The steemit account as a tiny enterprise

You may have not realized that yet, but once you opened your Steemit account, you became an entrepreneur. Congratulations!

This is something I tell my children every once in a while: "Your daddy likes to learn things the hard way, but you don't have to. You can learn from my experience". Of course, being my children, they seldom take this advice.

Yet I hope that this post can, on the same principle, save some time for those of you who still try to figure out what Steemit is all about. It took me the entire eight months or so that I've been writing here to figure out what I am going to share with you now.

So let me start with the basics. What you may have noticed by now, or at least was told by whoever recommended on Steemit to you: You post in your blog, people upvote your post, and you get rewards. Another way you get rewards, is by upvoting others. So this is the basic idea, but in fact, things are a bit more complicated.

You may have noticed by now, that when you submit a new post, you have to choose which part of the rewards on your post (both yours and that of curators), will be in Steem Power. It may be 50% or all of it, while if you choose 50%, the other half will be in Steem and SBD. The Steem economy actually have two liquid currencies: Steem and Steem-backed-Dollars (SBD). Maybe you noticed that the text besides your SBD balance says that an SBD is a token worth about one US dollar but this is not exactly so. SBD are liquid and can be traded on the crypto exchanges, and as I write this post 1SBD = ~ $2 ( @ned, I think it's a good idea to change the text in the wallet page to clarify that). But the point is that some of your rewards come in the form of liquid currency that you can exchange for Bitcoins for example, and the other part as SP or Steem Power, which is something else.

Have a look at the snapshot of my wallet page (and yes, this was taken at 5:45 am. I am an early bird). At the bottom, you can see my estimated account value, and if you look at my SP and SBD balances ( I keep my Steem balance at 0, as I will explain in a minute ), it is not hard to do the math and see that most of my account value comes from SP and only few tens of dollars (about $70 in this case) is liquid SBD. I had a little more than 100SBD until not long ago, but I used some of it, which is what it is made for, after all.

Why is my Steem balance always 0? Because I make sure to power up, that is to convert to SP, all my Steem. Now this is the key point here, Yes, you can refrain from powering up completely, leaving all the Steem portion of your rewards as Steem, and have a greater liquid income, and I know many Steemians do exactly that. But, especially if you are new to Steemit, and you want to get some real value out of it reasonably fast, that would be the wrong way to go.

To understand why, you have to understand that your amount of SP determines your internal worth in the Steem economy because the more SP you have, the more each of your upvotes is worth. Thus, you may look at your Steem account as a tiny enterprise, that is worth is equal to the value of your SP. Your SP represents your productive assets, and any entrepreneur will tell you that in order for your enterprise to succeed, you have to make sure that for quite a long time after it was started, as much of its profits as possible will be invested back into its intrinsic growth.

So this is how I learned to look at my Steem account: It's a tiny enterprise, worth currently about two thousands US dollars, which makes a tiny little income of few dollars a month in SBD. Now some "real" entrepreneurs may laugh at these numbers, but I am sure the better of them will not, and for two reasons. The first one is that it is going to grow dramatically. I am quite confident of that. Of course, you can never know for sure, but I strongly believe that investing in Steemit at this point is like how Forest Gump invested in "that fruit company". And the second, and IMO more important reason , is that it is truly amazing that you can have such a tiny enterprise that actually works. It goes to show what happens when you take down all the overhead of banks and real estate ownership or rental and so on.

I have a relative who is a geologist. An expert on thermal water search. He once told me that someone who wanted to hire him , asked him what does he need in order to do the work, and his reply was, "A desk and a telephone". I think we are heading toward an era where this may be the answer of many people. When robots and AI will take over all the jobs that just anyone can do, everyone will have to harness their own human assets to make a living. Writing in Steemit is a wonderful example of how this may work. If you're still wondering if this whole thing is real and viable, so let me tell you this: I still have my doubts too, and I don't plan to leave my day job any time soon. But I am more and moe confident every day about Steemit, and I say, that this is really up to us, and on weather enough of us will learn to look at our Steemit accounts as small enterprises that can scale from tiny sprouts to a large and prosperous forest