Let's talk about investing on Steem.

This post has been brewing for a while, but it was catalyzed today by four posts: Hive account@abh12345's shitpost about delegations to bidbots, Hive account@tarazkp's response (and Hive account@threrealwolf's comment there), Hive account@steemitblog's post about app development resources, and Hive account@timcliff's idea to have a social media blast day.

A lot of the discussion around putting money into Steem focuses on "investors," but mostly they aren't really investors as I understand the term, they're at best speculators or lenders. People who show up, delegate to a service for a return, and in one way or another sell off their stake rewards aren't investing. People who buy Steem hoping that it will increase in value aren't investing.

An investor is someone who puts capital into a project in hopes that it will create value.

If you buy into a company, you're not just thinking "I hope the stock price will go up," you're putting that money in with the idea that the company is going to use it to create something, and that something will have value, which is reflected in the value of your share of ownership increasing, or your dividends. In that sense almost all of the investment on Steem is being done by Hive account@misterdelegation, which lends large amounts of money to startup companies, although as far as I can tell the return is completely opaque to the public. I'm very interested in information on how that works, if anyone has some.

There's more money in that than there is in bidbots.

I hope Asher didn't stop reading when I called him a shitposter, cause I think this is a key point for him. There's risk in putting money into ownership of a company rather than just lending it out, but the reward is also much, much higher. If we can create a significant equity market for building businesses on Steem, that should both attract new investors and encourage the existing ones to move their capital to somewhere that's more productive for Steem as a whole than the huge percentage that's going to vote-selling right now.

The vote-selling services themselves are some of the most successful businesses in Steem's history, and yet as far as I know only Hive account@minnowbooster has ownership available to investors. Part of this is that corporate ownership is complicated, especially for people who are focused on software development like most blockchain entrepreneurs. Part of it is that people have seen more potential profit from bootstrapping than relying on startup capital.

I think we can change that, and that's why I unexpectedly started a new project today: Hive account@forinvestors. That account aims to be an informational and social resource for entrepreneurship, both founders and investors, and help us move from a bootstrapping economy to one with structured equity investment, with all of its potential advantages.

SMTs are going to be a big deal for this, as one available class of SMTs will be ownership tokens, essentially stock certificates on the cryptographic open ledger. Hive account@buildteam is already planning one, as I understand it, and with those available it will become much easier to develop robust corporate ownership structures on Steem.

I'll be writing more about this on that account in the future.