Great post! Another detail I like to keep in mind is the "price" of VESTs in terms of STEEM. I have a screenshot of https://steemd.com/distribution on July 12th and it was around 211 STEEM for 1M VESTs. Today it's at 293 STEEM for 1M VESTs. The price of VESTs in terms of STEEM will never be cheaper than it is right now.
What that means is buying 1000 STEEM a month ago got you more influence on the network than buying 1000 STEEM today. 1000 STEEM today will get you more VESTs than 1000 STEEM a month from now.
This number however, has began to fall this week, with weekly active users falling from 21,000 one week ago, to under 16,000 this week.
That seems to be the only number that really concerns me. I'd like to see the growth rates of other social media startups (Facebook, Twitter, Reddit) in their early days as a comparison. If people aren't super, super excited about moving over to Steemit, it may have trouble overcoming the network effect of the existing platforms. I have friends and family that are planning to blog here, but it's just not a priority for them. Until more of their friends are here, they won't make the move (chicken: meet egg). Also, they aren't on social media every day, all day like many of us are. To them, it's just not that big a part of their life.
You should really do a post on this! This is something I suspect 95% of Steemians are not aware of (myself included until I read this). I think if more people were aware of this, they would be buying Steem and powering up now, rather than waiting to try and buy in at the bottom.
Thanks Tim, maybe I will. I'm looking for historical data on the change in the 1MV to STEEM conversion rate over time and I don't have it yet. I'll poke around though.