Just a couple of shower thoughts that I was having about crypto in general. Apologies for the unstructured nature of this post.
Just to get this out of the way, I love crypto, I have decent holdings in it and I managed to get in about 2 years ago, so this is not a sour grapes post.
So, my circle of friends are mostly non-technical and non-scientific. They all view crypto either suspiciously or as a way to "get rich quick". Very few view at as an asset or more importantly, as a currency. Things like the recent NEM theft don't help the first case, and people getting severely burnt in the recent falls don't help the second.
Anyway, then I got to thinking that the principal problem facing crypto at the moment, is that most people don't have incoming income or sales in crypto. This applies to investors as well as the general population. For instance, myself, I had holdings in crytpo that were bought a while ago with fiat or mined. However, I don't get paid in crypto and unless I invest with fiat the balances will essentially remain constant. I would wager that my case is quite a common one (please correct me if I am wrong). Thus, I am incredibly hesitant to spend any crypto, as I don't know when I will recover it! This further adds to the problem, because if no one is spending, no one is receiving. So, most of the crypto gets locked into playing games on the exchanges.
I had a moment of this when I went to see what the Cryptokitties craze was all about (and Cryptocelebs). I went to buy a couple of kitties. The price was super low, around 6 or so USD, which I would not normally hesitate over. However, this was in ETH, I was incredibly reluctant. Further, to keep playing you need to make ETH transactions which will also cost ETH. Again, I reiterate, the problem is not the actual money in fiat, but the fact that you are spending a resource that you are not likely to regain from a income source.
I know that you can just exchange fiat to crypto easily. This doesn't address the real problem, which is that we want the crypto to replace fiat, and to do that there must be a way to earn or have the crypto move around easily. So platforms like Steemit are great way to begin this revolution. As there is a source of income that completely gets around the fiat exchange problem.
I have no doubt that greater minds than I have thought about this problem, and I have no doubt that this is probably the 1 billionth post on this topic. I am curious if there are other platforms that also do what Steemit does, ie. pay directly in crypto for doing "stuff" or work?