I remember when Ethereum was having a surge in price the first time it landed on 3 digits and the ICO craze started occurring, so much Eth being locked up in new projects all promising big things but few ending up delivering anything. Many got lucky with Eth and made a fortune only to find they shouldn't have doubled down and see their greed take away what they had made and not able to sell when prices started hitting 4 digits and instead having the projects they had invested in bring the price back down along with the rest of the cryptomarket. What can we learn from that here on Steem?
Well, we may not be the best at discovering great content with what the current system offers, which I'm hoping will change for the better soon, but one thing we can try do better is invest in the startups that are and will be happening here. Steem has a great advantage as it already has a big community, one of the biggest in the cryptosphere and can give new projects a great boost in usage early on. This is something that many lack, if you look at Eth it was struggling to have daily users of their dapps for a long time, transaction fees sure didn't help and that's not going to get better any time soon.
I am hoping we will be able to use proof of brain better in this aspect though, and the way our platform is built where words travel fast within our system it is going to be interesting seeing how things evolve. There are quite a few projects moving from the other chains onto Steem and many new ones starting up, something I encourage my readers and anyone else stumbling upon this post is to be careful where you place your Steem. A big advantage we have is that the cost to run applications on our blockchain is fairly low, this means that many startups won't even require a direct investment but offer stake through delegation instead. I've mentioned many times in the past how much better of a way this is to invest in what you believe will be a successful project cause it will be as safe as possible while only costing you the reward pool for what you could've earned with that Steem during the period of the investment, the stake itself remains in your control at all times. Not many other chains can brag about having this opportunity.
Not only is it safer but it will also cause for more competition between similar projects, they will want to offer you more stake, better returns and keep on improving and delivering cause else it will mean you can just adjust your delegation at any time. We've already seen a few of these become quite popular such as steemhunt and now the upcoming actifit and their sale, and all this during one of the harshest bear markets Steem and their dapp ecosystem may have ever faced. It's a pretty good sign for the next ones.
We're already privileged to have these advantages and never have to risk our own stake to invest in these new start-ups, but let's aim high and be clever about not being tricked by things that seem too good to be true and riskier than need be. Let's help each other make wise decisions cause in the end we will all win together as that's how the system is built up. I believe we can do much better than the ICO's that happened with Eth and that we can save a lot of the possible damage that could be caused if we were as reckless as those investors were.
I am really looking forward to investing my stake in future projects here on Steem and trying my best to give unbiased views on what I think will be good investments to my readers. It's really exciting to me of what is yet to come as the possibilities are endless in this open environment of this ever growing and evolving technology. Let's make the most of it. :)
