Shows cliff notes:
Crypto happens fast; pressure when the price pumps.
I unintentionally get quieter when things get pumping, working.
Everyone is just guessing. I am really good at getting on the right boat, just sometimes I get there a bit early.
I don't sweep a broken economy under the carpet.
Inflation is dragging us down when it should raise us.
You're going to piss off someone being yourself.
If you had a bunch of Steem power, you could be running contest daily, giving away free money via the inflation your steem power is allocated. It is the most powerful futuristic advertising vehicle on the planet.
I've made a lot of seemingly fucked up choices to get to where I am. And if I didn't do it exactly how I did it who knows where I'd have ended up. What seemingly in the moment may seem terrible is really life saying move muthfucka you almost to the promise land, just needing to go through the swamp to get there.
But if I didnt invest in Steem, there would be no 3speak, and there would be no several other projects I'm about to launch, either. So sometimes life digs in you a little to push you in the right direction.
Additional info that's not said in the show but relevant to the topic:
Steem:
Steem is speculation drive, mostly, atm. So aside from: "Why would anyone buy Steem?" - The new EIP, if it makes content discovery better and brings in more people, does that necessarily mean a better price for Steem? Where is the value damnit?
At the core of Steem, the "intrinsic value" if you will, is resources credits (needed to do anything on Steem), voting power and influence (both for positive/or with free DVs, protector of reward pool). If I see value in Steem as an investor, it would be important to me to be able to play a role in protecting the reward pool via downvotes, because I could better defend my investment from pointless dilution via spam post. A single Steem token comes packed with all three of those things, while also being a good medium of exchange, as Steem is censorship resistance, ships in 3 seconds with no fees.
So why did I buy Steem? Speculation. Right now Steem does do a lot, Steemit has proved that. But what really gets me excited is thinking of all the possible front ends, with their own communities and token. Games will for close-knit communities and build their own economy with crypto, and so will just about every other niche will as well. Steem is scarce digital real estate. The people in this community are builders, this thing has taken orbit, and when you have as many smart minds as we have here, working towards the same goal of making Steem better, magic happens.
Inflation paid to authors is about 17 million STEEM per year. That's about 46k Steem hitting the market every day. For the price not to tank, we need people buying more then what is being sold, obviously. Note, 100% of the author rewards are not sold, but this isn't accounting inflation paid to witnesses.
If we chalk up author rewards, Steemit INC. selling of 800k a month that adds another 26kish bringing a steady 70k Steem to sell pressure each day on average. Of course, inflation goes down every year, and Steemit INC's stake isn't, and they could decide to change the amount their selling tomorrow, but that is what we have right now. I'd say most of the early adopters who were going to sell would have sold by now, a nice year + long bear market will test the strongest of hands.
All of the above happens without the need of Steem being used to curate content. SMTs can quickly fill that role, and we, as a community, should focus on driving solutions that can be built on Steem. However, Steems curation/author rewards were never meant to be the backbone of Steem value. The inflation pool for rewards is a trojan horse for ranking high in search engine results. We were (still are) a very high ranked site at one point, and you can thank that to the reward pool giving upvotes value. The reward pool is a cheat code to greatness, very genius design.
When Steem started, there wasn't a large marketing budget, and with lessons learned from Bitshares, there needed a way for Steem to go viral without it costing any money. Speculation drives investing (bitcoin, gold, etc.) and with the massive traffic came fomo of Steems possibilities. I believe if the reward pool is used right, to reward great content and that results in a higher ranking for Steem on search engines, then we can look at that 17mil Steem each year as a marketing/onboarding budget. Aside from the fact, the reward pool offers a genius way to distribute a currency (dpos being esp important here due to voting rights), it serves as a valuable way to onboard people who need to "try it before they buy it" when it comes to resource credits.
The bigger picture here is 1 billion people all needing a little bit of resource credits, spending 5-10$ to a lot themselves more posting/playing/doing rights on the steem blockchain. The bigger picture for Steem is 1 million people all buying 100-200$ worth of Steem to tip their favorite curators for as long as they wish, allocating their tiny fraction of inflation to the creators they love. The bigger picture for Steem is too big to actually picture, things get blurry, and my head starts to strain when I start pushing the limits of what Steem can do.
Distribution of Steem will always be vital, and for free is the best way to onboard people, the trade-off for free is a form of natural marketing. Without this reward pool, we would have no early speculation because we would have had no marketing budget. Dan Larmier and EOS raised 4 billion USD, ya bitshares played a role, but it was the massive viral success of Steem that attracted the investors.
Steems clever marketing ploy is our cheat code, and we should tweak the code right, so it propels us to the front of trending, not the trending on Steem, but on the internet. People come to Steem every day and produce content, content that will last on the internet forever, each little post bringing in compounding value over time. Content is priceless and will be exceedingly more valuable in our digital age.
▶️ 3Speak