The Economics of the DAILY STEEMIT SELFIE CHALLENGE by @papa-pepper

Here we go again! Talking about that silly selfie contest - we do a lot of things, and many of you who know me know that I like to try a lot of different things and always seem to be 'moving around'. I am an experimenter - a connection maker - a developer - I ferment ideas and continuously change plans.

Well here's something that I got involved in that is still going on - and it is unlikely that I will give it up very easily - the economics of it are encouraging us to see this baby through.

_{Waterboarding myself for SBD}

I'm not a selfie taker, for all my bluff and bluster I am a very private person, my wife and I live in a very private small town in a hidden valley in a far away country on an under developed continent. That said - here we are doing all sorts of crazy things for virtual coins!

_{Hair spikes - Don't I look like the poster boy for liberty?}

One of the most interesting things about Steem (and thusly steemit), is that it takes intelligent incentivization to the next level - something that I have thought about since my very first days of economics class.

Do we want to favor a certain behavior? Incentivize it. Want other things to lessen or stop? De-incentivize it. Taxes, for example, are de-incentives, or negative incentives. It always seemed weirdly obvious to me that if we want more jobs, more labor in the market, we shouldn't be taxing it. We should be taxing things that we want to see less of - like traffic, murder and contamination.

Anyways - Steemit is an experimental social media platform built on top of a crypto-incentives engine. I can't help but experiment.

_{Torturing my miniture friend for SBD}

So I currently find myself inside an incredible experiment by an incredible steemian; @papa-pepper is deep and thoughtful, and has months and months of interesting material on his blog that I am still sifting though. For those of you newer users that are following me - check out @papa-pepper - this is one mighty dolphin worth following, supporting and interacting with.

_{Would you take a picture of yourself in the middle of the night? I even had to turn the light on...}

Why am I here - and why have I titled this post 'The Economics of the DAILY STEEMIT SELFIE CHALLENGE'? Currently the prize pool sits at 1111 SBD, and I wanted to put that into perspective for myself and my followers.

First - lets ignore the fact that 1 SBD is currently worth USD 1.37 as of this writing, lets consider them as dollars (except unlike dollars these are backed by something real - STEEM!)

The payout calculation is 75% for the winner - if everyone else dropped out today that would leave me, as the winner, walking away with 833.25 SBD. This amount will only keep growing, but it is sufficiently large to show you what I am talking about here.

_{'Eating' my wife...}

The currently minimum monthly wage in Colombia stands at 737,717 pesos ($246) in 2017⁽¹⁾. That minimum wage is nation wide, and while it is nearly impossible to live on that in the capital of Bogotá, the minimum wage is like a King's Ransom here in rural Líbano. In fact, many day jobs in retail sales pay only 100 - 120 dollars per month, the labor market is very fragile here in Líbano, and most of it is cash based.

My wife, @ecoinstante, and I, lived for almost 4 years as rural farmers, and in that time we averaged approximately $93 dollars a month combined household income, a large portion of which I earned doing translations and other off farm activites. We were able to survive as long as we did by experimenting with some drastic cost-cutting measures and by growing the majority of our own food.

_{Cold water}

Currently, however you look at it, the ever growing prize pool of SBD represents multiple months of work related income - perhaps even as much as 9 months of combined household income from homestead life. As the prize pool will continue to grow - and with it the expected value of my continued participation - there may even come a threshold where it would be beneficial to quit my current minimum wage job if it interfered with the selfie competition. After all, even at the current minimum wage - The ever growing prize represents more than 3 months income - and the time that could be saved by quitting the job could be dedicated to even more income by writing ever better articles on Steemit.

Some things to think about - Love and Light to All!

Source: (1)-https://www.reuters.com/article/us-colombia-economy/colombia-raises-minimum-wage-by-7-percent-for-2017-idUSKBN14J1U4