Two weeks ago I wrote a post/rant about the upcoming hardfork and got a few unfollows for it. That is okay, I will recover. Now we are 14 days out...
I am actually not in much of a rantish mood so I don't think this will satisfy those looking for some drama, but who knows, perhaps someone will read this and get something out of it - perhaps I will since it is a freewrite like most of my posts and therefore, I have no idea where it will lead either.
What I do know is that today I was talking with one of my onboards from over a year and a half ago, a person who never posted and while interested at first, couldn't find the space in his life to participate - and today he was asking more about it, asking about investments into crypto, talking about watching The great hack and questioning the way things currently are in this world we have created.
He and I have been friends for about 13 years now and when we talk we can speak openly and honestly without fear of ridicule -it is refreshing. He also doesn't mind putting his two cents in, questioning my thinking and trying to understand, even if he doesn't get it all.
I find it hard to speak about Steem to people in the non-Steem world because I have spent so much time on Steem, thinking Steem, living Steem that I am not sure where to focus the conversation as there are so many things to consider, so many things happening. This is a problem that the applications should be aiming to sort out and hopefully with the shift from Steem being contributor-centric to owner/user centric, they can focus on building the user experience, without having to worry about the issues of investor considerations.
It was always going to be a rough start to lump everyone into the same open space and have them build their experience themselves as, people have different lives they live, and desires to be filled. While it may be great to build Steem to be "fair", it is an impossibility because of the base starting point - none of us are starting from scratch.
This isn't just a comment on our economic position, it is also our background, culture, skillset, access to resources, education, intelligence, personality, willingness, energy levels - you know - everything that affects our experience and influences the decisions we make. However, each of us can affect our future outcomes through our behaviors at this moment, the next moment and the one after that.
This upcoming potential hardfork will be the 21st since the beginning of the Steem blockchain and unless cataclysmal in its effect, will not be the last the Steem blockchain or its users will face. What an investor in Steem needs to get comfortable with is that the type of investment and the return it provides is a variable and always will be - something the earners need to face also. It isn't easy to face uncertainty and once someone holds something, they do not want to open it up to risk. As my friend said today;
People like something tangible in their hand
This is actually a hurdle for cryptocurrencies because so many of the people compare it to cash and, cash they can hold. This sets up the illusion that they own that money, even though they have no control over the money itself, only what they purchase with it. The funny thing is that while something tangible like cash feels tangible, real crypto by design is actually more real in terms of ownership as whoever holds the keys, owns it.
The general public do not see digital money as being anything more than zeros and ones, even though that is all fiat actually is these days as most of what is out there, does not and will not ever exist physically. The other thing that they don't understand is that someone can own digital real estate in the same way that one can own land or gold, with the difference being it is not subject to the limitations of physical things.
I have posited that if all the Jewish people in Germany had their assets in digital forms that traveled like crypto does, most would have left Europe before the real persecution began. I would also say that if we all had ownership of our wealth and it was highly mobile, governments would have to work much harder to encourage us to spend our money locally, instead of moving to greener pastures. Mobility is a resource, and immobility is a detriment.
Are you mobile?
Would you continue living where you are living if you could pick up every bit of value you own as well as the income you regularly get and move to a nicer area? How much of what you own is transportable to that degree? Probably not much, unless you are a digital nomad with the ability to earn on the go.
What I think has to eventually happen is that we as participants in this world will be forced to reimagine value and economy and shift away from the models of the past and create something altogether new. With the growing utilization of AI and automation, the shrinking number of jobs, the decrease in skill need and diversity and more people unable to participate in earnings and the increasing shift of wealth to the point, many of the systems are going to systematically fail.
Remember, failure is inherent in the design of the economy, otherwise we wouldn't keep crashing every decade or so. And due to the way business and bank have commandeered to own most of the assets, these failures are going to continue. When was the last time banks bailed out consumers for their mismanagement of personal funds? Perhaps taxpayers should have charged credit card interest rates on the bank bailouts of 2008.
Own to use
I think that with the upcoming global economic failure, more people are going to be exploring ways to secure their wealth and while many are going to move into Bitcoin, BTC itself doesn't have the mobility of many of the cryptos and is not the kind of blockchain to handle something like fast and free transactions at high volume. This will be up to others.
I also think that Steem investors are going to have to rein in their earning potentials on RCs as while there is a very high possibility for them, the first order of business will not be to earn on the delegation of Resource Credits, it will be to use them to empower new users to be able to post and interact as much as they want, to support applications to bring on the masses to earn distributed tokens and encourage the smoothest transition from a world of renter, to owner.
Light accounts would go a long way to easing this process as will the coming delegation pools, but I believe the investors are going to have to be patient. However, once it all starts to come together, once the mindset of the individual translates into a paradigm shift for the masses toward ownership models, real value starts getting generated.
At the moment the crypto market is tiny
The market cap of all crypto assets is around 290 billion dollars and while a lot more than you or I are likely to see in our lifetime, is a drop in the ocean of zeros and ones.
Yes, a staggering 5.9 trillion dollars, but still only 1/4 of the US debt. Remember that in order to have debt, someone must have spent something somewhere. Also note that BlackRock took in 264 billion of new investment in 10 months and increased their funds by less than 5%. Pretty amazing.
Just think what happens if they choose to diversify a percent or two into crypto
And I believe they will increasingly do so because more and more their customers are going to demand it and, they are going to want a piece of the investment opportunity that has massive upside potentials. They don't need to believe in it, they just have to be able to sell it and, investment companies are very good at selling opportunities - real or imagined - to create a self-fulfilling prophecy. Of course, they take a bite out of the profit apple too as well as draw in profits from the investments that people purchase and the interest people pay on their loans. They have their own economic cycle going on and, it makes continually increasing profits, but they come from someone somewhere.
Users pay, owners earn.
Will people wake up to this fact and recognize that in order to balance the economic books, users have to also be owners of their experience? I think some are and I think that Steem is well positioned to attract the early adopters of the new economy yet, even many on Steem struggle with the concepts of ownership over merely earning. But, it seems more and more are slowly building their knowledge banks.
Investment is hard when one doesn't even have the vocabulary to speak about it and finance isn't a language well taught to the masses, but it is learnable through participation in the economic conversation.
Own your words.
Has a nice ring to it, doesn't it?
Taraz
[ a Steem original ]