What Happens To Steem If Bitcoin Goes To $1000?

Bitcoin's store of value narrative is questioned right now. The stock market crash also brought Bitcoin down to its current stable level of $5000 to $5800 from a sharp dip to $3800. Investors clearly do not view BTC as a safe haven, yet. I think for Bitcoin to act as a real safe haven, it needs a much longer history or mass adoption. The markets seem to treat it as a speculative asset of the kind that loose money seeks out at the end of prolonged economic expansion.

Bitcoin does have the 200 week moving average at about $5000 to close under before the price trajectory predicted by the stock-to-flow model is conclusively invalidated. We'll see what happens. I'd be very careful about going long on Bitcoin at the moment.

If Bitcoin falls much further, it will not bode well for any altcoin, either. What that means is that investors in STEEM would suffer great losses at least in the short to medium term. However, the Steem blockchain has actual real world value not tied to it's utility coin STEEM being treated as a speculative quasi derivative of Bitcoin. To be honest, I have always been disturbed by the massive price volatility of STEEM. I believe the STEEM bull markets have attracted partly the wrong kind of people to the platform, that is, speculators and maximizers. If the loss of STEEM's speculative value means flushing this type of people out, then so be it.

I believe the real value of Steem is in its censorship resistance. It is very difficult to have an open debate on most mainstream platforms at times. This is because of ham-fisted censorship, often algorithmic, or abuse of censorship powers by the administrators or users who make complaints. That is annoying bullshit. There is none of that on Steem. Community managers can block users from Communities owned by them, but there is no way to block anyone even from one's own blog. In my experience, that has more upsides than downsides. I really hate censorship.

If the monetary value of Steem rewards stops being a selling point, I believe we can still attract freedom-loving people to join Steem. The organic growth potential will be put to the test. Steem nodes are pretty cheap to run and I believe the chain can survive 3 cent STEEM with a stride. See @aggroed's post on how a very low price would affect Steem:

https://steemit.com/steem/@aggroed/steem-is-dead-or-is-it