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RE: So who is actually paying the Steemit bill?
Upvote for raising a valid point. I've been wondering this for a long time now too and where the money comes from. I do not want it to become a place like facebook were it is flooded and you are bombard by adds that interfere with the user interface experience. Things like reddit gold or the small ads on top or on the side would be preferable. Also I really don't understand enough about mining bitcoins or altcoins to even fully understand how those have value you either though. So im not really one to understand crypto currencies in general. kinda frustrating having the lack of knowledge after I've read so much.
Don't worry, the Bitcoin/crypto part is actually pretty simple. Bitcoin has a simple selling proposition: being digital Gold, just as it was designed to be. It took years to get where we are now, still a tiny niche, but many have grown used to that idea and actually use Bitcoin that way so far. As for Gold: Imho there is no special reason it's gold and not platinum or iridium or whatever rare metal you could name. It's simply has become a tradition to see it that way, as a scarce "store of value".
It's with Steem, Steem Power and SBD that things get much more tricky. I've never seen anything like that. A kind of monetary token that is designed like an inflationary hot potato but has to support with it's price (the expression of the value people active in the market see) the rest (SP and SBD). That has nothing to do with other cryptocurrencies, it is much more complex, so don't worry there either.
Because it is designed that way and you only really need it to get in and out of the Steemit ecosystem, you need people to really want to get in to buy the Steem (you'll always find sellers if the price is high enough, so don't worry about too few sellers). Advertisers are an obvious choice but maybe I am missing other groups. So you have to be careful to give them enough incentives to pay to get your attention. Think of them as sponsors of the system, not as some nuisance like on Facebook. They don't pay you on FB, but they could do so here, by increasing the price of Steem and thus making the rewards you get more valuable.
Gold's value is actually quite practical, from an ancient world point of view, not many of the other metals you mentioned could be found on the surface, and gold, with it's resistance to tarnish and rust and ease of working, was a natural choice. It was easy to make things from, appealing aesthetically, and it lasted basically forever, unlike iron.
Ive read about more and understand it better now. The value goes up on each cryptocurrency based on the security of the blockchain created by the miners. value goes up the more rare each coin is for mining it.
I do like the idea of getting paid directly instead of the platform profiting from our data and I completely agree that the investors need incentive to invest. Yet I'm very mixed about the advertising still. Mostly because it so easy for entities who leverage money to take over a platform.
Once you let some of it in, then it seems to take over and dampen the user interface. It should be very clear and obvious were an advertisement is, I feel it is manipulative to hide the ads within all the other content. I was using facebook as an example earlier but I feel this has also plagued other social media platforms like instagram, twitter, youtube, and many other great platform that now have a dampened experience for me now. Reddit is still more or less classy with the way they do there adds. Craiglist is the most amazing to me cause I haven't seen any sacrifice in user interface to make more money. I believe though that there is a way to find a balance between these two things.