Can Steem Actually Scale?

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We all know that Steem scales in certain ways, Steem is fast and able to scale in transaction speed, but that is not the type of scaling I'm talking about...

Steem has a membership onboarding problem. This is because Steem requires STEEM or a very large amount of resource credits in order to create and cause an account to have functionality.

If Steem requires around 15 STEEM to be powered up per account, this can be a very expensive problem for any serious project planning to build a social website around an SMT, or even just Steem itself.

Now, at the current price of $0.17 per STEEM, something that has always been free now costs only 17% of a dollar, but still, that's more expensive than it has ever been. That means that the average user would cost the social network provider a whopping $2.55.

It is common to expect a conversion rate of only 1.9% of site traffic to actually result in revenue gains, which means spending $127.50 to onboard 50 people to find that diamond user that will buy something. Let's hope whatever they buy is more than $127.50...

As the price of STEEM returns to its higher rates users won't simply cost $2.55, but quite a bit more. Let's pretend STEEM went back to its ATH of $8.40. What do you think would happen? I can't imagine businesses being able to afford to onboard users if the cost of STEEM were so high and the requirement was 15 Steem Power for each account.

Steem scales in speedy transaction times, but I have to say that the user scaling issue is the real hurdle here.