The Present Value of an Active Life

Today I’d like to propose some back-of-an-envelope math in the spirit of Freakonomics. How much more valuable does Actifit make an active lifestyle? Previous posts of mine have considered the open source Actifit Fitness Tracker from the perspectives of user experience and technical improvement. This is just a bit of fun from another angle.

_{Photo by bruce mars from Pexels}

Living a non-sedentary lifestyle can pay a broad spectrum of intangible dividends. Active folks may benefit from longer lifespans and natural highs as well as improved quality of life overall. In many ways fitness activity is its own reward. And yet @Actifit proposes to further incentivize our exercise undertakings with cryptocurrency rewards.

Cool―I’ll take it.

There are in fact two cryptocurrency rewards for using Actifit right now, AFIT tokens and upvotes on the Steem blockchain. I will only consider the latter in the calulations below. As for AFIT’s I expect they’ll be worth something soon. I hope they’ll be worth a whole lot. I don’t count on them being worth anything, except maybe bragging rights at the gym.

_{CC0 from Pixabay}

On the other hand the Steem rewards are concrete and immediate. Personally I’m long on Steem. But even for those who are not there’s no denying that a Steem upvote can be cashed out within a week.

There are many valuations that can be made for Steem. For convenience I am going to treat the estimates shown on Steemit as real values in U.S. dollars. This would be a terrible assumption to make if large amounts were at stake. But here we are discussing pennies and only trying to get a rough idea for sake of comparison.

I’m also going to ignore the difference between liquid payouts and Steem Power (as I said, I’m long on Steem). Likewise I’ll consider the curation portion to be mine too, though in the sense of it being my “gift” to the curators and broader Actifit community.

Object to this methodology all you want. You’d be fully justified. Ultimately, it’s just no more than my fancy rationalization for keeping the arithmetic simple.

Measured this way my most recent thirteen Actifit posts average a reward of $0.28. Those are spread out over 25 days. I sometimes run into obstacles posting. Or I simply forget. So, my daily average is closer to $0.15 per post.

_{CC0 from Pixabay}

This may seem like a small amount, but keep in mind this is real money awarded for things I was mostly going to do anyway. Besides, I’m the kinda guy who still bends down to nab lost change on the sidewalk. The Actifit rewards add up too―$55.00 annually. To earn that much from my money market account I’d need to deposit an additional $2,750.00.

So, there you have it. In exchange for investing a little time and effort in using the tracking software, Actifit has made me almost three thousand dollars richer. If I could become more consistent about posting my activity points daily the same level of activity would be worth about the same as $5,000.00 in the bank.

That's how it works out for me. Let me know in the comments if you would approach this question differently.

---

Links

• Actifit Fitness Tracker source code https://github.com/mcfarhat/actifit (Android version)
• Related Article ― Actifit Bug Report and Github Issue
• Related Article ― Actifit Fitness Tracker for iOS: Preserve drafts until posted

Github Account

https://github.com/tdreid