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RE: HF21: What Makes Steem Valuable?
Funny, I was leaving this comment at the same time you posted yours. I agree with you. SMTs and the work you're doing with Steem Engine may have been an important piece of this system's success from the beginning. Without it, there's no experimentation or growth. That's certainly one of the stories we were sold early on. The downside of that story is it may mean the STEEM token itself has no real value other than serving as one example among many of what may not actually work well economically compared to other cryptocurrencies.
Maybe cryptocurrencies, like healthy life, need to reproduce. I explored that a bit in this Twitter thread.
That doesn't meant that STEEM has no real value! STEEM is the token that powers the platform. It was so much easier to build Steem Monsters on the Steem platform than any other blockchain platform I know of, and to be able to do that we need to have a significant amount of SP available to make sure all of our players have enough RC to play. SP is our fee for building on the platform and the bigger we grow, the more we will need.
Appics wants to create their "proof of brain" content platform - they can do it on Steem where (in theory) it will be just filling out a form and hitting submit or they can do it on a general purpose platform where they have to build the whole thing from scratch. Many will choose Steem, and they will all need enough SP to allow their userbase to use the platform and receive their rewards.
We already see there is demand for this type of product (appics, VIT, scorum, etc). This is how STEEM can be big. This will sell to investors and speculators.
Thanks Matt. That's a really helpful bit of optimism and encouragement. :)
If we had more successful examples like Steemmonsters, I'd fully share your enthusiasm about the great potential here. I've championed it for three years now (as of today, my accounts is three years old) and unfortunately feel like I was selling an idea which never materialized. Yours is one of the few examples. Appics was stuck waiting for SMTs and hasn't been able to move forward much (prior to Steem Engine), VIT has it's own troubles and forked the code anyway, so that won't help the STEEM token. (I didn't realize they had pivoted their whole company away from adult content). I'm not a big fan of sports anymore (even though I was a college athlete), but I do see a lot of potential there for sure. I just don't see how that will necessarily help the STEEM price if it becomes easier for people to just spin up their own chain as DTube just announced.
That is true, when the cost outweighs the convenience of building on a blockchain, whether that is Ethereum or Steem, building a sovereign blockchain becomes the natural choice.
A lot of blockchains are indirectly gunning for Steem's job. Ethereum is soon getting Akasha, but right now it already has Loom which created DelegateCall as a sample site to display the capability to build Steem on Loom. Then Cosmos is another way to do it effectively, and some social sites are already being built on it.
Ethereum keeps getting abandoned for sovereign blockchain roadmaps and if Steem was expensive for businesses to build on, why not fork?
There is a clear issue here, which is that blockchains and their participants have conflicting interests. Coins/tokens need to have a utility, but at the same time it seems in crypto that coins and tokens can become more expensive than the value they provide to the user, so the user starts fresh.