This is interesting. Glad to see openbazaar is doing it's thing and still going.
We have our own marketplace at the IFC and it was doing really well at first when the value of steem was higher and we had a bunch of transactions and stores that opened, but ever since the value of steem dropped it's been really quiet in there..
I think that's one of the main hurdles right now, I feel like if the value of steem went back up even to just a dollar or a couple of dollars that would make a huge difference, but as long as it's below a dollar I think it makes it really difficult for business.
I still highly believe in our marketplace as well, though not sure how to really help it grow much right now with the market where it is and with steem as slow as it is..
But.. There's a few other people trying to do similar as well. I remember hearing about Dstor? And it seemed like they had a bunch of drama and not sure where that's going, there was also steembay I think? or steempay? And a few others.. There's been quite a few attempts to link steem to real world value and I think there's a tremendous amount of potential here. Also this sort of links into our other conversation about freedom and going in a new direction as I think if we had our own currency which we could set up marketplaces for and buy and sell and trade physical items.. That would be a major step towards obsoleting the old forms of power. Will that be steem? I can't say for sure, but I do think that's an important part of the equation to freeing ourselves more.
I saw that IFC mentioned just a minute ago. What is that?
Absolutely. We have to be the change we want to see.
Will Steem be a major crypto? I think is certainly can be.The only way that will happen, though is if we grind it out and add value every day in every way. The tech will stand up, but we have a lot of work to do.
Side note: I think the biggest thing keeping Steem down is all the people that come in and immediately power down and never do anything. It's really a literal drag on the value of the platform. I don't have a solution, but I do think that is our main problem right now.
Why does a low value for Steem make it harder to sell things?
At least from my experience in the Marketplace I created people were doing a lot more business when the value of steem was around a dollar or higher and the two main reasons I think for this is that there was a higher demand for steem cause people believed in it more and thought it was more valuable and the second reason is because you could buy more with less, for example.. When steem was a worth a USD you could say buy a crystal or a drawing or a hat or whatever in one of the shops for 10 steem, now with steem at around 30 cents, it would cost around 3X that in steem and be like 30 steem or more.
For me personally that decrease in value means I'll be spending a lot more steem to purchase anything than I used to pay. And I'm sure other people in the marketplace felt similar.