Why Steemit is better than holding a Masternode
There is a lot of hype in the cryptocurrency community around masternodes. This is a feature of certain coins that allows you to lock up your holdings, anywhere from 1,000 to 100,000+ as a the minimum deposit, within a node that you run on a remote server, or even at home, and receive a reward for securing and providing certain services for the cryptocurrency's network.
There is a great website called Masternodes.pro that lets you track all of the cryptocurrencies that offer this feature, and the returns you can make on them.
Masternodes can be a way of earning a long term passive income through holding cryptocurrency, as well as speculating on a rise in price, as more and more of a coin's supply is locked up over time in masternodes that holders have a strong incentive not to sell.
I'm definitely not denying that masternodes can be a profitable investment. Dash, the cryptocurrency that pioneered the masternode, has done extremely well over the past year. One masternode is now worth $287,000, and produces an annual income of $22,000 at the time of writing, and nearly four times that as little as a month ago. But if we look at Steemit, the platform actually works in a very similar way, but with a number of important advantages.
Steemit also rewards users for holding their cryptocurrency of the platform in the form of Steem Power. By Powering Up your Steem into Steem Power you commit to keeping your Steem locked up for 13 weeks, which is how long it takes to Power Down, and in exchange you get a certain amount of voting power, as well as higher author and curation rewards.
When you look at the numbers, just the voting power that every user is allocated daily is 0.1% of their Steem Power. You can make up to 10 votes at full power every day, which, if you have 1,000 Steem, means you can earn 1 Steem every day just through voting power. That's 365 Steem a year, or a return of 36.5%. This doesn't even count the author rewards for making blog posts, or what those posts can earn for even a new blogger.
This compares very, very well to the kinds of returns you can get on masternodes. But with Steem you don't need to run and pay for a remote server, there's no complicated process for setting up and maintaining a node, and you can start with any amount of Steem. This works the same for 10, 100, 1000, 10,000 or 1 million Steem, which means anyone can get started without needing to put a fixed investment in upfront.
The cryptocurrency ecosystem is constantly evolving, and one of the most exciting promises of this space is the ability to create currency and value through the network effect. Both masternodes and Steemit provide two ways to do that, but I'm sure a lot more will be thought up of in the future, as we invent new and innovative ways to earn and give back more!
This should not be taken as financial advice, and is intended for educational purposes only.
Great article dude! I'm new to steemit (3 days in), but i already fall in love with the platform. When i first decided to try it I thought it will be just a bunch of spammers seeking to make money, but thats actually not the case. Steemit is full of carefully written articles and a great community.
That's so great to hear! It's an amazing platform that will only get better as they add more new features, like dTube and dSound, as well as the Smart Media Tokens that are coming.
That's something I wanted to write in my post too. What I love most about this place is the incredible community. The people here are true pioneers and free thinkers to be in this at such an early stage, and put up amazing content which will only get better over time. I'm here myself first and foremost to share what I can about what I know and the causes I care about, to try and really help others.
What makes Steem so great is that, together with an ecosystem that also gives us all an incentive to be nice to each other, to help and support each other, because that way we all make money together.
Thanks for the comment and I really hope you make it here on Steem!
Also, please also explain the difference between "full power" and non-full power.
If you look at the third screenshot, you can see my voting power is at 65% now. You can check your own at steemstats.com.
Every user gets a certain amount of Steem from all the new Steem that's mined every day to use as their voting power. This works out to about 0.1% of your total Steem Power, but if you have more than 500 Steem Power you have the option to choose what percentage of your voting power to use with every upvote, using a scale bar.
You can make 10 votes at 100% power, 20 votes at 50% power, 100 votes at 1% power and so on each day. If you vote more than that in a day, then your voting power gets lower and lower. If you vote less in a day, then your voting power replenishes, until it's at 100% again.
You can use this voting power to pay yourself Steem every day, or you can upvote other people to give Steem to them. If you just upvote yourself with 100% of your voting power, 10 times per day, that works out to an ROI of 36.5% per year.
Not bad!
Of course it's better to upvote other people too, not just yourself. But you can also earn from making blog posts, and from people commenting on you. If you're just using the platform naturally you'll make Steem without thinking.
Thanks for the comment, I hope this has helped! 😊
Good work man. I'm learning a lot about steemit just by reading your comments. You should compile all that useful stuff that you already wrote in a big faq about steemit. ;)
Thanks man! I'm always learning myself, I still have a lot of questions about exactly how everything works, especially the details on how payouts are calculated, the witness system, how Steem is mined etc. I want to keep on doing more tutorials in the future though, I'm planning one on how to use EtherDelta to get bargains soon!
Oh, that would be really cool. I am currently studying about ico's, I have some experience investing in ipo's, but there are many differences between the two markets that I need to learn yet.
A big “thanks” for your clarification, and I am giving some up-votes plus following you. Soon after joining Steemit just a few weeks ago I bought over 500 STEEM and promptly turned it into Steam Power, with no clear idea as to exactly how to use my Steam Power! So, you have given me the clarification and thanks again.
I have made a couple of blog posts; but I have to tell you that I reached the conclusion (after careful observation) that until you have a large community of followers, hopefully including a few whales, who are ready to up-vote almost anything you write, you basically will find yourself doing many hours of work to earn a couple of dollars on one post that has a lot of true ‘green’ content. Big deal!
So the trick to making worthwhile money on Steemit is to first grow your community of followers, which will be a very slow process unless you’re bringing those followers over into Steemit from places like YouTube.
I have seen a couple of people that I know from YouTube come over into Steemit with their videos and hordes of immediately-acquired followers and promptly gain a great deal of money (compared to those of us who are making ‘green’ content and earning peanuts because we don’t have a big following). One YouTube giant came over here and got $15,000+ on his first post, which was largely a ‘let me introduce myself’ post. I saw another YouTube giant post a paraphrase of the lead section of a much longer article that he published in Wired and gave us a link to the article, and within 30 minutes his estimated payout had exceeded $700! Just yesterday, I saw yet another YouTube person bring over her video on explaining block chain. She does have a few paragraphs of green content which I think is not at YouTube; but there are already many books and articles explaining block chain. Yet within an hour so her estimated payment had exceeded under $130.
“There is something wrong with this picture”, I think.
I definitely hear what you're saying. People bringing large followings from places like YouTube obviously have an advantage. At the same time I think there are still excellent opportunities for smaller content creators like us to make money on this platform.
Steem is very cheap now, and you can still buy a lot of it for not a lot of money. Converting this into Steem power gives early adopters like us a huge advantage for when the masses start signing up to Steem.
I'm not sure if you're aware but Steem actually has user levels.
The dollar numbers are a little lower now, but your 500 Steem Power is equivalent to 1MV, and already puts you in the superuser category. That means you're in the top 4.76% of all users on Steemit right now. If you imagine the price of Steem going up significantly in the future, which I think is very likely, it will soon be very difficult for most people to achieve that level.
Even with a relatively small investment, if you post every day, Power Up all your Steem, and compound your returns, you can grow your account by 40% a year just upvoting your own content and in the future this could be worth a lot of money. Consistency is key.
That's the difference between Steem and other blogging platforms. Here you're earning something, it might not be a lot at first, but it's something. And if you believe in the platform and Power Up this ecosystem rewards you proportionally. On any other blog, unless it's popular, you're earning nothing.
I’m learning a lot from the information that you’re passing along, and will up-vote once more just to reflect the value that I’m getting.
What I’m about to say might include one or more questions or might trigger in your mind the thought that you should correct a misinterpretation on my part. So I want to thank you in advance for your patience and helpfulness.
I take it that the first column of the table is the minimum dollar level for each user level, which suggests that I am $300 below the boundary for superuser. How do you arrive at $500 as being the boundary?
I ask you that question not to challenge you; but rather to put in place the correct boundaries since that would help me in my strategizing, as you will see below.
For example, what I’m getting from your thoughts is that there is a systematic way to use what you’ve invested in Steam Power (SP) to increase its overall nominal value, and that it is up to me to become aggressive about that use. It’s somewhat like me watering my vegetable garden -- if I water aggressively, and correctly of course, I’m likely to get much better vegetable growth than if I sort of ignored the stuff I planted except for the odd hap-hazard watering, which is been my pattern with my SP.
One thing I do wish to avoid, though, is up-voting my own posts. Usually there will be a lot of work behind my posts, so with the number of followers I have now, which conspicuously exclude any whales, there is simply no way for the revenue generated by posts to make any sense if I seriously think that there should be a reasonable relationship between the payout and the combination of the effort I put in, my focus on bringing ‘green’ stuff to the table, and the fact that I tend to write about things that I know a lot about (that is, I really try to put new value on the table when I make a post). So, it’s going to be years, really years, before revenues from Steemit posts could match the effort that I put into them. (That’s why I’m sort of angry at these people bringing in their hordes of followers from another place and automatically pulling down big dollars for stuff that is not ‘green’.)
Anyway, my best strategy for the next several months is to focus on putting in an investment with a hope that many months down the road adequate returns would begin to roll in. That’s true of most successful investments -- you have to sit and wait!
Based on what you have wriiten, my first thought is going to be whether I should try to get up to the next user level (“Power level”??) seeing that STEEM is now less than one dollar.
Finally, as regards the future price of STEEM, I invite you to review my long comment at https://steemit.com/steemit/@greatvideos/each-steemian-should-have-629-steem-to-have-an-equal-share-of-the-total-supply-of-steem-20171020t17144735z#@lestatisticien/re-greatvideos-each-steemian-should-have-629-steem-to-have-an-equal-share-of-the-total-supply-of-steem-20171020t17144735z-20171020t172050830z . This comment is
based on several years of trading options and stocks in the stock market, and deeply understanding (I think) the mechanisms underlying price change.
So, when I make the investment we are talking about is certainly not for a capital gain arising from a future rise in the price of STEEM! For one thing, there are other ways to achieve worthwhile gains that do not involve money coming back to you, as you know.
My bottom line bet is that the Steem block chain and Steemit in particular are in the process of growing deep network routes across the world, and the expected future all-out attacks by many governments upon private cryptocurrencies are not going to affect us (we have more to fear I believe from some “big competitors” trying to take down the system). So, I feel that a bet on Steem and Steemit for the very long term is a good bet, as long as you’re not looking for a capital gain!
Coming back to the point about network roots around the world, I see only three cryptocurrencies that are as strong as STEEM: Bitcoin, Ether (ETH), and Ripple (XRP). And in the cases of ETH and XRP, the strong network is primarily among institutions. Bitcoin is in the wonderful position of being strong in its network roots not only among institutions but also among the people in many countries where they feel a desperate need for an alternative to “official money”. Unfortunately for us in Steemland, people around the world seem not to think of STEEM as a nice haven from official money.
Thank you for your very long and informative reply, it's given me a lot to think about! Yes, I think the analogy of watering the garden regularly is a good one. I don't think there's anything wrong with upvoting your own posts, as long as you don't only do that. When I make a post there is an option to automatically upvote the post on publishing, and also to receive all rewards directly as Steem Power.
This is what I do, and I think it is crucial at the beginning. The more weight your post has from the moment it's published, the higher it appears up the rankings, and the higher probability there is for it to be seen on the pages you tag it to. If you comment on your favourite authors as well, and upvote your own comments, they will go to the top of the list of comments and will be one of the first that people read. This will also help bring attention to yourself as a user.
I think this is important to do when starting out, as it's the only way you'll get noticed out of the thousands of profiles out there. It's like an investment. I also upvote, resteem, and comment on posts that I like from others. I do comment a lot as well especially to give back, because other people get rewarded for me posting a comment on their posts.
As for the dollar amounts, this image is slightly out of date. 500 Steem Power is 1 million "vests" or 1MV, which is now slightly less than $500, but when this picture was taken the same amount cost $800. Personally my goal is to get up to 10MV, I am at 6 now. I expect to get there just by compounding in about a year. If my blog gets more popular this could happen sooner.
I have read the comment you linked, and even though the current rate of Steem inflation is 9.5% this will go down by 0.5% every year. It's important to bear in mind that even Bitcoin is currently inflating at a rate of 4% per year, so I think there is still a lot of potential for capital gains for Steem despite the inflation rate, especially when you take into account the potential for exponential growth in new users signing up, and that there is a real incentive for users to hold their Steem as Steem Power, which decreases liquidity out of an already limited supply.
I would very much like to learn more about how the Steem blockchain really works and how it is distributed and keep decentralised worldwide, this is unfortunately something I don't fully understand yet, as it's a little above my head technically, but I want to make a point of learning more. It's very important for me to be invested in something that is as decentralised and resilient to government attack as possible. One of the reasons why I like Bitcoin so much is the uncompromising attitude of the core team to decentralisation above all else.
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Yours is a very helpful comment. I need you to clarify the following important remark please: “When you look at the numbers, just the voting power that every user is allocated daily is 0.1% of their Steem Power. You can make up to 10 votes at full power every day, which, if you have 1,000 Steem, means you can earn 1 Steem every day just through voting power.”
What exactly is meant by the allocation of voting power? Do I get that 1.001 multiplication of my 1000 SP in one day IF I also make sure to vote 10 times that day?