The debate about whether Vesting STEEM or locked up HODL should be included in the market cap should be separated from the debate on whether "founders" coins should be counted. Conflating these two concepts can seriously misrepresent things.
Suppose that the vesting period was just 1 week? Would that change the opinion on whether or not they should be counted? Suppose it was 1 month? At what point in time do vesting tokens get "taken out of supply"?
1% of all STEEM could be on the market within 7 days.
5% of all STEEM could be on the market within a month.
50% of all STEEM could be on the market this year.
100% of all STEEM is available for BULK trades today.
Clearly vesting for 1 hour or even 20 hours counts in the supply of Bitcoin (time until new coins are transferrable).
So now we are left with drawing some kind of arbitrary line in the sand. It comes down to a "net present value" calculation.
One thing is certain, a $285K market cap and ranking at over 100 on CMC is grossly out of proportion with actual interest and capital investment in the Steem blockchain.
I am all for having some kind of sanity check on whether or not a platform's "valuation" is fair and reasonable.
You will note that coins held by the Eth Foundation are included along with coins held by Satoshi. Even the vesting stake from BitShares has been included for the past year and a half along with the "founders stake" in BitShares.
I am mostly arguing for consistency and fairness of rankings.
I agree with this. Steem's current available supply is a placeholder until we can figure out the calculation.
So we can make a better informed decision, can someone answer these questions:
What is the vesting period on Steem?
How many coins do the founders hold?
Steem held by Steemit, Inc: 14,331,475.907
https://steemit.com/@steemit -> this is the total STEEM and VESTING STEEM combined (57%).
Steem paid to employees and contractors should not be counted as founders, they are free to sell like anyone else.
Steem vesting can be viewed as a perfectly laddered / rotating 2 year CD. The "average time until maturity" is 1 year. Ie: 1% is available in 1 week and 1% takes 2 years... 50% available in 1 year.