Today the value of Facebook is over 335.000.000.000 dollars.
This value is generated entirely by the fact that 1 billion people uses Facebook everyday.
Facebook is getting value from our natural propension to generate relations and to cooperate. And also from our propension to fight each other, eventually.
But does Facebook cooperate with us ?
- we have to pay to advertise our own business, and Facebook sets the price we pay. And moreover Facebook decides what can be integrated with their site and what cannot. Being Facebook a private company that works for his own interests, this hardly allows anyone with a competing service to survive.
- we not have a say about Facebook policy, and censorship phenomena are already happening.
And Facebook is just an example, but talking about what other companies are doing to our own life and planet would bring this post too far, and I will treat this matter in an other ones.
As early adopters of Steem we have a great responsibility: we have to start to involve our family, our friends, and start using Steem instead of Facebook or other socials, to share our toughts, our experiences, our dreams.
We are going to make a lot of money doing this, but this is not the point.
To understand the point we have to think a bit outside the box, and try to understand the nature of money. And this won't bring us out of topic: because our whole life is conditioned by the functioning of the economic system.
Money is for the society what the blood is for a living organism: it has the function of facilitating the exchanges between the various parts. Like blood isn't a property of lungs or liver, and neither of heart, money shouldn't be a private property of anyone, but only an instrument to facilitate trades. Allowing to trade a future production for instant availabilty of goods and services, money allows anyone who has the skill to do anything to produce something useful for the community.
In the world we can build thanks to cooperation and free currencies, having much money will just mean to have the skills and the responsibility to produce something useful for others.
We will make a lot of money because we are creating an enormous network of intelligences, competences, and hopes. And we are not delivering it in the hands of some "astute" speculator who may only think to his short-term self-interest just cause he can't manage to think to anything better.
We are creating this network of free spirits to hold it in our hands and in the same time share with others.
Many of us will have very soon the availability of dozens or hundreds of thousand dollars that they will use to realize the activity of their dreams, and share their experience with others.
The point are not the thousands, or millions, of dollars. The point is that finally everyone, in every part of the world, will have the chance to do something good for others.
Of course many people will just try to exploit Steem to make some money in the short term. But even this people, who probably learnt from his life experience that the only way to achieve something is to sottract it from an other human being (and it is people like this that we often find at the head of big companies that condition our lives), even this people will have the chance to realize that there is an other way of living waiting from them just outside the box.
I know about this people because I have been one of them for a long time. I have been a professional poker player for many years, and a pretty successful one in my country. When everyone around you thinks that the only thing to make a living is to sottract money from other people you may end to believe that this is really the only way.
But it is not. And we are all here to realize it together.
Happy Steem everyone!
Simone
There are so many interesting things happening in technology today. I'm really excited to see if the world will continue to evolve into a much more fair balance. all the blockchain technologies has the potential to move everything in that direction, but there's also always a tradeoff when doing something different. hopefully those tradeoffs wont be too problematic.
I believe the challenge is to make technology an instrument from human beings, instead of the opposite.
And for this there isn't a magic recipe, but the challenge to put human in the first place in every thing that we do.
Much of the economic world and of the internet world is now in the hands of few subjects that are not human, and are not supposed to work in the best interest of human beings: internet companies, hedge funds, banks, etc. What happens if a person working for a certain company doesn't put the interest of the company in first place but instead the interest, for example, of a human being who is in trouble ? Of course there will be one more human being in trouble, as this person would be fired.
This must change, and Steem can be a technology at our service to make this change happen. Because creating a free currency based on our work to build a community, and sharing our competences, we create a free market: and this won't remain confinated in this virtual reality but will have an impact in everyday life as much a revolution like Internet changed our lives.
Okay, so I see this as the new gold rush, a collective gold rush more like. Don't you think this going to create a new set of 1% elite who have manage to collect more crypto currency than others? I mean this is only available to someone with access to technology, an entire world out there has no such facility. Similarly, the 1%-ers who gambled on the Bitcoin back in 2010 have now amassed millions of dollars while people who are just finding out about this have to battle against the $600 trading price at the minute. I see the obvious and intelligible implications and benefits of the Blockchain technology but would it not take us years to move beyond money as the sole basis of value?
I believe Steemit is going to have success because it will be always possible to do something good for the community, so the "elite" who has much steem power will remain the elite only continuing to contribute to the project.
What is really good in Steemit is that is a currency free of debt, this is the revolutionary thing. I will try to explain it better in a further post :)
That makes very little sense. Its like Adam Smith putting his faith in the then future bankers thinking they would do great things for the economy and society? Look where we are today? 1% own more than 50% of the entire wealth.
I understand that its a currency that isn't based on debt, like you know, gold. Only this is gold that isn't available to everyone. Therefore a technological redistribution of wealth makes no sense, as crypto itself stops making sense in a world where a computer or a mobile phone is not owned by everyone. There are many countries that have a very small percentage of active internet and computer users. Catch my drift?
Seriously liberating to know we can meaningfully challenge the status quo with regard to social media, and potentially make money as well!! I'm really interested to see how businesses and NGOs use this format to boost their brand/profiles or raise money. I think there is huge NGO blogging potential.
This is a better explanation of what I was attempting to share in my article:
We all want it — Steemit https://steemit.com/steemit/@strangerarray/we-all-want-it
good