STEEM: The easiest Shill in town?
The Steem Blockchain, and the STEEM token should be one of the easiest promotion pitches you have ever given, here's why....
Ok so maybe 'Shill' isn't the best term after all
The Urban dictionaries top definition for 'Shill' is as follows:
I don't particularly like the sound of 'covert advertising', but I suppose attracting new investors to buy STEEM and invest in Steem Power may mean that I will be gaining financial benefit if the price of the token rises.
If I am honest with who I speak to and state that I am invested in STEEM, then am I really 'shilling', or just promoting with full disclosure? Meh... technical details, I guess. Let's get on with this 'shill'!
Investor and trader friends
Through the years that I have been investing in stocks and shares, I've collected a few friends who regularly discuss the financial markets on a Whatsapp group.
Through chart voodoo and discussions on fundamentals, 'we' have done OK - the stakes are low, very low, in the grand scheme of things, but the chatter is lively and I'm happy to have them pointing out what could 'fly' next, or what is looking like a sure fire 'pump and dump'.
Over recent months, cryptocurrency has become more of a talking point (no surprises here!) and this has allowed me to drop STEEM into the conversations more and more. Bitcoin was the first coin mentioned of course, and in fact was the only token most of the members knew about until recently.
While they are still getting their heads around 'proof of work', 'proof of brain', Blockchains, crypto exchanges, and the like, I've been dropping in the usual winners regarding STEEM and it's Blockchain.
- Free transactions
- Speedy transactions (at around 3 seconds) - as displayed in this excellent gif by @kyriacos
- And more recently, a statistic I read stating that the Steem Blockchain now deals with more transactions each day, than the rest put together!
To anyone learning the ropes, these are enough pro-points to raise an eyebrow, but there's another positive sell regarding 'proof of brain' that has caught the attention of my eco-investor friends.
Save the planet, don't mine Bitcoin
In energy terms, meanwhile, a recent analysis by the Motherboard site estimated that a single bitcoin transaction requires 215 kilowatt-hours of electricity to process. That is the equivalent of what an average American household consumes in one week. source
According to new research conducted by energy tariff comparison service PowerCompare.co.uk, the electricity used to mine Bitcoin this year is bigger than the annual usage of almost 160 countries. The energy consumption has already exceeded the amount used on average by states such as Ireland and most African nations. source
From the Steem.io blue paper:
Steem provides a scalable blockchain protocol1 for publicly accessible and immutable content, along with a fast and fee-less digital token (called STEEM)2 which enables people to earn the currency by using their brain (what can be called “Proof-of-Brain”).
My investor friends do try to do their due diligence when looking into what stocks to invest into. Palm oil is off the table right away, and mining in many jurisdictions is also a no no.
And so when I stated that STEEM tokens were mined not with x number of Graphical Processing Units going hell for leather and being cooled by a vast array of air conditioning units in a huge factory floor, but mainly (?) by Steem account holders creating content to be shared on the Steem Blockchain, this really perked up their interest.
Obviously we still have the witness nodes, user's electronic devices, and other backend infrastructure consuming electricity, but it's a safe bet to say the electrical output in use here is only a small fraction of what is being used in a 'proof of work' set-up.
Are they on the network yet? Sadly not.
Do I think they'll be joining up soon? Yes I do :)
I'm going to leave it to them to decide when to buy some STEEM, if they do so at all.
The cool thing is that you don't even need to do that to get started here (But it helps!)
Have a great day all, it looks like STEEM has turned the corner after a tricky couple of months.
Cheers!
Asher @abh12345
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Steem has never let me down regardless . And I can’t image a better place than these and it has better consistency ?! :D
Same for me.
It's always worth a check on the price over time to try and avoid buying in on 'spikes', but even if you do that just holding Steem Power and engaging on the network should see you through :)
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Steem has never let me down regardless . And I can’t image a better place than these and it has better consistency.
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Getting people to join has been easy. Getting people to stay has been impossible.
They arrive bright eyed and bushy tailed and give up shortly after arriving. They leave either confused or discouraged or both.
We still have a major distribution problem, in that so many people with terrible content can buy their way pretty easily on to the trending page. That is what a lot of newbies are basing their perceptions on.
Until Steemit cleans up a little, I think it will be a hard sell for me to get anyone to stay!!!
Yep changes are required from both the people and the interfaces - I know which will happen first!
That's true. But until the right people start to change, it doesn't make much of a difference. I love this platform, but I can't afford hundreds of dollars just to drop my content on to trending.
In some ways, this can't change until the platform changes, no matter how hard people try.
Yes very true. Don't hold your breath for this though.
If you wish to use the bots and time your vote right, you will be able to get most of your investment back. However, this is a real drain on the rewards pool shared by all and not the way to help the platform grow, in my opinion.
Just keep plugging away is what I do, i have no frame of reference to bring from any other platform so perhaps that makes it a bit easier?
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I agree steem is a very easy sell. I have gotten just about every member of my family to join. The reasons you listed are all true and great selling points. My family all enjoy posting on other social media. So my big sell was why not do the same thing you have been doing and make alittle money doing it. Who doesn’t want that?
Ahh good man! You are doing better than me then, but I am working on it for sure :)
For bloggers/vloggers, there is that additional 'why not do the same thing you have been doing and make a little money doing it' for sure. The guys I chat with aren't so into that side of things, yet, but it is certainly a positive side shill to include. Cheers!
Steem could be a competitive service to patreon.
It would be great if it worked like that.
All we need is a donate with Steem button
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You know what I like about Steem? Steem Power. I like how if you hold your steem power it grows over time because of how the vesting works (as time passes, it takes more steem to buy the same number of vests). I noticed this as my delegated SP amounts have all increased since I delegated those whole number amounts. I delegated 2k SP to a project a month or two ago and that amount has gone up by a few SP because apparently the delegation amount is measured in vests. And the ratio of SP per vest drops slowly over time so the same number of vests is worth a few more steem power than it was a couple of months ago (it's only like 0.25%). It's slow growth but I'm actually gaining SP just by holding it, just by doing nothing.
And because of that, in some amount of years if I hold the SP I have now it'll grow all by itself because of the way vesting works here. And I have to do NOTHING in order for that to grow slowly. Nothing but hold onto it.
And of course there's all the other ways to grow your portfolio here like curation, authoring & commenting, delegation to bots which brings rewards, and of course when the value of Steem goes up the value in fiat money increases.
You've already covered some other positives such as transaction time which should be a no brainer since it's faster and more efficient than so many other blockchain technologies.
Not to sound like some douchey spammer, but nice post :D
Totally :D
Holding Steem Power while inflation drops steadily over time is just awesome - in 10 years if 'we' are still on the road this should show a healthy return in itself!
Cheers to you, the clearly not a douchey spammer - I get enough comments to spot the difference pretty well these days :D
Have a top weekend!
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I don't mind the caution, even if what people hear about STEEM and crypto in general are exaggerated, half truths, or essentially blame it all.
However, with some time to step back and see what's going on, monitor the situation for a while, get more used to the concept, STEEM will make the most sense to folks.
Right now, though, there apparently continues to be a bottleneck to the on boarding process, unless you are bot farms. Individual accounts are all across the board in the time that it takes for them to be approved. So, there are people out there trying to get in and can't.
If some of your friends were stuck in that time loop for a while, I imagine that some of them would lose interest and probably wouldn't come back, like some others that have been reported.
I find it hard to talk about STEEM to anyone, at least not in a major advocacy way, just because, unless it's a pure investment, the ecosystem just isn't ready yet. There's plenty of good things happening, and early in is better than late to the party, but you still have to have a higher tolerance for whatever you want to call what goes on here than I think the average person cares to or has the capacity to do.
So, anyway. STEEM in and of itself is not a hard sell. It's seeing the goings on here that can become a detriment. :)
Indeed. I agree with the points you raise.
As a pure investor, it is possible for the most part to stay clear of the 'goings on' - they become more apparent, the more you look I guess.
Despite all this I am still pro STEEM, but as I mentioned in another reply, it's certainly worth keeping your eye in on the goings on elsewhere too.
Absolutely. I'm sure there are plenty of things going on out there, EOS being only one of them, that we all should be aware of. I'm counting on the fact that decentralization and freedom is a concept that more and more people will want to be a part of, and the vehicle to get there won't be as much of an issue as is the attitude or the behavior of those involved.
We are really in the middle of a tug of war between a pure investor mentality and a pure worker, consumer mentality, and it really needs to fuse together. Everyone needs to be looking out for what's best for the long term of the platform, rather than what potential profiteering you could make. Even in that situation, some people are going to do better, whatever the reason. It's just the way things work. But there does come a point where enough is enough when it comes to earnings. I've actually experienced that threshold, and it was surprisingly low, though higher than what most people achieve.
I think in there lies the issue. Getting to the point of enough, and then realizing you're there. Enough being what you're situation calls enough, not what some bureaucracy or other entity determines is good enough.
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Great point raised @abh12345.
In my promoting of both STEEM and Manna, I run into a glaring problem. If you think STEEM should be the easiest shill, I will go one further and say Manna should be since it is freely given to anyone who signs up and verifies their account. STEEM requires some effort, Manna does not...yet I still run into the same issue you mentioned.
The challenge in front of us is either people do not know about crypto hence have no understanding or, those that heard of it, have a negative connotation with it. The FUD was so great that people are scared of it.
That is what makes the prospects of cryptocurrency and STEEM in particular, so exciting. Nobody knows about it. There are so few who are involved in cryptocurrency who will be in the future. This is the best part of it all.
Of the 7B people on this planet, how many wallets are there? Less than 50M? That is a lot of room for growth.
Thanks TM
I agree that there is huge growth potential, and that people are weary, partly down to the recent 'news'.
It's a great opportunity for those willing to take that leap of faith I guess, I'd like to have encouraged as many friends as possible to do this before things really take off! 👨🏽🚀👨🏽🚀👨🏽🚀👨🏽🚀 🚀
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😂 yes sir!
Hahaha... Don't come back until you are a dolphin. So damn funny.
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tell me more about these bounties. what are they adn how do i get them?
I was brough into the fold by @masterroshi during a anime convention in Las Vegas a little while ago. I can surely say I was sold as soon as he said you could earn cryptocurrency from simply curating content.
aside from the learning curve Steemit is my favorite social media platform thus far. Ill gladly do some shilling for the platfor in the future.
lets give Shillers a good name lol!
i am happy you joined the platform!! keep up the good work.
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@abh12345, good shilling points here! It was unimaginable, but the speed with which Steem's price grows..OMG. I thought it would be extremely cool to have 20$ Steem at the end of 2018, but now...it may even be 50$!
I have no solid price predictions to offer but would speculate we will surpass the year high at some point this year. Good luck!
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