I've been interested in cryptocurrencies on-and-off since Wired started publishing stories about it in the early 2010s. I wasn't aware of Satoshi's white paper or the culture of meeting up in the physical world to exchange cash or gold for bits and bytes. After the market matured I had a little "fun" with bitcoin, but after getting burned by MtGox I lost interest for a while.
About a year later, a colleague mentioned that NeuCoin was doing a coin offering, and I read their white paper and thought it had an interesting premise. You do some kind of physical "work" in the real world (listen to music or play a game) to earn the coins, and then use them to tip musicians or artists or anyone else. More importantly, transaction times were quick and fees were low. The other big selling point was that it used Proof-of-Stake minting instead of Proof-of-Work mining to reward users for keeping the network secure. That's when I realized why I wanted a piece of NeuCoin and had lost interest in Bitcoin. . . I couldn't really DO anything with it. With BTC, you buy it and then wait to see what happens to the price. There isn't much else an individual can do to affect the price or utility of it. If I want to mint NEU, I run an app on this machine, sitting on a desk in my home office, powered by the solar array on my roof:
To mine BTC, you now need something more like this, most likely powered by prehistoric rocks:
And even then it's not particularly lucrative or. . . fun! Once you have the bitcoin, it doesn't make you any more likely to get more bitcoin. There's no accumulation of earning power, there's no compounding interest, there's a just a mark in a ledger that allows you to exchange it for something else. Don't get me wrong, BTC is absolutely necessary now, but mostly as the gateway into the more interesting cryptocurrencies that have tangible applications. And to state the obvious, STEEM is FUN! Even if I don't earn another STEEM cent, I've already learned how to write markdown, host images, and take marginally better pictures. I'm enjoying the process, regardless of the outcome.
Am I wrong? I would guess the #steemit community is more interested in STEEM than BTC at this point, but I'm curious as to whether or not people still find bitcoin-specific projects interesting enough to pursue, please let me know if there's anyone out there with a fun side-hustle in any other cryptocurrencies!