This week I took a trip on discord, I visited all these steemit communities, and tried to find out what's happening with each. I encourage you to do the same, there are great ideas and great people putting a lot of time and effort to improve steemit and make it a success.
I know we do not have to agree with every idea, but every idea deserves a chance to be explored. The steemit communities on discord are buzzing with activities and discussions.
They say ETH found it's killer app in something that was sitting there all along, tokens. Maybe steemit can find it's killer app as well.
The tokens on ethereum, good or bad, contribute to it's value. So will these steemit communities/projects, like them or hate them, all contribute to steemit value.
When the ETH devs got involved with the DAO the result was a complete disaster, but afterwards tokens without ETH devs involvement, was what made a huge difference.
To make this short, I see all these steemit communities/projects that want to create tokens, and they do that on bitshares right now. How hard is it to allow token creation on steemit? let these projects compete for Steem contributions, not pool rewards and steemit support. We already have token creation on bitshares, we should have the same on steem.
Steemit supporting one project and rejecting another would be equal to the DAO disaster. As that would mean direct involvement. Something that will limit creativity and chances at success.
Sadly what I see now are mostly projects that offer to manipulate voting for a share of the reward pool. Something that is not practical or scalable on the long run. But we should not shut these down, or play favoritism. Every community that formed around steemit does the same thing. This is the result of false guidance and low ambitions.
Ever since it's conception SBD was the perfect example of an ERC20 token, it fights with us to get loose, free itself from our imposed value to it's own speculative value, yet we remain blind to the possibility, and force our rules. We went as far as making conversions undesirable, and forcing people to sell their SBD.
Maybe we should have freed SBD as the payout token for content on steemit, and it's value left as speculative. Maybe we should have more tokens created by communities and set those as payments for each community.
An example would be a video hosting service on steemit, the project would issue tokens trade them for steem and power up the steem to serve as voting power to award more of the same community token. The team behind the token would would approach exchanges and try to list the token with it's own speculative value.
If communities award their own tokens from upvotes then these communities are no longer fighting for the same reward pool.
If the upvote for example awards 25% SP and 75% community tokens. Authors can publish to any community they like, and have rewards in both SP and community tokens.
Of course not every token will be successful, but the reduction in steem rewards and the demand for SP in community creation would create an upward price pressure that would make 25% SP much more valuable. Curation paid 100% in community tokens would limit abuse as each community would strive to make their own token more valuable, it would be in their best interest to police themselves and curb abuse.
Community and token creation should follow certain rules. We can set an amount of SP required to be able to create a community and associated token. So a team with the intention of creating a community token must have a whitepaper and present investors with an economical model of how the token holders will benefit from their efforts.
This is one way the reward pool and abuse prevention will scale. There is an incentive for communities to power up and compete, there is an incentive for authors to join more than one community and compete for different tokens. Communities would compete to attract better content, and create their own financial model.
I know most of this would take time, but I call on steemit to start by making SBD the first test token, make SBD a speculative token, and remove conversion. Change rewards to 25% SP and 75% SBD. The inflation you cut back in steem can be used on the internal market to buy SBD at market value and burn it. That will give SBD enough support until more community tokens are created.
The separation of Steem from reward token/s, might be the answer we are looking for. Communities might present us an opportunity to do just that. Steemit communities with separate rules and payout tokens will create less friction and more opportunities for community leaders to introduce new and fresh ideas.
It was not long ago that steemitsports succeeded in creating a community of sports fans, instead of letting this community flourish and grow, we simply killed it. Why we killed it? because it was "eating at the rewards pool". A term we never stop using, "raping the reward pool", none of us stopped to think that the reward pool might be our problem.
Maybe our reward pool is centralized, it's controlled by a few individuals with their subjective taste of what is good and what is bad. In a communities token format, whales can choose where to invest their SP, what content they think is good. We no longer have to subject authors to a broad judgment as we do now.
Curation rewards in community tokens will force everyone to vote for the community authors that they think are producing the best content. The competition to earn different speculative tokens will reduce friction and free the reward pool to scale.
This would be equal to creating a token economy on the Steemit platform. It will allow various projects/teams to create their own speculative tokens and ask for contributions in steem which would be locked as SP. Another approach would be to compete for delegation that pays in community tokens.