Does the Centralization of the STEEM Economy Continue?
I used to be very negative about bid bots and considered them the root of all evil in Steemit. Eventually, I realized that not everything is unequivocally bad and unequivocally good. When a person uses a bid bot, he is forced to increase his delegation all the time, since there is constant competition between authors - whoever delegated more earned more. Thus, thanks to bots, authors are forced to Power Up, which reduces the amount of liquid STEEM and has a beneficial effect on the token economy.
However, the presence of bid bots still has many negative consequences. Among them, the worst is because the bid bot equally votes for a good post and for garbage.
In any case, in this post I do not intend to talk about the benefits or harms of bid bots. I wanted to talk about the economy.
I have previously published several posts demonstrating that the proportion of SP delegated to bots is steadily increasing and is dominant. Thus, there was a constant centralization of the STEEM economy. If this process were to continue, then over time those people who for whatever reason do not use bots would not receive any support. First of all, this would apply to beginners.
This is probably why the Steemit team started clubs. In theory, clubs should make the STEEM economy more decentralized. Is it so? Are you interested? I do, so I decided to check it out.
In order to find out, I took the data from the STEEM rich list (22.1.17) post and compared it with the same data from previous periods, that is, I continued the posts I used to make.
Share of SP Delegated to Bid Bots
Amount of SP Delegated to Bid Bots
Amount of SP Delegated to Individual Bid Bots
Note that the chart does not show all the bid bots I know, I just selected a few.
Conclusions
It seems that the club initiative is working. This is evidenced by the fact that the absolute amount of SP delegated to bots has decreased slightly. Also, the share of SP delegated to bid bots relative to current supply has decreased.
The overall result was most affected by the decrease in the power of the most popular bid bot @upvu.
If it was the clubs that stopped the centralization of the STEEM economy, then it is safe to say that this initiative has done a great positive thing. It can be assumed that the reason for the decrease in the share of SP delegated to bots is the appearance of a powerful @hungry-griffin account (effSP = 5162568,355). However, the total amount of SP delegated to bots also decreased, which is most likely the result of the clubs' actions.
If the clubs continue to operate, we can hope that the decentralization of the STEEM economy will accelerate in the future. Authors will increase their power and support each other. This will reduce the expectation of an @upvote from SC01 and the temptation of bid bots. All this, I think, will benefit the platform.
This is a very interesting calculation
I think the STEEM economy needs both the clubs and bid bots.
Many investors choose to stay in steem because @upvu can give them a good return/interest on their invested amount, so we need the big investors here.
But I agree that upvote bots/services also bring a lot of dirty posts that we don't want to see here.
Many local communities are growing and their steem power is also growing thanks to their members. But the members are left with very little voting power and are themselves dependent on the community voting them back. Or the clubs. It will be limited how long the steemit team can continue with it because users on steem must eventually learn not to depend on the clubs or the steemit team.
It is important to invest in one's own steem power, I mean to buy some steem so that they themselves can invest in their future here on steem. I would like to know how many of the active users actually buy some steem.
If only the big ones buy steem, there won't be a future with steem because when they don't get a good enough return on invested funds, they will sell to make their investments elsewhere.
The clubs are a great project, but if those who are in the clubs do not buy any steem and most of them are active today with the clubs, it will not bring steem in from the market, only the opposite way when they want to sell.
I believe that the clubs should be run by the local communities in the future, and that there should be a rule that also means that they buy some steem. There will certainly be many opinions on how this can be done.
We have to flow both ways with steem so that there is a balance in buying and selling, not just selling
The lack of demand for STEEM in the market is a real disaster for the project. Currently, the attractiveness of STEEM is negatively affected by many factors, including:
You are right, most active bloggers are active because they intend to make money. They are not investors and none of them have bought STEEM. How to attract investors? An investor does not care whether it is convenient to blog here, whether the content is interesting and whether the publications are of high quality. An investor should see the money he will earn from his investments. Now the easiest money is bid bots.
Investors can be attracted by a successful social project in which there are many people. Then new opportunities open up, in particular for advertising. But we all know that our whole STEEM community is not that big.
Due to the lack of real areas of application, cryptocurrencies are highly dependent on the faith of investors in the growth of their price. Returning faith is always incomparably more difficult than winning it with something new. There should be a core among us that would deal with the STEEM token. It is necessary to try to list it on more exchanges. Any listing is great advertising. It is necessary to increase the possibilities of using the token. Easier said than done, especially since it all comes down to the need for programming.
In order for more investors to appear, more people from economically prosperous countries need to learn about STEEM. We have a wonderful German community, but no British, French, American, or even Norwegian 😉.
What if we create an actual economy? I mean, person A offers a digital service and person B, pays with steems. Like, I can explain stuff about science, but someone else can teach Spanish... or another person can help someone else's daughter with her math homework.
We have a large enough community to create a knowledge economy.
I have another idea which involves journalism, but idk.
Your idea is great. I once suggested something similar. It would be great to create a platform where people could offer services and goods while getting paid in STEEM. Unfortunately, it is easier to suggest than to do. We lack developers.
Greetings friend @o1eh
There is another thing to add, and it is the importance of the appearance of community accounts, because users have other options to delegate and concentrate a good community power, without having to go to a voting service outside the community, Las Community accounts have been favored by a good number of delegated SPs, proportionally reducing delegations that were possibly going to be for these voting services.
It's true, I didn't even think about community accounts. Thanks for the useful addition.