I wake in the morning, checking the price of Steem to find that it has once again fluctuated significantly. I go over to the trending page to see if I can't catch any blogs by
or 
or 
(because despite having followed these guys the trending page is still the easiest way to find any of their new posts). Lo and behold, there's about to be some major changes in the Steem universe with the addition of smart media tokens, a way for Steem to be used on almost any platform.
Like much stuff in the crypto universe I just barely understand it despite having read the post by Ned, perused the whitepaper, and gone to the summary page, but from what I understand it works mostly like this:
Steem will serve as a sort of 'gold backing' for other types of crypto that are specific to a blog or subtopic on the blog. This isn't exactly new, since Ethereum apparently has a mechanism for this and I believe bitshares is essentially a similar idea. The real turning point here is that it'll be bringing the advantages of Steem to these new currencies. In other words, value will be attached to the upvotes themselves, there'll be no transaction costs (because Steem is built to take care of that within itself), and the Steem blockchain can scale way high without any problems.
The only problem right now seems to be that though the bar is (relatively) low for how tech savvy you need to be, you will still as of this moment need to interact directly with the Steem API in order to get it going. Still too much low-level shit for most of us, but it's an exciting start!
That got me to thinking about how crazy price fluctuations could be. I mean, you're talking about value being ascribed to a potentially very small community or based around one person. But, I mean, the value of any system comes down to the people at the end of the day, right? Especially with online communities.
So then what in the hell is the value of a person? Does your value fluctuate from day to day like the price of Steem? I'd like to argue that each person has an inherent value, one that it is absolute regardless of anything else. Then there's an 'external' price, one that's determined by society based on all aspects of who you are and what your status within society is.
Crazy, huh?
I think at the end of the day, as long as you have a strong inner sense of self-worth, this supersedes everything else. Despite how you might be judged people can always feel a strong aura of self-worth and are inherently drawn to it. So it's important to make sure we don't let circumstances or people effect that sense of self-worth in a negative way.
Maybe the daily fluctuations I should be checking are that sense of worth and esteem. And who knows? Maybe one day soon there'll be a Steem backed cryptocurrency that'll help me keep track.
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