Well in this case Economics can provide some answers. For Steem and Hive the problem is the supply and demand of the coin. The staking mechanism / consensus that rewards (supplies) out coins is not in balance with the demand. The central question is why would you buy Steem or Hive? I think the logical answer would be so that your upvotes and post will earn you more tokens and you will have a larger influence when it comes to voting on the future of the platform. The more people bring in outside money into the platform the more the value of the Hive or Steem token will rise. The problem is the supply keeps getting created faster than people want to buy it.

Demand side for the people buying Bitcoin is different. A lot of the large investors in Bitcoin are institutional investors that are buying Bitcoin as a hedge against inflation. A lot of the gold crowd has also exited gold and moved into BTC. Many of the people who buy Bitcoin don't really interact with a broad range of other crypto products. All they know is Bitcoin and that they think it will just keep going up. They are really people who are just currency speculators that are trying to momentum invest. They aren't in it for the long term.

The supply side of BTC has a cutoff so people believe that there will be scarcity. That is not the case with Steem and Hive. Steem and Hive seemed to be printing money indefinitely and there just isn't enough demand. Leo on the other hand is pretty smart. The wrapped Leo allows it to be traded more easily on other networks and Leo is creating other products that should drive demand for the coin and that is probably why Leo is worth more than Steem and Hive on a per coin basis.

If I had to take a guess from my experience, I would say that 90% of the crypto market will fail because many of the projects are redundant and the market doesn't have room for more than one of those products in the long run. Just like nobody wants to use the second best social network or search engine. In some places there will be room for competition.

Such as the coins that will be used for remittance. There could possibly be two players in that market or more. Just like there is Western Union and Moneygram in the United States, but who uses Yahoo to search and who uses MySpace as a social network?

This fits in the broader theme of centralization vs decentralization. In some markets there are only one or two players and in some market there are thousands and there always will be thousands. So when you invest in a market its best to try to make a determination of what the state of competition will look like.

Posted Using LeoFinance ^Beta