Why Steem Could Be A Great Payment Method

Typically, each blockchain has its own purpose and depending on what it is trying to achieve it might be used by certain type of people. However, Steem is quite unique project that combined various important components that made it very diverse and one of the most successful blockchains on the market.

Since my main focus is payments, I want to outline why I believe Steem as a currency could be one of the greatest payment methods of all time.

Speed

Firstly, it has one of the fastest blockchains on the market, I believe only EOS can be faster at this point. I consider this property is a real gold in 2018. Most of the projects are only starting to develop their scalability roadmap and some are delaying because of certain technical issues they stumble upon.

If you think about it, blockchain is only a different way of storing your data. It’s more secure and reliable way but still it’s just another solution. But due to the massive success of Bitcoin, people began to idolize this tech as something they must use for their business applications. The truth is, that’s not always the case. People don’t understand the basic limitations like speed and the number of transactions their project will be capable of handling because of them.

Besides, if you go deep in the way we make integrations, you’ll find that our core strategy is to integrate with existing software, like point of sale systems or vending machines. That requires near instant broadcast messages to make invoice processing fast. Based on the properties of block generation on the network, Steem absolutely fulfills this gap between the ease of integration for developers and the response of successful transactions that are prevented from double spend attacks.

Community

The biggest benefit I would say that non of the other blockchains have is a humongous community that Steemit holds. At the moment, it is the only working blockchain-based social media network with a real traction and reputation. Because of that, all of the projects that are somehow related to cryptocurrency are migrating over to Steemit. They still have their own blogs but you can’t build an engaged community who is going to support it over the long term elsewhere.

On top of that, big community can be one of the solid reasons that can help a merchant to make up their decision of accepting cryptocurrency. There are over a million accounts on Steemit. They can all become customers if motivated properly with discounts or something. Unfortunately, Steemit has only several thousands of active users so far but I believe that’s only the beginning. Imagine what is going to happen when everybody will start switching from Facebook, Instagram, YouTube into decentralized alternatives? The quality of people will grow so will the dazzling number of potential customers a merchant can have an access to.

Easy to get in

Traditionally, in most of the other blockchains there’s no simple way to get crypto. You need to either mine or trade them. That’s not something your mom would enjoy doing. But when you can create a distribution model which is based on content creation, you change everything. I’ve heard that thousands of people have set up their first wallet specifically because of their awesome work on Steemit.

Features

Lastly, Steem has most of the features that are required for an ordinary person. It has account names and profiles, account recovery, interest bearing accounts, simple voting system. I’m still waiting for recurring payments and a simplified version of memos when you send funds between users.

I assume after the HF20 a team will start working on several awesome functionalities and a native Steemit mobile app, which makes me even more excited. In any case, that's only my personal opinion. We'll see how far Steem will go in terms of adoption in payments.