RE: Everyone seems to be making money, can Steemit survive long term?
Ok, so you are saying that every day or 2 maybe 2 or 3 people get $10,000 in STEEM Dollars that they can actually pull out that day, and over a few weeks or months many of them will. And that is both true, and necessary.
If STEEM could not stand up to people selling out it wouldn't last, but if you got to Bittrex for example, the Buy Wall is pretty thick. You could take 100 Bitcoins worth of STEEM (about $60,000) and cash it all out at once (losing money by not selling it slowly at higher prices) and you would only knock down the Buy wall about 3 pages and down about $1. If you were to take that same 100 Bitcoins and spend it on the Buy wall, it would send the price up by 5-7 pages, nearly Doubling the price.
There is a lot of talk on STEEM about Whales, but we have not even begun to see the effects of a single Whale. Whales make waves, that is why they are called Whales. What a Whale does is goes in to the market, drops $1,000-$100,000+ in the Market, jacking up the price. Then wait a few minutes, and sell about 1/6-1/4 of it for a huge loss, knocking the price down lower than it was before they came in. Then they use the money they got for selling all that STEEM (though at a loss) and use it to buy STEEM for even more than they paid before (again at a loss). Then they put all their STEEM they have for sale at different intervals ($6, $6.05, $6.10, $6.15, $6.20, etc) below the lowest Sell prices (of those that are left), then set up a buy wall with 1 or more Bitcoin, so that they buy price is locked in at the new higher Price.
There are now about 100 people with that capability here on this Website. And some of them might not even realize that they can do it. But STEEM is about to see some major Whale activity over the next year.