Hi Ura, just my view but say I want to tip another Steemit creator over and above what I can do as a minnow, then I can use SBD's. For example you tipped me .12 SBD and I upvoted your article but my SteemPower is only worth a .03 or .04 upvote. So I can do what I just did which is go to my wallet and send you .20 SBD. For me that's utility.
For example when I started on Steemit I was following a Musician/Artist on Steemit called Nina (@derosnec) because I thought she was cool. She started doing video blogs and I tipped her 6 Sbd at one time because to me it was a payment to a musician, kind of like if I just went to a music store and bought her CD. I did similar but less amounts with a couple of other musicians. So it meant I could do meaningful interactions with people I liked or wanted to support outside of just the steemit voting system. So for me that's utility. The fact that the Steemit wallet is so fast and that I'm sending money to a person and not a random string of numbers like the usual wallet address for someone's crypto wallet is also part of the utility.
Over the Xmas period I invested a little in Verge because I liked the open source potential of it and it's supposed to have very fast transfer times. However the anonymity that Verge provides is also it's downside in terms of Utility. For me, as a creative person, on Steemit I can meet and vet other creative people, join in on communities and know who the people behind their wallet's actually are, and then say I want to interact or work or hire/pay, or do work for one of them where either they or I pay each other money, then SBD's are the perfect utility tool to support meaningful interactions.
For that reason I see SMT's being massive when they come out because the perfect use of building blockchain communities based on reputation is having a token system where we can build our own community and reward them, and the fact that Steemit and the Steem blockchain were designed with a "currency" offering, i.e. SBD's will play into that.
Also in terms of Steem, I know you can do useful things like delegate it or lease additional steempower from MinnowBooster but that's a general overall reward. Say you have something specific you want to do or specific about a topic and you just want to boost those posts, you can use SBD's with MinnowBooster to get some direct traction to your content. That to me is very useful, so for example if you have a contest you are offering or you designed a T-Shirt and you want to promote it etc. then using SBD's and boosting your article it is effectively the same as say putting a post on facebook and paying a little to advertise it. I think that concept, letting people pay to advertise or to promote their featured content if they want, is very much a utility that is much needed on a platform like Steemit where things can just get drowned out.
I think overall the utility for me is that I want to meet and collaborate with similar artists on Steemit and have the ability to pay people in SBD and to use SBD's means that (especially once SMT's are deployed) it will become increasingly possible to build supportive micro communities on Steemit based around a topic or interest. Kind of what Google plus nearly did with their circles, but instead with a valid way for artists and creators to tip/pay each over and above just curation rewards. To me that's SBDs.
Also sorry just a final thing but I really hope the pegging SBD's to one US dollar thinking goes away. Firstly free markets aren't free when they are manipulated by a group of witnesses artificially pushing SBD's back down to 1 USD.
i.e just let the market and value go where it rests naturally.
It also benefits creators massively when SBD is high because it's a direct 7 day payout in SBD in real money that they can use if they have to pay an electricity bill.
For that reason alone SBD's have the most utility. Because we all actually need not just to earn steempower but also to earn real money to help us live on a daily level.
So your .12 upvote on my post, given that SBD is worth maybe $5 USD today actually makes it more like getting 30 or 40c for my comment, and that is decent money which makes it worth being engaged.
So even if someone creates a post and only earns $10 in total on that post, they'll probably get a $3 SBD payout which in the real world if market values aren't manipulated might make their $3 payout effectively $15 in the real world.
So high SBD market prices are a big incentive for people to put better and better content on Steemit because it then creates a reward system where you have a real incentive for putting higher quality stuff up.
Especially for artists who show their workflow and create original art for example. Say an artist does that and their post gets $50 rewards on Steemit. The eventual $20 SBD payout they get from that after 7 days will actually help them pay their bills and feed their family. And that's the greatest utility there is.
I think maybe you are missing that you can send Steem to people just as you can do with SBDs, plus some upvote bots also accept Steem as payment, not just SBDs - so as far as I am aware, the only benefit of SBD is that some of the bots accept them and not Steem.
No you're right and I know you can. I probably need to do that, I've just been more drawn to SBD's because you get your post payout in SBD which gives you real currency in SBD that you can spend there and then. I delegate about 50% of my SteemPower and I'm going to build my Steem up a little by exiting out of XVG when the price on the exchanges goes up enough to make it worth it. This was a very long and downwards Xmas period.
I kind of view Steem more like an investment coin that you hold because you don't want to spend it, but you could cash it out in an emergency in a day if you need, whereas because I earn SBD from posts I view those as a utility currency I can use around Steemit to make extra payments or tips or boost posts etc.
Probably not completely accurate but that my way of viewing it.
I understand, ok - yes, that's kind of how it is intended to function to some extent, but there aren't any real rules around it and the fluctuation in SBD value greatly reduces any significant differences between the features of the two. Thanks for your SBD tip by the way :)
I just checked out your website and saw some of your music video back catalog - great stuff! I remember at least a couple of your videos from the past - I think maybe the one for 'torn' is the one I know the most just because of it's large level of exposure at the time.. I haven't really watched TV for years though so maybe some others are biggies for you too. :)
(followed you btw).
Thanks Ura, that's really kind. Yeah I was the exec producer on Torn, at the time it was one of the most visible videos in the world but it never got to number one in the UK because it was beaten out by the The Barbie song for about 14 weeks. Lol.
I kind of don't watch TV either, I do a lot of animation these days and I'm just starting an animation training series which I'm going to be doing on Steemit.
Don't know if you know but there's also a new Vegan discord server / steemit Vegan group that's been set up.
This is the discord link.
https://discord.gg/9HwWkYX