Steem Dollars to Paper Dollars
I was thinking about this problem last night.
At some point in the future I might attempt to convert steem from my cyber wallet to paper dollars. I would then use the paper dollars to pay bills.
To help me visualize this process I went out and borrowed a paper hundred dollar bill.
I took its photo and made the following graphic.
As I understand, there is currently over 250 million steem in this world. For me to trade my steem for dollars, there must be a huge number of people with green paper in their leather wallets who value steem more than their paper currency.
This is the basic economic challenge that we all face.
The value of our work isn't found in ourselves. The value of our work is found in other people. It is found in the market at large.
I checked the exchanges. It said that Steem hit a low of $1.72 today showing that people with cash are skeptical of steem.
As we play the SteemIt game, steemians should look at the platform and think about the way people with cash value what is going on in this cyber community.
If the market does not see this platform as valuable, what things can we do to make it valuable?
I have opinions on this subject. However, my experience in life is that people are usually better off asking questions than reading opinions; so I decided to stop this post with the question.
In order for me to convert steem to dollars there must be people wanting to convert dollars to steem. What are the things about this platform that would inspire people to convert dollars to steem?
Dollars can buy you Steem Power, and Steem Power can give you very lucrative voting clout. That's what should inspire people to convert dollars to Steem. However I've personally found that explaining Steemit to other people is as difficult as trying to explain Bitcoin or Ethereum was to other people in the early days. I think it will take a few years :)
I find that Steem is easier to explain than Bitcoin. Quite frankly, I think Steem is the ideal tool for introducing people to cybercurrency as it involves a game of curating posts for profit.
Like many new-steemians, I am set on building my steem wallet organically. I am still a few months away from my upvote being worth a penny.
As you mentioned it is still difficult to jiggle a hundred dollar bill out of person's hand to get them to buy steem. I am a case example. I know that my lack of Steem Power means that the upvote I dropped on your wonderful content is less than the rounding error, but that knowledge isn't enough to jiggle the hundred dollar bill I borrowed out of my hand.
Thanks for the upvote! And give @dustsweeper a visit. It's a bot that sweeps up the "dust" votes (ie less than $0.01 - which would otherwise be discounted) and bundles them together so they are worth something.
I think you're right to call Steemit a "game" - that probably makes more sense to people.
In a way this is like a micro-patreon in the sense that you are able to reward content by owning equity. So I guess the main draw is having the clout to curate content.
I agree that a major draw of Steem at the moment is its use as a tool to curate content on SteemIt.
Of course, people can curate without buying steem.
A wallet full of Steem Power increases the influence of one's curation.
SteemIt pays people for curation. Even the curators will arrive at a point when they want to power down and trade some of their Steem Power for cash.
Your suggestion of using Steem to reward or pay for content creation is even more interesting. The upvote of a new account is worth about 0.0005 Steem. That is not sufficient money to create content.
In this case Steem is a currency used in a transaction to reward content creators.
In this scenario, a person buys steem and gives it to the creator. The content creator is likely to quickly sell the steem to pay expenses. Steem is held for the duration of the full transaction.
In this case the value of steem is simply based on one's willingness to use it as a form of currency. The same rules apply to all forms of currency including bitcoin and fiat currencies like the US dollars.
PS: I would like to see steem used as a direct mechanism for rewarding content outside in the web at large.
"I agree that a major draw of Steem at the moment is its use as a tool to curate content on SteemIt.
Of course, people can curate without buying steem.
A wallet full of Steem Power increases the influence of one's curation."
Precisely. Which is what I mean by "clout."
"SteemIt pays people for curation. Even the curators will arrive at a point when they want to power down and trade some of their Steem Power for cash."
Speaking for myself, I don't intend to ever liquidate my SP. I do currently have it set up to pay me half-and-half SP and SD. I have accumulated about $5 worth of SD, so I think that I've probably accumulated a corresponding amount of SP. Now, I probably will cash out my SD at some point, but I don't intend to touch my SP. I want to continue to let that accumulate clout for me while I take my SD and invest it elsewhere (most likely, other cryptos).
"Your suggestion of using Steem to reward or pay for content creation is even more interesting. The upvote of a new account is worth about 0.0005 Steem. That is not sufficient money to create content.
In this case Steem is a currency used in a transaction to reward content creators.
In this scenario, a person buys steem and gives it to the creator. The content creator is likely to quickly sell the steem to pay expenses. Steem is held for the duration of the full transaction.
In this case the value of steem is simply based on one's willingness to use it as a form of currency. The same rules apply to all forms of currency including bitcoin and fiat currencies like the US dollars."
Yes. An extremely convenient way to compensate people for their work in direct, concrete amounts.
"PS: I would like to see steem used as a direct mechanism for rewarding content outside in the web at large."
I was very excited about Reddcoin because that is precisely what it is attempting to do. However, I'm not seeing them integrate into social media very effectively. Steemit already has its own family of platforms, and I don't see why they couldn't take that and develop their API in such a way that it could integrate into other platforms, assuming the creator in question was set up to receive it.