Would Steem Be More Valuable If It Were Worthless?

The cool thing about blockchain the technology and technology in general is that once you get beyond the glitz, glamour, and greed and dive beneath the surface you can uncover a lot of cool ideas and can reflect on old ideas with a refreshing new light.

Here's an interesting thought: Would Steem be more valuable if it worthless?

Meaningful experiences don't need a monetary value

Perhaps you cannot fathom a worthless Steem token. But just imagine a coin that you couldn't trade for another token, just a token that you could simply use to distribute more tokens to other people. Steem is no longer is bounded by the definition of money, but has the opportunity to become something else.

What does Steem anymore if it has no monetary value? Well, what does it represent beyond what monetary value it has?

I would argue that Steem becomes a measure of credibility within the network. Someone with more Steem Power has more credibility within the network since people have openly allocated that Steem to them over time. Granted that would require them to start at zero, but who would buy Steem in the first place if it were worthless?

With these tokens we would actually be interested in distributing them towards people that made content we actually liked and not towards the content and individuals that would maximize personal profits because there would be no profits.

Content would be better because there would be no real reason to post other than to participate in community of individuals that prioritize meaningful interaction and passion in their work over their time. With a valuable token, you prioritize money over everything else.

But who cares about money? Blockchain governance would actually worth exploring if we treated the imaginary money as imaginary money. People would be interested in creating a legitimate decentralized community rather than living in their isolated self-interested bubbles looking out solely for themselves.

Sure, you might argue that nobody would want to be a block producer if all they got was imaginary tokens for all that hassle, but at the time, they are proving themselves as individuals that legitimately care about the community rather than the money. They would gain power and thus receive credibility for the hard work they do for the community for free.

But some would argue that there is no value about having an imaginary playground where people have meaningful interactions and interact with content in new and interesting ways and coming together to build something truly unique. I get if you have no time to play make-believe and if it isn't paying out it ain't worth the time.

But in a world so concerned over status and one where as adults we self-isolate as soon as we grow older and drown ourselves with shots of dopamine in between long hours of meaningless work, perhaps such a community is something we need. Social media with no agendas attached.

But for now it appears that blockchain in the form of cryptocurrency is what the public's eye is fixated on. Rather than find new ways to create interesting forms of social media and social engines, we have to abandon a lot of things that give meaning to society for a quick buck. While there's nothing wrong with following such a path, I simply wonder if we had chosen another. One independent of monetary value instead exploring other avenues of representational value, like credibility or reputation.