Where Will the Value Come From? - A Glimpse Into the Future

I've seen so many discussions and posts about the future of the Steem ecosystem. People are wondering and pondering about the future of the RC (Resource Credit) system and how it will factor into the future growth of Steem as an ecosystem.

It's very interesting stuff and I'm very excited about the future with RCs.

RCs are essentially an entirely new credit system. Think of them as being similar to your voting power and upvote value on Steem.

In the beginning, upvoting on Steemit didn't give much value, even if you had a lot of Steem Power. You could move around a lot of STEEM tokens, but each token wasn't worth all that much.

As the Steem ecosystem grew and flourished and new users signed up in hopes to earn STEEM tokens as well, the value of each STEEM token went up and thus, the value of upvotes and STEEM POWER rose as well.

The value proposition took time to manifest into what it is today.

I look at RCs as having a similar trajectory - right now, they are valuable for interacting with the blockchain, but they aren't super valuable yet.

It's going to take time for RCs to manifest into a more valuable currency on this blockchain.

How exactly will they become more valuable?

Think of it this way:

The more people that are interacting with the blockchain - DApps and entrepreneurs and users - the more expensive interacting with the blockchain will become.

For individual users, this could prove to be a problem - if it costs more RCs to interact with the blockchain, who knows how much SP it could take to have enough to actually post, comment, create SMTs, etc.

But a very important part to that equation is missing - the DApps themselves will allow their users to interact with the blockchain by leveraging their own RCs (at least, this is my prediction).

Think about it, a DApp is going to have the ability to make a significant investment (by either buying STEEM and powering up, or leasing STEEM POWER from someone or some service like Blocktrades).

As a DApp grows, so will their need for more RCs. Thus, driving more value to each individual STEEM token.

When SMTs are launched, I predict that a TON of entrepreneurs are going to flock to the Steem blockchain in order to launch their own DApp.

When this happens, they're going to need RCs and thus, tons of SP will be in high demand. That's a win-win for everyone involved with this blockchain.

For now, RCs aren't extremely valuable. You want to make sure that you have at least the minimum amount to interact with the blockchain as you wish, but if you have tons of SP (anything above 3,000), then the only real way to ensure that your RCs aren't simply being wasted is to collect account creation tokens by spending your RCs as they regenerate.