Discussion: Will We Ever Have Actual COMMERCE on Steemit?

Way back in my earliest days here on Steemit, one of the issues I would often bring up — particularly when people started talking about such things as ”use cases” for the Steem currency — was that it would be really nice if Steemit were to develop some actual commerce as part of the community.

I thought it would be an excellent use case, and a way to give people a distinctly functional purpose for buying and holding Steem, if we had something like an actual peer-to-peer marketplace where our many talented artists and creatives and homesteaders could actually trade with each other using Steem, rather than our legacy fiat currency.

I envisioned something like a cross between an eBay and Amazon marketplace and maybe Craigslist that would be open for people to trade with each other whether they had services or hardgoods. Seems like Steem would be an ideal currency to use, thanks to our 3-second block times and feeless transactions. By comparison, think of how expensive and slow it would be in Bitcoin or Ethereum!

Unfortunately any of my suggestions fell largely on deaf ears… never quite sure if they were rejected because I was a newcomer at the time, or because nobody wanted to deal with it.

There were a couple of halfhearted attempts along the way. There were a couple of guys who got up and running with the now defunct @steembay which I even supported by offering several pieces of artwork for sale and actually succeeding in selling them!

Sadly @steembay soon enough fell by the wayside and even though there were a few other attempts at starting ”Steem Shopping,” none of them ever really turned into something.

All these years later, there still isn't even discussion of such a thing, to the best of my knowledge. And I think that's a shame. However, I'm also open to the possibility that I just don't know what I'm talking about!

I'm going to keep this post fairly short, and just using it as a way to throw the idea back out there to see if there's any interest in it at all. Since the engagement level here in our community is nowhere near as high as it once was, I don't expect to hear a lot of feedback. But if you do have an opinion please leave a comment below!

Thanks for reading and have a great remainder of your weekend!

How about YOU? Do you think actual ecommerce, conducted in Steem, would be a positive development for Steemit? If no, why not? Do leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!

(All text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is ORIGINAL CONTENT, created expressly for this platform — NOT A CROSSPOST!!!)
Created at 20220109 00:10 PST
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