image from pixabay

The IDEA of decentralized businesses, is quite attractive

but in reality, it is painfully slow and seems unlikely to hold up to the pace that centralized businesses can move.

If you are building a currency, especially one that the governments of the world will not like it makes a lot of sense to have it spread about on many computers with no clear leaders to attack or prosecute. It works as the goals are pretty simple. Mining the tokens and distributing them is a pretty easy task. However, as soon as things quit scaling and business decisions need to be made on how to adjust the product, the problems begin. We can see this happening with Bitcoin and it's many, many forks. The silly antics of Roger Ver and the Bitcoin OGs.

Getting large groups of people without leaders to agree on a direction is like trying to herd cats or people. :) In most businesses, there is a small group of leaders who make the decisions and hand out directives and incentives to those who will help them meet defined goals. Those leaders can adjust the goals and directives to meet changing market conditions. Some within the organization may disagree, but it is always clear who is going to make the decision and those with differing opinions have to choose to either leave the company or get on board with the current direction.

In the case of rewarding content, there are many decisions to be made, While we also have a currency and a blockchain to manage, there are additional variables as well; how the rewards work, what to do about illegal activities, target markets, branding, upgrades to applications, how flagging should work, which coding changes will reach the blockchain and many many more.

The solution to those challenges regarding the Steem blockchain is SMTs. This solution will allow many products to make these decisions in different ways and see which ones are attractive and perhaps profitable. After all this time, I am still not entirely clear on how that ads value to the Steem currency. What it does achieve are smaller groups with Investors or Leaders to make decisions and develop different types of products that may favor different types of Content or other use cases. Each SMT can have different protocols on how they distribute their tokens, which facilitates different reward systems and values.

Rewarding Content Creators

Rewarding Content Creators is a difficult task that several companies have tried to take on, but eventually, most sites that try to reward content find that people just don't take money out of their wallet and hand it to another in exchange for reading a blog or listening to song, etc. Once voting power has monetary value, that is exactly what we are doing, it is a complex tipping system, but most have realized there is a monetary value in our votes and so voting for anyone else is essentially taking money out of your own pocket and handing it to someone else. How many posts here would you actually pay to read? In effect that is what we do when we vote for someone else's content. It is not a surprise to me that we are struggling with rewarding quality content and it is a problem we may not solve.

There is no question Steem has taken on a difficult task in a new economy, (crypto) and there are many times I wonder what on Earth I am thinking to spend so much time and energy on such a difficult model in a difficult environment. I can no longer claim to be rational when it comes to Steem though. I enjoy the community, I love the ideals, and I have put too much time in to walk away.

As An Investment

However, I am not at all sure that my investment here will grow. I watch as the bear market and sell pressure eats away at any monetary value my time here has created, and I get a little frustrated. DPOS ensures that skill sets or successful business ideas will hold no place in the near future as our large stakeholders are mostly miners and coin stackers vs. people who know how to build businesses. Many have an idea that large investors should get paid first, instead of putting in time and money to get money out later. My hope is SMTs and applications, may bring in more business minded people. I think the financial success of Steem currently is very much tied to the entire cryptocurrency market and hoping for pumps.

Benefits

We are providing a place for content creators to get rewarded though, and although it is awkward, I think many are making more here than they could possibly make elsewhere.

Although there are those who still flag over disagreement, we do allow for different viewpoints and unpopular opinions to be voiced and discussed.

I am most grateful for the education in cryptocurrency, and I do believe that P2P transactions will change the future of how we transact with each other financially, but it will likely go slowly and take time for the way we think about money and purchases to be a visible change.

The experiment has been amazing to watch and unfolded so differently than what I would have expected. Human behavior has always been of great interest to me and watching this community has given me a new appreciation of the challenges of Freedom. While we all have our own thoughts and ideas on how this should work, every single person here impacts every other person, the reward pool, the community and our futures. It's an interesting challenge.

I have no idea what this post is about...
@whatsup