Metcalfe's Law is a law attributed to Robert Metcalfe (co-inventor of Ethernet), and it states that:

The value of a communications network is proportional to the square of the number of users of the system.



In layman's terms, you can think of it like this (using telephone companies as an example):

2 telephones can only make 1 connection

5 telephones can make 10 connections

12 telephones can make 66 connections

You can see how in the beginning, with a very low amount of users, the system has relatively low value.

However, as the number of users of the network increases, the number of possible connections exponentially gets larger and larger, and thus the total value of the system increases.

This law has been used a countless number of times to quantify the value of telecommunications networks, social networks, media companies, fax systems, and the entire Internet. Why not use it on Steem as well?

According to SteemDB, Steem has over 95,000 users with a reputation of at least 26. This is about 0.1 million users who have posted and gotten upvoted past the starting reputation.

Ignoring the reputation condition, Steem has about half a million accounts. Steem also has much more activity (transactions) than other blockchains:



You can clearly see how Steem is number one when it comes to transaction throughput. By the way, Steem is rocking a million transactions at 0.09% of its total possible network capacity, while Ethereum is handling less than that at 47% of its capacity, and Bitcoin is barely chugging through at 100% capacity (plus over a hundred thousand unconfirmed transactions).

Clearly, Steem has more users and much more transaction activity than many other blockchains. Additionally, the platform ticks many boxes for a valuable cryptocurrency, with:

an active developer team

constantly evolving/updating platform

high scalability

usefulness

Steemit is the only place you can reliably, easily and quickly be paid to write articles, post pictures, and share anything in between.

Over the course of the past year, Steem has grown by over 1965% (over 20x) in value. By comparison, Bitcoin has grown by under 1566%, meaning that in the past year, Steem has actually already been a better investment than Bitcoin.

We have a lot of growth left to do, but already it seems that Steem has a lot of value and unlocked potential. Let's take Steem to the top of the charts in 2018.

Thanks for reading,

— @mooncryption