Wow! Thats a great news.
The underlying purpose of any social media platform should be to facilitate the ease of connectivity with strangers. I personally feel that the platform could be doing a better job in this regard. Nevertheless, I am excited for the future of the Steemit platform and I am looking forward to see if it can really challenge the established social media platforms of today.
Social media is a solid investment because of the popularity. I actually had the idea for YouTube long before it was created. What stopped me is too many people telling me it was the stupidest idea that they ever heard of. When both Facebook and YouTube went public, I didn't invest. STEEM is the next major paradigm shift for social media. We now have various apps that run on the STEEM platform like Steemit. This is a goldmine.
What many people don't realize is their quantity of crypto can easily increase by 25% annually when invested here on Steemit. They don't even have to blog. On top of that, the value of STEEM can go up fast. I've been following STEEM for a little while and I'm convinced that we are seeing a switch from market pressure to social media pressure.This is an influence that other cryptos won't have.
The social media pressure comes from:
Right now, there are close to 1 Million accounts. When we hit 100 Million accounts, STEEM will have become extremely scarce and price will be very high.
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Indeed I personally think the way Steemconnect works now (and by extension I think Hivemind will be similar but a more native platform function rather than external) is groundbreaking and something that should have much more recognition IMO. It's basically kind of how you get all these things at Google with one account, like you sign up and now you have Gmail, Youtube, Google+, Drive and so forth. Here it's so far restricted to different user interfaces and specialised applications, for instance DTube and Busy or Steepshot, which are modeled after Youtube and Instagram and maybe Facebook (though the new Reddit redesign basically looks like Busy to the extent that it looks like straight copied tbh). This sort of thing could be expanded on with Hivemind a great deal, and the fact that you don't have to keep signing up to more things with your email everywhere but instead just sign in with your Steemit user is very conducive for quick adoption. That said, the security better be good because you're giving away your active key all over the place and that could really backfire.
The big hurdle I see to Steem price is that there isn't all that great a reason for the regular person to buy it. You're not really that much hindered in functionality with your typical 0.1 SP with 15 SP delegation newb account, you can still post and upboat away all you like, and really the thought of putting money into a forum-like site must be pretty off putting to a lot of people. I mean do you pay money for Reddit or Facebook right now? Why the hell would you?
The other issue I noticed with these exchanges is that sometimes they let you buy Steem on there and send to places but they don't let you deposit and sell them there, which is strange tbh. Also I feel like SBD has been majorly neglected, and that one was explicitly made with the idea of commerce in mind. I personally think it was a big mistake to split the token at all, there really is no need for SBD to exist, it's futile to try to keep balancing the two when there is basically zero functionality for SBD right now.
I personally would like to see an ecommerce extension to the Steem blockchain, as in something like Bandcamp or Shopify and the like, for you to quickly make product pages for things to sell for Steem/SBD directly. That would be IMMENSELY useful, since Steem has zero transaction costs and transfers almost immediately. So having a backend that registers purchases and sends you a log while auto selling it via the market or blocktrades or something to a BTC address if you so choose, or straight to fiat currency would be fantastic wouldn't it? That would seriously muscle in on the ecommerce industry. I'll tell you right now setting up a decent working ecommerce site is stupidly expensive at times, even Shopify charges you something like 30 bucks a month for the lowest tier. That's 360 dollars a year man, stuff like this adds up and if you're not already raging with sales it's very discouraging. Having a social media platform where you can for free set up a little shop for yourself, be it old ebay style flogging off old stuff around the house or dedicated brands of stuff you've made and want to make a living from, would be hella awesome indeed. You can see Facebook kind of trying to go in that direction, but Steem already has all the infrastructure necessary, it's a cryptocurrency after all, using a currency transaction system for actual commerce should be a no brainer, right?
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I love that input. It is very thoughtful and you really know you stuff.
If you don't mind, I would like to change your mind on the "no need" for SBD. Remember when Tether was a serious issue and could potentially pull the rug out from under cryptocurrency? SBD could potentially be a competitor for Tether. A single pegged currency is a single point of failure. This is cryptocurrency's Achilles heel. We cannot have a failure of a single currency that could send crypto back 5 years. SBD absolutely cannot be a competitor to Tether right now, but when the Steemit user base gets to a size of hundreds of millions, and the quantity of SBD gets large enough, it can be a huge asset. It wouldn't just work for buying things on Steemit, but it could be used as a stable currency everywhere (once it becomes massive enough).
For now SBD is a major benefit for those who are working hard on this platform. The peg doesn't work because the supply is too small. The only way to create supply is to earn it from content. Investors know this and buy it up or Steemians hold onto it with the expectation that the demand and price will go up. This happens to be a major benefit for those who work hard creating content on the various STEEM aps. We get paid in the quantity of SBD not the US dollar equivalent value. This means that right now it is a really good deal for us creators. So there is really no need to attempt to get rid of this cash cow called SBD.
Here is how the economics works on SBD. Getting paid in the quantity of SBD actually floods the market with the currency. This increases supply and price falls. Once the price of SBD drops below a US dollar, Steemians switch to the 100% SP reward system and supply of new SBD drops causing a shortage and price goes up. This is the just one mechanism that fixes the price to the US Dollar. It is really amazing how popular SBD remains as the evidence of price continues to stay well above the peg.
Long story short: Don't bite the hand that feeds you, and SBD will only get better over time.
Thank you for leaving such a detailed comment. It is not that often I get some real effort in comments.
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Hi thank you! Oh I'm not averse to changing my mind, and tbh I don't know too much about SBD itself. For it to be worthwhile there needs to be a lot more functionality for it that makes it special. Know what I mean, like right now about the only real difference I see in how you would use SBD is that you can't use it to power up Steem Power. It doesn't transfer faster or allow you to do more fancy money stuff like perhaps smart contracts and the like (not yet anyway, that's something good to add isn't it?).
Yeah the peg is all over the place exactly because of this complete lack of functionality right now. So SBD behaves like your typical manipulated to all hell speculative altcoin, because Steem is the one you want for actually doing things with your account. About the only thing people use SBD for is to buy upvotes from bots.
I would rather like to see an actual 50/50 split of SP and SBD in payouts. The payout system is REALLY confusing, and it keeps on changing all the time. It seems that when the price of Steem is low (at around 1 USD) then it's something closer to 50/50 but even then not really. It's more something like 78% of the payout gets split like 60/40 or something like that. And when it's high it's worse, it's 62% of the payout gets split into 75/25 (all figures SBD/SP). It took me ages to get my head around it and really as it is not it's far too misleading to encourage goodwill among regular people. They see yay my post made a dollar, then it pays out and wtf is this why do I get something like 0.47 SBD and 0.102 SP or something, what gives man where is my dollar? Now have that happen millions of times a day and you see the completely unnecessary headache the devs created, for no reason at all. For that the payout should simply be computed to show the exact payout at this given time. If someone else upvotes and changes the payout and curation, well then re-compute it. It's the same work either way, you might as well make it calculate the way that returns an actual accurate result. I mean the payout formula tallies it up in the end anyway right? So just let that one compute the result in the meantime as well. That plus getting denied a one cent payout for a new user is also a kick in the balls. Like wow you're teasing me with this tiny little payout that I earned, and don't even give me that? Wtf?
But I'd argue that the broken status of the 50/50 vs powered up 100% is what makes SBD "popular", not that people like SBD in particular. When you're powered up, you simply do not get 100% of the earnings in SP, you get a far lower fraction than you should. I've tried it, it was horrible. You're better off getting 50/50 and then selling the SBD and powering up the Steem you get from it.
See what I mean lol, there has to be a better approach than "read the whitepaper lol it's all explained there and in this convoluted maths/programming post this one guy wrote". That's like if the Reddit or Facebook devs pointed you to their github repo to have a look over the source code and shut your fucking mouth too bad if you don't understand it.
Rule number one in any type of business: bend over backwards three times to make it as easy and frictionless as possible for your customers to want to see their money fly out of their hands. Not include lots of little annoyances and make it so convoluted that everyone needs to spend some weeks observing the system to get it.
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The argument for new user payout not amounting to much doesn't wash with me.
There is really two ways all users need to approach Steemit.
OR
Everyone here can easily make 25% or more Return On Investment. The problem is that people can't seem to understand that if they don't invest any money, then they won't get great returns. It would be like me wanting to make a killing in the stock market, but I refuse to invest any money. 25% returns of $0 invested is still $0.
The returns are really amazing here. Let's compare to the stock market. If you make 10% on the stock market, you are doing really good. Most people don't do that well and some years they will be negative. Let's compare to a physical business. 10%-20% returns are also good, but think about the massive up-front capital investment, payroll, insurance, massive overhead, and other expenses. It is tough to run a business, and at the end of the year you may have squeaked out 10%-20%.
Let's compare that to Steemit. You can easily make 25% or more with almost no overhead. All you need is a laptop and an internet connection. There is no payroll, no building to buy or rent, no materials to buy, no insurance, no utilities, no employees to hire and manage, and no sales to deal with. Even if you decide not to do any work, you can get great returns just by delegating your voting power and not do any work at all. The other benefit to Steemit is that it is scalable. Your investment can be as small or as big as you want. Imagine trying to scale a restaurant. You really are stuck with the size of the building and the building seating capacity.
Now the new user doesn't even have to want to be an investor. They can do it purely for entertainment purposes and there is no advertisements and the account is free.
I'm going to help you with understanding the reward system. I have to admit that I was confused for quite a while and did a bunch of research and still was confused. Once I understood it, it was an Ah-Ha moment for me. It is actually quite beautiful and ingenious system once you understand it. I felt compelled to make an explanation to use as an aid for helping people understand STEEM. Click this link. It explains the reward system.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@socky/steemit-rewards-breakdown-a-simplified-explanation-with-illustrations
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