When we begin reinvesting 200,000 Steem every 28 days in projects promising to help Steem grow through a decentralized governance system featuring budgets, proposals, and voting, we can expect the value of the Steem we hold to increase exponentially without it costing us anything in upvotes, curation, author rewards, or inflation! Will you please read the next two paragraphs because the excitement will build in seeing how easy this is to get started with?
What Do We Really Want?
Are we all hoping for Steem to make the greatest difference in the world and to get the highest return on our investment? Absolutely. How do we make that happen? We make the difference and get the ROI by increasing the value that Steem provides to everyone using it. Every action dedicated to building the value of Steem gives us what we want. A transparent budget proposal funding system designed to reinvest some of the new Steem created every day in projects that grow our community is very likely to add massive value to Steem as it has done for Dash and therefore give us what we want.
Executive Summary!
How much of a return on our investment will we get when we make about 200,000 Steem every 28 days available to any member of Steem submitting a proposal that offers to add value to our community? If the results from Dash are any indication, we may be looking at a Steem price 20 times higher than it is today within a year of adding a budget proposal system alongside smart media tokens, communities, and a mobile app.
To make the 200,000 Steem available, we can remove Steem power interest and reduce top 20 witness rewards by 50% or increase inflation by the same amount. While any suggestion of change is likely to trigger fears and quick dismissals, after further investigation, we find this change is likely to give us exactly what we are hoping to get and be worth the discomfort of trying something new. Would you read the rest of this post or the same text in the whitepaper at http://jerry.tips/steembudget because this will empower you to help us make budget proposals a reality today?
Dash Price up from $11 to $300+ in 1 Year!
Dash price increase by year.png
The digital currency Dash attracted me as an investor for my first all in cryptocurrency investment in December 2016 which purchased a Dash masternode for $11,000 at $11 per Dash. Dash’s budget proposal system is the primary reason I invested because it made it easy to see how Dash was funding its own growth and predicted a bright future because every speculative increase would increase the real value of the budget available. Learn more about Dash’s budget proposal system using these links.
See existing proposals at https://www.dashcentral.org/budget.
Learn how the budgets, proposals, and voting work at https://dashpay.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/DOC/pages/19169430/Using+Decentralized+Governance+Proposals+Voting+and+Budgets.
BitShares has a similar system with worker proposals at http://docs.bitshares.org/bitshares/user/worker.html.
Within a month of investing in Dash, I was promoting Dash in all my videos and submitting my own proposals. Within 4 months of using Dash, I had submitted 7 proposals despite having almost no other relationships in the community. The first several of my proposals failed with the fourth and fifth succeeding. Dash budget proposals gave me over 70 Dash in exchange for advertising Dash on Facebook and YouTube along with making a new series of tutorial videos which I completed before the proposal was funded. Most importantly, these proposals gave me a way to immediately add value as a new user without having to build a following, spend months hanging out in chat, setup a server, or get approval from the Dash team directly.
The Dash I was given was a small fraction of the total budget which funded many more projects like mine every month including integration with an exchange, sponsorship of YouTubers, travel to conferences, new app development, exclusive partnerships with Dash by third parties, promotion on a cryptocurrency radio show, and hundreds more projects designed to add value to Dash.
What makes all this amazing is the fact that Dash is only a small improvement over Bitcoin and now has no other feature besides budget proposals and the relationships resulting from successful proposals that give it value above another blockchain. Dash has a fraction of the transactions that Steem has and appears to have less wallets despite being older than Steem and having a market cap 10 times higher than Steem. Dash’s “instant” transactions cost a significant fee and are limited to once every 15 minutes or so while Steem and many other blockchains do nearly instant transactions all the time. According to some, Dash is not truly anonymous because the private send feature can be traced while newer cryptocurrencies offer anonymous transactions every time. Nothing about Dash is unique as newer cryptocurrencies do everything better and older cryptocurrencies have bigger followings … except the budget proposals.
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Every month 7,000 or so Dash are available in budget proposals which today is worth about 2 million dollars. Few other digital currencies, companies, or agencies anywhere make it so easy to access so much money with transparency as to how to apply and who gets funded with the purpose of reinvesting the payments into projects intended to build the community. Dash’s budget is almost completely responsible for Dash’s success because every effort in the budget proposals multiplied with everything else the Dash community was doing. How much would we benefit from adding a budget proposal system into Steem? If the results in Dash are any indication, making this one change is likely to produce our best chance at giving us what we want.
Dash Budget vs Steem Author Rewards.
New users join Steem every day and try to make a contribution via blogging. Often the projects new users develop to promote Steem add incredible value right away including meetups at universities, new app ideas, suggestions to improve Steem, and translations to languages beside English. The massive effort made by new users to get started often is usually rewarded with almost nothing while the very best get a few hundred dollars and some Steem power delegations that can be taken away at any time. A budget for project proposals that is community funded will give many talented developers and entrepreneurs the ability to contribute immediately without needing to spend six months to build a following or sending hundreds of messages begging for upvotes!
One new user’s journey with Dash and Steem shows the power of budget proposals to make effective collaborations. Max Keiser at maxkeiser.com or @keiserreport joined Steem in June 2017 making posts earning 3,344.52 Steem Blockchain Dollars or SBD along with 3,772.92 Steem paid in Steem power which is much more than most users on Steem earn in the first few months. Initial posts featured Bitcoin, Gold, and Steem. As rewards continued to build with one post earning over $1,000 at https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@keiserreport/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-fud excitement about Steem was high until …
In August 2017, @keiserreport received 2,000 Dash equal to $660,296 USD today for a Dash budget proposal at https://www.dashcentral.org/p/dash-gap. This budget proposal provided funding for a nationwide tour in the USA sponsored by Dash. Since then, @keiserreport has understandably lost enthusiasm for Steem. Most new posts by @keiserreport are about Dash. Almost all the rewards we paid @keiserreport were powered down and sold.
keiserreport dash posts.png
We lost the opportunity to build an effective ongoing relationship with @keiserreport to a competitor with worse fundamentals and we are missing more every day. Will we learn from this and build in a system that has proven to be incredibly effective at promoting collaboration because this will help boost the effectiveness of everything else we already have?
Why Add Budget Proposals to Steem?
Allowing any Steem user to create and submit proposals to build our community will attract many new users and empower our community to fund our own growth consistently. When we combine this with our incredible innovation in smart media tokens, we are likely to MULTIPLY the benefits together. Multiplication of our efforts will give us a blockchain that becomes a clear top 5 choice for an investor hoping to gain value.
BUT JERRY don’t we already have author rewards, witness rewards, the crowdsourced marketing protocol, and countless projects designed to help with this? Yes we do. None of them offer the following together!
Makes the funding easily accessible without having to go to any individual or central authority.
Provides clear directions for success that any user can easily understand and follow.
Allows every user to participate in making the decisions about what gets funded.
Shows outsiders with no previous knowledge of Steem exactly where the money is going.
Proves the process works with case studies featuring hundreds of users receiving funding.
Addressing each of these five points is critical for a funding mechanism within Steem to maximize participation, excitement, and results. We have nothing that does this today, based on my experience going through every single process we do have to get funding for ads for Steem. Despite me having the largest real following here mostly from new user signups and being one of the top 200 holders of Steem power, I have found the process of receiving funding for a project designed to build the value of Steem extremely challenging. If it is hard for me, it is probably impossible for most while being too easy for a few. This equals low participation which equals low value for Steem which equals not getting what we want. Budget proposals enable us to get what we really want by increasing participation, consistently building the value of Steem, and thereby raising the true value which will guarantee a price increase in time.
Read the Whitepaper for More!
The first use case and who earns the most Steem sections do not appear in this post because that made it too long to submit. For the full text, the whitepaper is available at http://jerry.tips/steembudget.