As I prepared to release Waystation Deimos over the weekend, I also broke another milestone.

I bought Steem (or, really, any crypto) with fiat currency for the first time.

It was a surprisingly simple process, really, though I had to buy some Bitcoin before I could get it into Steem (if anyone knows a way to buy Steem directly in the US, let me know), and it was a great chance to capitalize on Steem being really low to increase our SP and really have more of a stake in the network.

With that said, I want to quickly say that I don't believe that Steem as a currency is necessarily going to be a cash-bearing investment in any sense of the word (though, largely by coincidence, I would've made a profit if I'd turned around to sell today).

Wait, what?

I view Steem as effectively existing as two simultaneous systems:

1. A social network.
2. A transaction provider.

I don't necessarily think that the Steem cryptocurrency is going to have any value, and I'm not concerned as to whether or not it does. At some point I might wind up being able to retire early, but that's a fantasy and I may as well dream about having the socks in my sock drawer turn out to be made of vibranium and actually be worth trillions of dollars.

The important thing is that Steem (in terms of the whole blockcahin, not the currency itself) doesn't get its value from either of those things. My use of Steem doesn't hinge on actually having the Steem currency I hold be worth anything.

Why? Because its value comes from the first two things, the social network and the transaction provider. It's not perfect at doing these, but ith as some real advantages over the alternatives.

The Social Network

Here at Loreshaper Games, we rely on exposure and publicity to do our main thing, which is selling (or, technically, giving away while politely asking for donations in exchange) products.

Every time we gain followers, we gain a potential audience member. Between Discord, Twitter, and Steem, the three platforms we're currently active on, we have a reach of something like 2500 people regularly, though a lot of those people don't have any connection to us and I just connect with them on the Discord servers I browse personally.

One of the advantages to having more SP is that you get more of an influence on the social network. While this is a relatively subdued element; the amount of bandwidth you can access is tied to SP but does not generally require much SP, it increase the curation rewards you receive and also the rewards that the people you upvote receive.

One of the great things about Steem as a social network is that getting upvotes feels rewarding, both in the traditional "like" method but also as a link to numbers. You have a reputation system as well as earning Steem, and both trigger rewarding experiences. More SP means more contribution to that experience to other users.

Plus, on a mercenary level, being able to boost other people more means that your attention is worth more, and having more SP sets you apart from the crowd (not to mention the bots).

A Transaction Provider

One of the only nervewracking parts of buying Steem with fiat was having to go through Bitcoin and make sure that you had the right address.

Hashes are scary.

Steem is very user-friendly for doing transactions, however. You simply send a transaction to the user you want to transact with, using their name. You don't need to remember a hash or use a QR code/hyperlink, and that makes it incredibly simple to deal with.

Another good thing with Steem is that it has no transaction fee, as the bandwidth you receive for holding SP is used to cover the transactions. This means that you can always transfer however much Steem you need without losing money on a transaction fee. The bandwidth limits for the network are also incredibly high, meaning that while there may be cases (like with the most recent hardfork) where people wind up with an inability to conduct transactions, but these are rare and you're not going to see any reason to restrict things for a long time.

An Aside

One of the things that I found interesting is that as I was preparing this I stumbled upon a video by Tim Pool, who's an independent journalist.

Since I powered up, the value of Steem's gone up by $0.40. I'd like to think that I'm a trend-setter, but I think that a large part of what's going on with crypto is the fact that centralized platforms seem to have collectively lost their minds. Twitter's weird, but at least I can follow professionals and mostly stay out of drama. I left Facebook a month or two ago (maybe more; I don't keep track) because it was a waste of time and sandbags businesses that don't pay for ads. I never got involved with other social media (beyond Steem).

It's just not worth being on these platforms for the majority of users. They're poorly designed and toxic for average users and business stakeholders.

I'm not idealist enough to think that Steem is perfect, but it has everything we need for business.

Leaving Patreon

I'm going to be leaving Patreon shortly. I've already taken my personal account off and I want to get the Loreshaper Games account terminated soon (I have a pending 68 cent payout that's preventing the shutdown; it's too small to withdraw)

The issues surrounding Sargon of Akkad's banning are really what's provoking this. I don't have any real political stake in anything, but I create games set in fantasy universes. The chance that something I write could one day be offensive is not impossible, despite the fact that I try to keep Loreshaper Games family-friendly (capping at a PG-13 threshold), and the permanent nature of the internet. Patreon has shown that they don't really care about the rules they created, and I don't have faith that they would handle a case fairly if an issue came up.

Normally, this wouldn't be an issue, but I've found that Patreon just doesn't yield returns worth worrying about, and then you run into the fact that they don't seem to know what they're doing.

I'm not going to spend more time promoting a Patreon to try and get funding from a company that seems to have so many issues all of a sudden. I'm still open to trying the business model, but I'd prefer a platform that doesn't seem to be so riddled with issues.

Does anyone else find it ironic that "safety and trust" teams tend to have the opposite effect when they put out PR statements?