Crypto Tokens, Communities and Steemit
A few days ago I listened to an interesting discussion on @fyrstikken's podcast in which @ned explained a little bit more how two upcoming Steemit features, Communities and Community tokens, could work and their importance for Steemit and for the Steem blockchain in general. If you haven't already listened to the podcast, I highly recommend it. This is an important discussion that needs to be had by as many people as possible. The more people analyze and talk about these two features, the more perspectives on them can be had, the better.
Check @fyrstikken's recent post about community tokens: https://steemit.com/community-tokens/@fyrstikken/thinking-about-the-future-user-issued-tokens-on-steem-trying-to-explain-my-vision
I think that these two features, if properly implemented, will be a huge step forward for the future success of Steemit.
Imagine opening a group on Facebook or a subreddit on Reddit in which members of the group can earn my providing value to the other members and each member deciding what's valuable and what's not. In a way, it brings that saying "vote with your dollar" to an actual reality. At least, in the online world. Also imagine that anyone can create their own cryptocurrency by just a few clicks of the button. The community building and support possibilities are endless.
On the same topics, I've stumbled upon two Medium articles today, one also giving Steemit as an example.
Introducing Peerism: the Skill Token Economy for Post-Capitalism
Peerism solves job automation and wealth inequality via a blockchain-based economic protocol which matches paid work to tokenized individual skill levels, and shares the wealth from commons-owned AI.
The Ethereum-powered protocol autonomously routes tasks directly to the person or commons-owned bot with the required skills. This ensures a workforce resilient to automation by giving workers the choice of ondemand paid tasks matched to their interests, while simultaneously up-skilling.
The key to achieving this is for individuals to work for skill-based cryptocurrency tokens, enabling the economy to be self-aware of their diverse skillsets and to accurately quantify and rank those skills across a distributed global network — this is the goal of Peerism.
By earning skill tokens for each piece of work performed and engaging in those interest communities, you’re able to level-up a unique and diverse set of skills. Via peer-to-peer learning, peerism tightly couples education and work. Individuals pursue their passions while receiving paid work matched to their ever-increasing skill levels.
Your skills become quantified, ranked and transferable anywhere across the decentralized peerism economy.
No more degrees, instead you learn rapidly from others. No more 9-to-5 jobs or competing for low-paid gigs, instead high-paying tasks matched to your skills simply land in your feed ready to one-click claim or pass. No more resumes or CVs with references, instead the economy knows your skills:
12,234 Economics tokens
9,123 AstroPhotography tokens
2,345 3Dprinting tokens
270 FidgetSpinner tokens
Also an article describing the importance of crypto tokens.
Crypto Tokens: A Breakthrough in Open Network Design
Ethereum is inspiring a new wave of token networks. Developers are building token networks for a wide range of use cases, including distributed computing platforms, prediction and financial markets, incentivized content creation networks, and attention and advertising networks. Many more networks will be invented and launched in the coming months and years
First, tokens provide a way not only to define a protocol, but to fund the operating expenses required to host it as a service. Bitcoin and Ethereum have tens of thousands of servers around the world (“miners”) that run their networks. They cover the hosting costs with built-in mechanisms that automatically distribute token rewards to computers on the network (“mining rewards”).
Second, tokens provide a model for creating shared computing resources (including databases, compute, and file storage) while keeping the control of those resources decentralized (and without requiring an organization to maintain them). This is the blockchain technology that has been talked about so much.
Moreover, well-designed token networks include an efficient mechanism to incentivize network participants to overcome the bootstrap problem that bedevils traditional network development. For example, Steemit is a decentralized Reddit-like token network that makes payments to users who post and upvote articles. When Steemit launched last year, the community was pleasantly surprised when they made their first significant payout to users.
This in turn led to the appreciation of Steemit tokens, which increased future payouts, leading to a virtuous cycle where more users led to more investment, and vice versa. Steemit is still a beta project and has since had mixed results, but was an interesting experiment in how to generalize the mutually reinforcing interaction between users and investors that Bitcoin and Ethereum first demonstrated.
Crypto tokens are currently niche and controversial. If present trends continue, they will soon be seen as a breakthrough in the design and development of open networks, combining the societal benefits of open protocols with the financial and architectural benefits of proprietary networks. They are also an extremely promising development for those hoping to keep the internet accessible to entrepreneurs, developers, and other independent creators.
The "tokenization" of the internet is just beginning and Steem will be at the forefront of this process.
