Hey Charles,
You and I met at the Toronto conference in 2014. Do you think Steemit has made a fundamental shift in the way new adopters are brought into a blockchain based ecosystem?
I mean, the fundamental barrier to entry into Bitcoin or any other crypto up to this point has been the cost. Most of my "normal" friends still don't understand why they would trade fiat for Bitcoin for any reason other than to speculate on the price of Bitcoin.
Steemit offers a different proposition - "earn free coins when you use our app". If every dapp took this approach, do you not think those dapps would attract users more quickly?
I agree with you in the sense that I don't have the economics of Steemit figured out well enough to know if it is sustainable (I've made suggestions about how to improve the network by making Steem more valuable but those have so far gone unanswered). However, perhaps the most important "innovation" behind Steemit is they gave out free coins to everyone who joined and lots of extra free coins to early adopters. Is this not a superior mechanism to grow any crypto community going forward?
If we've learned anything from the last 25 years of Internet, networks that are free to join grow faster than those that are not free. In a way, most of Bitcoin was earned early on "for free" by miners who lent their computing power. Steemit has put value on people's time instead, and in my view, this is a more attractive entry point for the 99% of people who are still not interested in crypto. Thoughts?