How can you contribute to STEEM and why should you care?

So today I am going to write something about a bit more of a "chill" post, because I currently lack the time to write anything more elaborate. I am right now laying in a hotel bed after a whole day of listening to fusion related presentations and I am quite exhausted but I felt an obligation. I felt I needed to make a contribution not only to my fans, but also to the community as a whole in these troubling times where all the cryptos are tanking and STEEM is following suit. I dont have any concrete contribution to STEEM in the sense that I am no blockchain expert who can make it do wonders. At the end of the day, I think STEEM is an extremely good product with a huge potential as it provides many things that a consistent user base needs. I will only mention two I think for me are the most important but that does not mean STEEM does not have many more.

The first important aspect of STEEM that is extremely rare in the crypto-space is free transactions. Ever since BTCs price started to rise in the first bull runs in the early 2010s no one really wanted to use it as a payment system. Everyone heard of someone who bought huge amounts of BTC when it was worth only a few cents and by the huge growth of the cryptocurrency market was a self-made millionaire. So instead of using it as a world-wide peer-to-peer transaction system as it was first intended as, people used it as a store of value. This became only more pronounced during the amazing 2017 bull run when the fees for transactions were so high you payed a couple of euros for every transaction. This meant people were unwilling to pay for anything with BTC because it meant they were losing huge amounts of money by doing this. This last bull run destroyed any semblance of usability that BTC had before the bull run. BTC will never again be used as a payment system. This in itself is not problematic, but this means that BTC by itself does not have any use case anymore. It is purely a store of value like gold.

Similarly ETH brough smart contracts and token creation to the table on which also STEEM is built. But again, gas prices for ETH transactions are quite ridicoulus especially taking possible future prices of ETH into account. This made games based on the ETH blockchain completely unplayable. Also other dApps on the ETH blockchain do not make much sense when you take the price of transactions into account. And here now comes STEEM. STEEM offers completely free transactions and also offers quite easy dApp creation (not that I should know). At the same time it also promises easy token creation in the next couple of quarters. Can anyone tell me why one would use the ETH technology if you can simply use the STEEM technology. I am honestly asking because I dont know. For me it seems that STEEM can serve as an excelent tool for future dApp based start-ups with the above mentioned properties.

The second reason is more community based. And I mean that in the literal sense of the word. STEEM is to my best knowledge the only application of a blockchain technology where people who actively attempt to create content and develop a community are also actively rewarded for it. Gone are the days where people have their content demonitized because of some centralized authority who has zero contact with the user base. On STEEM the community rewards the users of the community for their contribution to the community. Lots of community in that sentence but it is true. Sure, this aspect of the platform has its problems like self-voting and usage of bid-bots, but the underlying idea is very good. The execution can most probably be improved still.

The perfect storm of these two reasons and also various others create favorable conditions to create such good communities, start-ups, dApps or however you want to call them like @utopian-io and @steemmonsters. Of there are many many others but I want to point these two out because I think their business models are simply superb and should be used as a model for future STEEM related bussiness.

You might have heard some rumors that @utopian-io might be leaving STEEM behind, but this was clarified to be false, and they are dedicated to stay with STEEM and even build upon their relationship with the STEEM blockchain. Now let that sink in. Wildly successful businesses like @utopian-io and @steemmonsters are still sticking with STEEM despite the decline in price. So what should YOU do in regards to STEEM. This with the above stated reasons make the STEEM blockchain extremely important in the cryptocurrency space. If these businesses are staying, so should you.

So how can you and I contribute to the STEEM blockchain. Well I dont know about you, but I intend to contribute with bringing the best possible content onto Steemit. This means I intend to write about things that interest me and I will build a community of friends who surround me and who enhance my stay here. Payouts are low, but dont let this be a discouragement. The foundations of STEEM are solid. The price will go up. We are still early adopters!