Breaking a social taboo: How and why you SHOULD peek at someones Steemit Wallet
Taking a peek into someones Wallet is normally a social taboo:
In many cultures, it is impolite to ask about money. This applies both to the business and personal realms. How much money do you make? How much profit did you make on your last deal? How much are you spending on advertising? These are questions that can lower the temperature in the room by a noticeable amount.
My guess is that this taboo comes from the desire not to make others uncomfortable in social situations where there is financial imbalance. This applies equally to the haves and the have nots. Those with greater resources do not want to be made to feel guilty, while those with less do not want to be undervalued as people by being judged by only their resources.
"Hey, How much Money do you have right now? Can I see?"
Social norms come about in a way similar to blockchain, by consensus. Fortunately the social norms of Blockchain and Steemit are based around an agreement of transparency, which makes things that were faux pas in other social constructs, acceptable in the Steemit ecosystem.
Blockchain assumes a certain agreement of transparency
Steemit is for many of its users (like myself), the first interaction we have had with Blockchain. However, new many of us are, it was made pretty clear that what you are posting is being recorded in the Blockchain and will be there forever. We will have to look more at how this works in another article, but for now, we just realize that anyone can use any number of apps to view the blockchain, and so we all assume transparency and agree to this when we decide to post.
Transparency includes all your financial transactions
Now if you have been using Steemit for awhile, you will have noticed that making a deposit of Steem into your account, or sending someone Steem Dollars, or any other transaction gets recorded in your wallet history. That means, it is written in indelible ink of the blockchain, and unlike your personal bank account, it is written in a general ledger viewable by the public.
Key Idea: All activity, including each financial transaction is recorded and readable in the Blockchain
This agreement of transparency means that anyone can see all of my transactions, and I can see anyones transactions. But what do I look at, and equally important, why should I look at anyone else's wallet and financial transaction history?
How and why you SHOULD look at Wallets on a regular basis
Why should you peek into the wallet of another Steemian?
Let's start with Why we would want to look at someones Wallet. Since we have already established that it is part of the transparency agreement that we can do so and this is acceptable, why would we want to look? Basically the financial transactions reported in the blockchain (along with other information) provides corroborative evidence for decision making.
- Does the Wallet of a Steemian making statements about a successful strategy support these claims?
- Does the wallet history reflect the participation in helpful causes that the person or group claim to support?
- What vote bots, resteem bots, or other tools is the poster using and why?
Since we often only have the data we can access to determine someones validity, it is simply a matter of due diligence to verify the wallet as part of someones credentials. For art, I am going to follow artist I like, but for Steemit strategy posts, I want to follow those who are successful. I recently saw a post on how to increase your views leading to greater earnings. This sounded good, but when I looked closer, the person had a very low reputation, and their wallet did not have much transaction history or much in the way of valuation. Now if this was indeed from an expert that was perhaps opening a new account, then they would have known to provide additional credentials that could be verified.
How should you look at a Wallet of another Steemian?
I often tell my son regarding athletics, that he can play with his friends for fun, but to get better, he needs to play with those with a higher skill level. Looking at how much a Steemian is earning in curation each week, will tell me if this is a person of sufficient skill level for me to follow to get better at curation.
Basically to do this is simple. I open my Steemit account to by Blog page, which (another article coming soon) actually is a ledger of all my posts in any Steemit Ecosystem application. I can then click on wallet to see my earnings, current wallet, wallet history and so fourth.
When reading someones post about curation for example, I can click on that persons icon at the top of the post and it will ask me if I want to follow, but if I click again on the icon, it will take me to their blog page. From there if I click on Rewards, it will not be my earnings but theirs:
@flauwy's curation rewards for the past week:
Now to make an example, I went to the 'trending' posts and searched for 'curation', finding this interesting post by 'flauwy' on 1UP and how it can improve the voting system. (I just resteemed this because it looks like a good helpful article). Now if someone is going to be telling me something about curation, they should be getting some rewards for curation, makes sense right?
@flauwy based on his rewards history, shows he made around 11 Steem Power last week in curation rewards. Since I made a whooping .017 Steem Power last week from Curation, I might want to listen to what flauwy has to say. They also have a reputation of 69, which adds an additional level of credibility to their posts.
Now this example gives the general idea, The blockchain provides information for everyone to use to engage, learn, and grow. Successful Steemians will be those who do their homework including looking at the transaction history of fellow Steemians as an aid to making good decisions. Looking at Steem Power, Account Value, Transaction history, Curation and Author Rewards, can each tell us something about the person or group we are interested in following, partnering with, or learning from.
What do you think? Is this an acceptable practice, or do you feel there is a social norm that would place this in the realm of 'facebook stalking'? Let us know in the comments below!
SquareLink Newbie Blog #9: What's in Your Wallet?
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@phaazer1 [SquareLink]
If you can Dream it, you can Steem it.
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