Don't let that be a source of anxiety for you, there is no point to that. There are plenty of other things to worry about in life than finding the perfect investments. And crypotcurrency remains a risky bet regardless of any recent activity in that market. I know plenty of very smart people who are very knowledgable about bitcoin but who refuse to buy into it. There's nothing wrong with that.
https://steemit.com/steem/@ned/explainer-value-flows-on-stee...
It's a great way to build a large audience of money hungry people, probably not a great way to build a community with any kind of value. Nice hair.
Once you've built a core community that is first and foremost interested in ICOs and cryptocurrencies, how do you get out of that?
The idea is to create thousands of micro community who have their own ideas of where their communities wants to go. They can use their own tokens with their own economics if they happen to not agree with: 1. The inflation rate 2. The curation reward curve 3. The initial distribution
A lot of what you see over there now are schemes that essentially involve paying people to upvote content. At first, I was surprised they allowed people to bribe others to vote. But, when you think about it, that's exactly what the site itself is doing (bribing people to participate).
And, bribing people to upvote is not exactly the best way to encourage good organic content. I tell my friend the model is unsustainable in its current form, as it destroys the value it's trying to create. Worse, that value is what it's trying to redeem to entice more people to participate. So, it'll inevitably run out of gas (they apparently jump-started things by subsidizing initial posts, which sparked early excitement, but payouts sharply declined thereafter).
Some might argue that it democratizes content production, but the value creation effect is not the same as paying a smaller set of producers for valuable content that a larger set would consume.
So, instead, it's more like a perfect case study in tragedy of the commons.
The Steemit frontpage has many self-referencing articles and self-serving, monochromatic content.
Similar to Herbalife which is mostly made up of entrepreneurs selling entrepreneurship to the unsuspecting. There is no product-market fit. When there's money being made and no market fit, suspect MLM.
You're right that we're still a small and niche social network and that may be reflected in the trending page, HOWEVER, that definitely creates opportunity for people to bring something different to the table. Our MOST successful blogger is actually a travel blogger named @sweetsssj. You can see her stuff here: https://steemit.com/@sweetsssj. If you are right that the content isn't valuable, then that means their is a gap in the market that you can fill! Believe me, I know a lot of our community members and we jump any time anyone with a unique valuable proposition comes to the platform and genuinely engages with the community.
A year ago people levied the same criticisms as I am seeing here. Since then we have grown by orders of magnitude and so has the value of our coin. Personally, I don't really know how to respond to people struggling with FOMO. I certainly empathize, but I made a vow not to make decisions based on fear, but instead focus on the vision of the future I want to actualize (one where those who add value to a network receive a proportionate amount of stake in it) and, of course, self interest. I believed in the vision held by those who founded Steemit which is why I started contributing to it (and earned a great deal of Steem in the process) and why I eventually jumped at the opportunity to join the team. I hope to see you around our amazing community. We sincerely believe people come for the rewards, but stay for the community. And there are exciting changes coming soon too!
Community Liaison, Steemit
Most people are treating these things like startups, where the code is the primary asset. That's wrong. The code matters, but the primary asset behind a cryptocurrency is a balanced set of incentives which create an environment that encourages some predictable behavior.
Balancing those incentives is work, and not every project is doing it. Seek out communities where there is focused, ends-oriented discussion about incentives, grounded in recent crypto techniques.
If you find one that is also rallied around a cryptosoftware that does something you care about, and has a "healthy" work culture, whatever that means to you, that's your pot of gold. Not only do you stand a good shot making money investing in that communitity, but you can find a career there, and possibily even make a name for yourself.
Good luck.
That is just the hype getting to you. Anything that sells itself with as much hype as bitcoin does with the implicit (sometimes explicit) message that you better BUY NOW or you'll miss the boat... it means it is probably too good to be true.
The deeper you dig into bitcoin, the less attractive it actually is. Everything from the super shady set of characters that are at the top of its pyramid who hold the majority of its coins to all the promises it makes that are blatant mistruths (it isn't free, it isn't instant, it isn't trustless, it isn't decentralized....). Bitcoin is not a good investment.
I just buy Bitcoin and sit on it
Why so many crypto news are on trending. It is simple. Most of users came from this area, but right now Steemit is the only blockchain project which actually be used by every-day people.
If you want to choose a cryptocurrency as a hedge I'd go for litecoin, it's fairly old and under active development. It's far past the point where it's riding on a couple pump and dumps and unlike bitcoin isn't talking about 2-3 chain splits in one year.
It's very hard to tell which of the new cryptocurrencies are legit, and even if you identify ones that look good, that's no guarantee the price will actually go up.
Surely cryptocoin software is more than a pump and dump system right? Hodl until you can pass off to the later bag holders?
What happens when the old networks are obsolete?
In economics, the Gini coefficient is the standard measure
of how inequitable a society is. This is tricky to
determine for Bitcoin, as it's not quiet a "society" in
the Gini sense, one person may have multiple addresses and
many addresses have been used only once or a few times.
(The commonly-cited figure of 0.88 is based on one small
exchange in 2011.) However, a Citigroup analysis from
early 2014 notes: "47 individuals hold about 30 percent,
another 900 a further 20 percent, the next 10,000 about
25% and another million about 20%"; and distribution
"looks much like the distribution of wealth in North Korea
and makes China's and even the US' wealth distribution
look like that of a workers' paradise
Dorit Ron and Adi Shamir found in a 2012 study that only
22% of then-existing Bitcoins were in circulation at all,
there were a total of 75 active users or businesses with
any kind of volume, one (unidentified) user owned a
quarter of all Bitcoins in existence, and one large owner
was trying to hide their pile by moving it around in
thousands of smaller transactions. (Shamir is one of the
most renowned cryptographers in the world and the "S" in
"RSA encryption")"
Cryptocoin minting algorithms distribute the supply based on what the developer typed in. Almost always, this is exploited by the developer to create the most amount of coins for the least amount of effort to the smallest group of users at the start of the project. Then they just wait in hopes other users speculate on the "limited" supply and they dump their holdings which cost less to produce then current coins are being produced for.
Trading cards, beanie babies, and database-coin entries have production costs, which users don't always realize are significantly lower than the price they're charged for in retail.
If you’re logged out, the trending page is across the whole of the network; that’s of course going to skew toward cryptocurrencies at the moment because, well, Steem itself is also a blockchain and cryptocurrency.
That’s like complaining that HN is about “internet stuff”. Duh. :)
I'm experiencing a lot of anxiety lately that I'm missing the cryptocurrency boat, but at the same time the more I research the possibilities I'm finding far less opportunity to invest and much more opportunity to get taken.