Have you seen the price of steem lately. It is brutal and only short away from the all time low around $0.20. Granted we have a lot more coins today, so our market cap is still a bit higher than at that time.
Should we not do something to make steem value grow like our users and content keeps growing? I see that the steemit team has done a lot to make things better, but I think lately the improvement have done little for the price.
I have just the idea to make the price go up again: Bounties
Please read and provide some feedback. To show you how it works, I am putting a $200 bounty behind this idea for the comments that give the best feedback. 70% of that payout will be decided by me and the rest by the amount of votes the comment generates in SBD. If anyone wants to support this idea by adding to this bounty send SBD or STEEM to my account with the comment "bounty". I will add this to the bounty and let you decide how to distribute your part of the bounty. If you don't trust me and want an escrow or want to sent the money yourself, let me know and we will find a way. The bounty will be paid out some time after one week from now on Tuesday Oct-18 at 23:59 please also read my original post how bounties could work: https://steemit.com/steemit/@knircky/the-potential-of-bounties-an-improvement-proposal-for-steem-to-double-its-value
The problem with the steemit eco system: Constant downward price pressure
Steem has solved a key problem of the internet by revolutionizing how to monetize content. This is done by diluting the existing ecosystem and given the value that is diluted to content creators, curators and witnesses via printing of new money constantly. This is a genius solution, however it creates a bit of downward price pressure, because every day currency is floated on the market. This is required because we need to reward content creators and since the business model is to not use annoying ads or subscription the dilution is necessary. It does however creates this weird dynamic with the price. In addition the constant printing of money creates a natural inflation that simply just supports this downward trend.
The solution: Give people a true reason to buy, invest and join
We need a way for outside money to join the eco system without advertisements, subscriptions or dilution. We can do this by allowing, not forcing, users to put values behind topics and questions allowing them to reward content creators directly and in addition to the existing reward structure we have. This can be done with bounties. A bounty on a post puts value behind it, which users that will comment on it will receive. The distribution of the bounties is bound by time and votes commentators receive from users. The payout distribution of accounts that have contributed to the bounty will be of higher weight so that people who contributed to the bounty also get to decides who has come up with the best content. This works perfectly if you have a question or want anyone to find an answer for you. Just ask the question and put a bounty on it. Now the world will compete to answer the question for you. The bigger the bounty the more effort will be spend on the answer.
Bounties can be a great marketing tool
Bounties can also be put behind certain hashtags. In that case the payout of the bounty does not go to comments but to the top level post that carry the hashtag. Consequently this can be used to incent certain topics in the steemit community. For instance if you think there are too many "cat" topics on steem and you want to see more content about dogs you could sent some money to the "dog" bounty and everyone that writes about dogs now competes for votes in general and your vote in particular since your vote will have special weight when the bounty is distributed.
Bounties can be crowdsourced
Anybody can sent money to any topic or post, which means that many people can crowdfund a topic or question and thus the people looking to promote a topic, for an answer to a question or solution to a problem can work together for better results.
Bounties will bring new users
Bounties will form a new reason for people to join the site. Before the only way to make money as a new users was to write content that other people like. Some people don't want to blog or post stuff in general as a way to make money. But what if someone wrote a question that you have the perfect answer to? Now there is a reason to sign up and collect the bounty? What if you had a specific question that was worth money to you if the answer was good. Now there is a reason to join, ask your question and put up that bounty.
Bounties will increase the price and bring new money into the eco system
Bounties provide a new way to bring money into the steem economy. If you want to put up a bounty you will have to buy into the steem ecosystem. This could be made simple with the existing blocktrade rail so that even bitcoin users could contribute if they are no user yet. This is great because people leveraging bounties will buy something with steem or SBD that is valuable to them. This is much better than existing monetizations that exist on the internet (ads and subsriptions) and much more direct than investing. If bounties become a thing this will create new demand for steem in general and also provide a way to pay content creators without the need to dilute the stakeholders. This I believe is the most important economic aspect, because longterm we need a way to bring outside money into the ecosystem in order to grow it (without cutting into its value by dilution).
Of course the functionality still has to be built. I am hoping to bring some awareness to this topic with this post and the bounty I am putting up personally. I believe in steem and the power of the steemit team behind it, but I think the efforts that have been spend lately could be invested more effectively. I think with bounties steem would be unstoppable.
I have written a more comprehensive post about bounties and how I envision them here: https://steemit.com/steemit/@knircky/the-potential-of-bounties-an-improvement-proposal-for-steem-to-double-its-value
Please also give it a read, but provide your comments here, so I can give you the bounty.
Thank you all for reading and giving me feedback and have fun chasing after the $200 bounty, heck maybe some people will chime in and make it even bigger.
Please also don't forget to vote and follow. I follow back and am an active voter.