An income source within an income source within an income source

Not to get too inception-y in this post, but right now as I was sending out some delegations of my Steem Monster cards it kind of hit me. This is probably not something that will only relate to Steem but for sure we were one of the first blockchains to offer these alternatives. I imagine others with similar technology and Ethereum playing catch up on their way of proof of stake and blockchain security will get there at some point as well.

It's safe to say that there are a lot of traders in this space with many more to be joining come next bull run, looking at liquid Steem on exchanges it becomes quite obvious that many are buying up the dip and Steem is looking good for distribution spread over so many big and popular exchanges from all over the world. A percentage of these traders me be a bit more short term oriented and at some point realize their Steem gains which means new users get the chance to buy these tokens - distribution on exchanges. Maybe a percentage of these will know what Steem actually is, what it does and more importantly what it lets you do on the blockchain. It's no surprise that traders are at an disadvantage, if many of them are planning on holding for longer than 3 months they'd be much better off powering it up even if they instantly initiated a powerdown, they'll get inflation from their vests (which by the way is getting awfully close to 1million vests being exactly 500 Steem). Depending on how quick these swings occur the traders may be the ones eating the loss cause those that have powered their Steem up have grown their stake relevant to price, so they may still be at a profit while the traders with the same amount may not.

Then there is also curation, a percentage of the investors powering up may realize that there is a way to earn through curating posts, maybe a percentage of those set up a voting bot or follow accounts through a service. Then there is posting and curation, a bigger share for sure than just curation. Now there is also delegating to bid bots/distribution bots/leasing which will give you a much bigger return than both previous ones. How big of a percentage of investors do you reckon know about that part? Well, not many is my guess else there would be a lot less liquid although the reasons to that could be a lot of other things as well.

Now with SMT's on the horizon and services front-running that and projects creating their own virtual tokens while waiting for something like SMT's are popping up on a weekly basis. Will there be a time when delegating to dapps will prove to be more profitable than self-voting 100% of the time? It is not impossible. It will be a battle between the demand for Steem and the demand of Steem to invest in this dapp that is giving better returns than Steem is despite the fact that the dapp itself is causing Steem demand to rise. It's kind of crazy but at the same time beautiful.

The age for miners and developers is slowly coming to an end on the Steem blockchain, even though the advantages were big at one point and to some degree will continue to be impactful to those who held or continue developing, we will be seeing an age of investors slowly make their way here. There are not a lot of other blockchains that allow you to invest with the rewardpool without jeopardizing your Steem investment. The traders will of course trade like they always have, with most coins they will continue seeing similar returns as they have previously but they may not see something like Steem coming and by the time they start to understand why and how after taking a deep dive into this rabbit hole that only keeps on going deeper they will have realized what they sold prematurely at $0.50 or $1 or $10 without being able to do anything but FOMO in.

Steem is really interesting, although currently and for some time it may be a disadvantage to it's price and marketcap position that it constantly is printing out Steem unlike many others that cost you a lot of electricity and hardware to give you those rewards, at some point the advantages will outweigh the sell pressure that exists today and investors may find themselves not being able to purchase as big of a stake as they would do with other projects they are interested in. Steem is going to feel very scarce even though right now it doesn't and people sell it like it's water. ;)

So to get back to my edgy title, can you already see it?
Being able to delegate and earn passive income from ingame items may be one of the first signs of what is coming to Steem. Can you imagine dapps that will have their own token, where their token has its own tokens all giving you passive income in one way or another. Including adrevenue and other income sources that don't rely on the reward pool but depend on how much stake you are providing. It's gonna be a mess, we will all need a service to determine what to invest in cause we won't have the time to possibly be able to follow everything that is going on, no chance. What are the limits, when does it end, is there a cap?

A lot of people have for a long time underestimated this technology but things are changing and they are changing quick. Money and value will never be the same, automation and being rewarded for being human will also change completely. We will look back at days like these and think of ourselves how idiotic we were similarly to how we today look at the past and reminisce the same way. What we thought had value and what we thought was money is going to seem quite ridiculous in the future.