A Reason To Hold: An Actifit Story
The concept of @actifit is amazing in relative terms towards building community. If you're paying your citizens to be active, then they are going to be more healthy. They'll be able to focus and think better, get sick less often, and simply be generally happier and healthier people.
@actifit is also a great example of a product that has awesome distribution. Who wouldn't want to get paid for their physical activity? A lot of people were going to do that anyway, and the community gives incentive to push even harder in that direction.
However, once you receive the coins from the distribution, what reason is there to hold them? How does the project actually drain liquidity and push the price in an upward direction? From my perspective the only reason to currently hold coins is pure speculation. @actifit holders have faith that the project will build value over time and be worth more years down the road than it is now. Another reason to hold is due to altruistic support, but as we well know, we can't count on communities to be altruistic. It's just an added bonus on top of the other mechanics in place that incentivize good behavior.
Governance.
I've thought about this a lot. Why would I make a coin for the game that I'm creating (Pentaskill)??? The short answer is that I wouldn't because there is no purpose to the coin. As long as I want to retain full control of the project there is no point in trying to decentralize it.
In my opinion, governance is the ultimate use-case of cryptocurrency. We use stake holdings to measure how much skin in the game a particular user has. Users with more stake have the advantage of their voice counting for more during decisions that need to be voted on.
I believe as time goes on this governance issue will become more and more apparent. People aren't going to want to hold tokens unless holding those tokens comes with the benefit of leading the community in the direction that they think is best. How does this relate to a project like @actifit?
There are plenty of examples:
- How much inflation gets created?
- How is that inflation getting distributed?
- What tactics are being used to stop people from gaming the system?
These are questions one could ask about any project, and we see that the vast majority of the time stake holders have no say when it comes to solutions to the problem. The development teams aren't relinquishing their power. During the early stages of a project, this is probably a good thing. However, if the project wants to scale, then trust, decentralization, and shared decision making will eventually need to kick in.
In the context of @actifit, do we want to generate extra inflation to hire professional athletes to promote the product? What should those contracts look like? Do we want to generate extra inflation to build a physical gym somewhere in an attempt to generate even more revenue and promote the community? Who's going to manage that? Where will it be located? How much will memberships cost? Yada yada yada. The first two questions (generating and distributing inflation) can easily spawn infinitely more underlying voting scenarios.
The problem with all this is that if these decisions are under centralized control, no one is going to trust it enough to scale to the heights it needs to get to. There are tons of crypto projects out there that give holders less governance options than if they were to buy traditional stock in a company. This is unnecessary and unacceptable in the long term.
Very few projects will be able to avoid this governance issue. Bitcoin is one such example. The unchanging static nature of Bitcoin is a feature, so stake holder governance may prove counterproductive, as the niche served is one of conservative deflationary immutable monetary policy. However, this niche has been filled, and other projects need to get much more creative to stay relevant.
Business models
What can I buy with my @actifit? I've heard rumors that the goal with be to buy fitness related things. But now what incentive to the vendors selling these products have to hold the coins they just received? There's even less of a reason to do so because crypto is volatile and most businesses operate under razor thin profit margins and require stability.
Perhaps a solution to this problem would be to give vendors who hold a kickback in the event of a bear market so they don't go out of business. Perhaps not, as this would surely drive the price down even further. My point is that it shouldn't be any central authority making these decisions. Swarm intelligence is superior to the individual.
Conclusion
The main reason to be a stake holder in any project going forward is going to be governance related. Governance and trust in authority fails to scale with 7 billion people on the planet. This is the ultimate use-case of crypto. In 20 or 30 years (maybe even 10), any crypto projects that don't make this transition are going to find themselves undesirable. Speculation and altruism can only take us so far. The main function of crypto is to scale trust, and in effect, governance itself.
I think the problem with most tokens is that people don't understand business models... actifit for example, Where does the money come from? Why should people hodl? What can the token be used for? etc...etc... people, especially on STEEM, like to say "a token to empower your community", I don't feel that much empowered with a depreciating token.
Tokens need cashflow entering and burning the token for it to ever be worth anything, actifit has a community... start selling that community! Create a blog/forum specific for actifit users, put some fitness ads up on this actifit forum, get the ads revenue, buy the token with the ads revenue and burn the token, and start advertising on other platforms like bodybuilding.com, etc... to steal some of the users. In the long run this will make the token appreciate actually empowering the community behind it with value for their knowledge and attention, also if the token could be used to buy supplements or meal plans on that said forum for a discount it would increase even more the token's value.
With STEEM and STEEM tokens I think the main objective should be increasing the community, getting better content to increase the number of visits, get ads up, buy the token with the ad revenue and burn it, and some of the things steemleo is doing are great for this, they intend to use BAT and brave browser to even further buy the token and burn it.
Regarding governance, I agree with what you are saying, the governance part of crypto is very important, but I'm also afraid of it, what if the biggest stakehodlers are idiots? Because I've seen quite a few idiots in the cryptospace hodling large bags because they took 2 loans on their house and are now in debt forever in ever depreciating tokens... Maybe governance should be something down the line and not right now, we might need a few more bear markets to shake out all the stupidity in the cryptospace, to strengthen the stakeholder's hands and strengthen their brain and knowledge in the process.
So far the only reason I hold the token is to get the $1 vote from actifit a couple of times a week. You need to maintain 10,000 in your wallet for the honor and before the fork it was a great deal. I would assume that after the fork it's a good deal. Anything over 10,000 afit doesn't interest me at this point but we will see in the future.
I agree with this comment. You can’t exchange 20 AFIT tokens for the $1 upvote without 10,000 already in your wallet, so now I’m trying to post 10,000 steps every day to get to this milestone.
In my opinion, this in and of itself is a good thing because it’s encouraging a healthy behaviour.
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I was selling afit when it went on steem-engine because they hadn't announced the 10,000 minimum requirement yet so I had to save back up lol. So I'm now back getting that vote. But remember, after the fork we get less of that $1 vote. Still more than I make on my other posts.
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