not a superior blockchain to bitcoin.

Which brings me to steem. How does ethereum stack up to steem?

From a blockchain perspective, it is not even close. The steem blockchain is far superior and companies that are looking to bring out a token, especially in the content creation market, really only have one choice....steem.

To start, ethereum, like most of the other major blockchains, does not solve the scaling problem. Ethereum provides about 20 transmissions per second which is far better than BTC's 7, but still nowhere near what is needed going forward. With all the new tokens placed on the ETH blockchain, when there is a total network capacity of 25 per second, how long until it is overloaded and transmissions speeds slowed like Bitcoin?

Steem transmission speed: up to 10,000 transactions per second.

Yesterday, in a post I wrote about how STEEM was going to make people a fortune. In that post, I focused upon how Smart Media Tokens were going to be the key to great wealth creation. They provide similar service as ERC20 on ethereum with a couple major differences.

To view article: https://steemit.com/steem/@taskmaster4450/f-k-steemit-smts-will-make-steem-hodlers-a-fortune

Smart Media Tokens come with the curation/reward system built into them. This means that no further coding or database creation is required to implement a system like this onto someone's website. With ETH, further steps are required since the blockchain is general as compared to the specialized nature of steem. Steem was created with the intention of servicing the content creation market. So while not as potentially large as the general market, it is still enormous.

The second major difference which few consider is the validity of the tokens created. Trust is a major issue and we see the press that ICO's are getting are starting lead to regulators look at them closely. So what does steem have that ethereum does not? Any token created on steem is limited by the code at the time of creation. Whatever the total number of coins is, that is what it stays. According to the SMT white paper, this is hard written into the blockchain hence, unchanging. On ethereum, any token created can be expanded at a later date diluting the existing supply. In fact, while I hold some ETH, one of the reasons I am not higher on the token is because the total amount of coins is not fixed. At any time, they could add another 25M, 50M or even 100M to the total supply.

Porn Is Here

One of the first tokens created via the SMT protocol was Vice.org. For those who missed the news, this is a porn site that is going to "pay people to watch porn". Since few, including myself, have no idea who or what vice.org is, I had to look it up. It appears to be a partnering of many different porn creators including Penthouse. The entire reason for this move is to take their films direct and eliminate the distribution channel.

So what does this do for steem? Simply, it brings a ton of people. Leaving the moralistic aspects of this industry aside, the bottom line is porn has a huge following and has the ability to bring hundreds of millions, if not tens of millions, of people to this blockchain. That is a lot of people who not only are eligible to use other apps on this site but, even if they just stay on vice, they are using steem bandwidth which increases the value of STEEM. Vice will need to have a ton of STEEM on hand to ensure they have enough bandwidth to expand as their popularity increases.

This process applies to all entities who come on the steem blockchain. Steem is the currency for bandwidth and all activity uses it. Also, when we look at the content creation world, the number of entities having to pay some form of distribution costs is enormous. How would independent film studios like to take their content direct? What about publishers who has to go through distribution channels to reach their audience? Music creators? This is in addition to all those outfits that are allowing Facebook and Google to get the largest percentage of the advertising money off their websites. Each of these is a prospect for a token on the steem blockchain.

$50 Billion

In the title I threw out there $50 billion as a marketcap. At this moment that seems rather large. It is not.

Presently, only Bitcoin has a marketcap above that with a total of $151B. Ethereum is the next closest with a market cap of $33B. So how can I say that $50B is not a large marketcap?

Again, we need to look at the trends and understand what is coming. Wall Street is going to push the entire cryptcurrency space to absurd heights. Personally, I see $1.5T at the end of 2018 versus the $285B it is right now. That is a 6 fold increase.

Also, if we look at recent history, we can see how 2017 witnessed something very similar. At this time last year, there was one coin over $10B, BTC. It was worth $11B. To break in the top 10, only took a market cap of $33 million dollars. Now, there are 150 tokens with a market cap of at least $33M. IOTA presently sits at number 10 with a market cap of $2.2 billion, a 66 times jump of the value of the #10 token a year ago.

2018 is going to be a bigger year for the cryptocurrency market than 2017 was. This is a guarantee of Wall Street. They are gearing up to enter this market and they will do it in a big way. We are going to see price jumps that astound us. The key is going to be for individual tokens to get on their radar. As we already witnessed, being the leader in ICOs is a wonderful way to do that. Steem has the ability to generate that publicity by handing a few ICOs for some better known content creators. I am certain this will happen. Steem simply offers content creators too much when signing onto this blockchain.

In fact, there is one other point that I failed to mention. One of the biggest drawbacks to the cryptomarket is security. Consider the fact that content creators establishing a token have to worry about the security of their coins. This is the case on ethereum. On steem, however, this concern is removed. Steem handles the security for all new tokens created using SMT in the same way it handles STEEM.

Start digging down the rabbit hole that is steem and you will realize that by the end of 2018, a $50 Billion market cap on STEEM is not as outrageous as it first appears. For content creators, it is a much better platform for ICOs than ethereum and they will bring millions of users to the network. Considering the fact that I expect some known entities to sign on, we will see a great deal of publicity generated. And this, my friends, will attract a portion of the Wall Street money.

In closing, 2017, overall, was not a great year for STEEM. There certainly were challenges especially with the most popular app, steemit. That said, a year ago the price of STEEM was 16 cents. Therefore, in spite of a challenging year, the price of STEEM still increased 6.6 times.

Between Wall Street and SMTs, STEEM will just to heights few can comprehend at this moment.

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