Why SMT's will be better
A recent post on Reddit shows how many ICO's sold over 100,000 Eth in the past week and before you say "yeah well that's mainly why they raised those funs" then I want you to know that I am not arguing that. What I'm wondering is why are they selling it now? Ether is barely worth $100 down from $1400 at the top, why would they not have made the most of it earlier to fund their own project better? Since that's not something we are going to get an answer I wanna talk about the difference of investing in SMT's compared to the ERC-20 era.
Lately I've been fascinated by @steemhunt and the great ways they've encouraged users to curate on their platform for token distribution. A few ways you can earn hunt tokens are by posting, moderating, sharing, curating, commentating and delegating. The important aspect here though is that at no point are they asking you to invest Steem as in giving them your Steem in bulks. Why is this important? Well you see the majority of the ICO's in 2017 and 2018 have already failed, that's a lot of ether that the investors are never going to see again unless they buy back in. After you've been convinced from their ICO pitch and you make an investment, all you can do from there is hope that everything will go according to plan - often it does not and it leaves you helpless. "Well those investors have already gained a lot from the rise in Ethereum price - it's their own fault they were greedy trying to make more from new ICO's", here's the thing though, it doesn't have to be that way. Sure some investors may have gotten burned and its their own fault, sure some of them should've been happy with the profits they'd already made from ETH and should've just traded that back and forth instead - but there are smarter ways to invest and one of them will be through Steem.
On Steem you will be able to invest in projects directly with Steem Power delegation, RC delegation (probably sometime soon) and your activity directly. Not only that but you will be able to follow all of these projects on your favorite front-ends directly. Many of the already existing future SMT's are doing reports on a weekly basis and with everything being in one place it makes the whole procedure a lot more smooth. You will be able to choose your delegation investment by exact amounts depending on which one you think will do best and you will be able to change that ratio whenever you like. I know a lot of us here are already aware of this but imagine what outsiders who have had to invest their ETH directly and take a huge risk will think of being able to invest through the reward pool alone. It removes a huge risk on their side because if things don't run according to their expectations, they can just undelegate and power down if they want out and still have the tokens they've generated bound to their username to maybe find a nice surprise later in the future if they notice they made the wrong judgement of an SMT.
I'm not sure what you guys think, but although these prices are reflecting the same way around the whole ecosystem right now I am sure that they are reflecting poorly on Steem and its future potential. A huge reason for this is because traders got in, bought most coins in the top 100-500 and just left them sitting there on exchanges and when they see the price drop all over the board they may decide to either get out at a huge loss or go back into Bitcoin or Eth waiting for the next uptrend. I personally don't think many Steemians in their right mind are selling Steem at these prices cause they do not believe in its future potential. I'm going to try and make the most out of it at these times to collect more Steem, it's not the first time that traders are losing out because they were just holding coins on exchanges - steem power inflation through curation rewards or now through delegating to bid bots has given holders a giant advantage to those traders. I'm hoping that coming next bull market new investors will take more time to read into what they are buying and how they can make the most out of holding it - this is not just related to Steem as there are plenty of other proof of stake coins or those with masternodes out there costing holders on exchanges a lot of value.
It's a good thing for investors to be able to pull out their stake at any moment (and by the way, still 'earning' on that stake through inflation... Wow.) - The other side is scarier though, there's no guarantee that even though the developer holds its promises the investor won't pull away the SP suddenly. We've seen it before both steem-ua, utopian, surpassinggoogle, have temporarily or permanently lost huge chunks of SP very suddenly leaving them in doubt if they would get it back or having to explain to their projects participants why upvote values suddenly dropped. I see dstores now rewarding 'per 6 months': they will reward SP delegators only if they completed the 6 months. But what if after these 6 months all delegators undelegate? There's a huge inconsistency problem there.
I see Partiko being smart as well: they are collecting dozens of smaller delegations, making the risk of a sudden drop in delegations smaller. Another reason we need a bigger 'middle class' of SP Holders.
Anyway, just a few smaller worries that we might see solved through creative ways of rewarding, the overal concept of 'risk-free investing' is mindblowing - hopefully people will soon start to understand the huge opportunities that lie in that.
Dolphin is middle class 😂
Posted using Partiko Android
I was saying yesterday I think that a major benefit of investing into steem is that one us able to interact with the investment itself, not just hope. For me, this is a massive selling point.
The community is extremely important in this entire project. Without this community we wouldn’t be anywhere.
This is the best point steem is different from any other project including BTS and EOS. This downturn actually will benefit steem the most . So grab by both hands.
You can delegate resources to other people in EOS.
Posted using Partiko Android
I feel like 95% of the ICOs on Ethereum were just scams. They might not have been blatant scams where they ran off with the money but just random people who jumped in and raised money for something they knew nothing about. They themselves didn't even know that what they were proposing wouldn't work on Ethereum in the first place so it is understandable how they didn't at least sell out of a large part of what they raised thinking that the crypto gravy train would just keep going up or bounce back way faster.
I do agree with you that there are tons of people on the exchanges holding coins like STEEM and EOS who aren't getting any of the benefits of the projects that they could be getting. I have even told people previously that they could power up their STEEM and just set an auto voter and at least earn a little bit of rewards but they didn't do it.
I have also told other content creators that they could just link their YouTube and Instagram accounts to Share2Steem and passively have a chance to earn something but they don't do it.
In the end there is something not attractive about this system to most people.
I have powered up 9,000 SP recently but I often wonder if that money wouldn't have been better spent else where. It isn't a big enough amount to really make an influence here. Plus the idea of getting into a top 20 Witness position isn't going to happen. I have almost gotten to a point of feeling like these content creation platforms that are DPoS only make sense if somehow you can become a top witness otherwise they are too risky because the value extraction is too great to stay ahead of it otherwise.
There is saying that, change comes from within, so matter how much you tell them to invest they won't listen, but if they'd discovered by themselves this vote selling or delegating to other for rewards they would do otherwise.
9k sp seems nothing to you but it's good amount to me. Guess it all depends where we come from.
Posted using Partiko Android
Yep :)
It's something Steem Power investors can look forward to, and hopefully new money will come to follow our lead.
400-500 STEEM a month at present to run a basic witness set-up, ouch!
Yeah it's getting expensive. :(
Sure is :(
I am fully into this as I also see that Steem has more assurance for the investor as each of them can hold the ownership of their coins at their own end while delegating/leasing to the development that they want to reinvest their Steem with. This is like having a deposit in the bank while letting the bank to reinvest the money for us and getting some dividend. For this case, it is Steem that we need to buy in and we can liquidate almost instantly whenever we want. On the other hand, buying other coins like BTC, ETH, we can only speculate and hope they moon, which posts higher risk than Steem. I am buying in but also with the limited cash reserve that I had.
It should certainly be interesting to see how it develops. I think it will be revolutionary for smaller projects, but I do wonder about the scalability of this method of funding. Like if you wanted to start a company that has say even just 10 employees, I don't think delegations would be enough to cover the initial cost. A lot of companies aren't in the profit for years, and that's pretty normal.(maybe it won't be here)
It seems like even if you found an investor who's willing to put in 5 mil lets say, and you say "Hey, you can do this at a significantly reduced risk, by powering up Steem and delegating that to me" Feels like it shifts the risk to the business owner, because now you start your business, hire people, and the investor sees something shiny and pulls his delegation and now you're screwed?
I definitely think there's a balance to be struck and I'm excited to see how things play out!
I can see your point, what I think that does is encourage diversity and SP delegation caps. Still, I think delegation is going to be a huge player in the future economy with delegation as the requirement for membership access to services and products. Right now a lot of projects are trying to take a percentage of upvote rewards, and while that is one way to do it, I really think delegations are better most of the time.
At the very least, I would like to see businesses taking a cut of upvote profits as a minor player with delegation memberships as the primary means of profiting.
Thanks for the post acidyo! Resteemed!
I have been working on a business model that would be focused on using small delegation amounts such as 10 to 50 SP for membership access to certain services. I still have not figured out how I might utilize SMTs in my future business, but your post got me thinking about it.
Awesome read, man. Couldn't agree more. :)
Great post to reiterate the main value of SMT.
Delegation is more like we are partners.
We are both decided to do good.
Keep on postin
Posted using Partiko iOS
Yes i read about steemhunt and it encouraging to motivate their users by giving them coins for the engagement , and @partiko app will do the same thing approximately soon.
I said that when i talk about the founder of partiko @crypto.talk on the post below
https://steemit.com/drawing/@soufianechakrouf/dybbd8eu