Steem Basic Income is a social experiment to bring a basic income to as many Steemians as possible. Members join by sponsoring others into the program. Steem Basic Income is delivered through providing regular upvotes to member content.
To provide more interaction within Steem Basic Income (SBI), we are continuing our interviews with prominent members of SBI! We hope to bring a greater sense of community, get to know our members, and gain a better understanding of why Steemians are choosing to be a part of SBI.
Greetings, fellow Steemians, I am @wesphilbin; I joined Steemit back in June of 2017 (ironically, the same time as @eturnerx) and was interactive for a short time. But I was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis in July of 2016, so being active was a difficult thing to do. I have since returned and tried to be more active, M.S. allowing. I recently became interested in SBI, after being brought in by a good friend @tattoodjay. After looking through the various concepts of SBI, I decided to research further and met @josephsavage. I discovered there was a need for writers in which to interview potential SBI members, and like the above says; gain a better understanding of why Steemians are indeed choosing to be a part of SBI.
Today I had the pleasure of interviewing @eturnerx. He joined Steemit in June of 2017 and has many projects he’s currently running. After chatting with him for a while, I do get the sense that he is quite fond of community. He had a pending deadline, so we chatted on and off about all things Steemit, Steem Basic Income, including his thoughts on how SBI affected the current state of affairs on Steemit, and then briefly spoke of his ongoing personal projects…
Wes: Tell me a little bit about yourself; family, upbringing...what was it like growing up?
@eturnerx: The third child in a large Christian family, born in a lucky country. Two master's degrees, speak a couple of languages. My politics are broadly libertarian, but they come out looking a bit social Democrat.
Wes: That's quite impressive; being fluent in different languages, and having a good education surely must help you out in your endeavours. If you would, take me through a normal day in the Steem’verse… what constitutes a day for you?
@eturnerx: A day in the life of steem for me: - Check @we-are is running (it is, pretty reliable) - Check my investment tasks (mostly minnowbooster/dlease) - Check on @msp-foundation - again, mostly automated so just glance at the logs - Check my Discord: hope there's positive news about some project or other - Jump on Partiko and deal with replies and mentions - See if anything needs doing for @msp-makeaminnow. Shoutout to the Organizers @juliakponsford, @clayboyn and @victoriabsb for doing all of the actual work. - Maybe work on a post-draft. Those are on Google drive. I have maybe 50+ articles in various states of never being finished. Mostly about music. - Reconsider my work-life balance.
Wes: It sounds like you are pretty busy; with all of this going on everyday. Keeping that in mind, what is your opinion of this place we call Steem?
@eturnerx: Positive. I was looking to rebalance my crypto and went looking for projects in different categories. Steem was fairly unique in that it had an established base of end users, rather than just traders and fellow crypto nerds. At that time, and still, few other crypto projects can claim that. I like how social media can connect the world - we're not that different really. It gives a way for voices to be heard without others filtering them for us. Cryptocurrency and social media together turbocharge direct / bottom up charity too. It also enables us to form global communities based on shared interests and values rather than being forced into the community by the restrictions of geology.
Wes: As I mentioned in the introduction to my interview, it seems like you are very compassionate about community. What do you think about Steem Basic Income as opposed to Steem?
@eturnerx: SBI allows people to support content creators rather than individual pieces of content. SBI is a promise of future rewards based on past behavior. It takes >100 posts for an SBI share to break even (my calc is old), so when giving SBI shares you are encouraging people to post in future. I think that encourages good content creators to stick around knowing that they are guaranteed some min. payout. I often joke that, due to SBI's give-one-get-one system, I hope to give away enough SBI that it eventually becomes economically stupid for me not to post.
The flipside is, since SBI is automatic, I sometimes get rewarded for posting stuff I barely think is worthy of the upvotes. So, it is a bit of disincentive to post ephemeral content for me personally. Anyway, supporting content creators that work consistently I think is closer to the reality of what Steem is.
Curation is hard, so autovoters, SBI etc. allow people to automate how they support others in their personal communities. Shameless plug for a project of my own: @we-are (blog is at: @we-are-one) is based more directly on the concept of communities and giving upvotes to content creators based on their community affiliation. This is social media, so social stickability is important - esp. if the monetary rewards aren't sufficient motivation. And, for me, I think communities provide that. I think SBI is somewhat similar in being a way to forge community ties via gift giving. Economically SBI is fairly similar to powering up the 1 STEEM (instead of gifting the 1 SBI) and adding the person to your autovoter. But in the long run, it creates less blockchain spam (SBI accumulates and gives a single vote). It's also a bit more selfless because you've only attached your ego to all the future upvotes once with SBI, whereas it's every time with an auto-voter.
Wes: I’m curious; you’ve touched upon several different projects you have in the works. Do any of them involve the Steem Basic Income rationale?
@eturnerx: @msp-makeaminnow has included SBI as part of its prizes for the last 10 or so rounds. I sometimes run SBI contests relating to my music posts. The usual requirement is for entrants to demonstrate some engagement with the content by finding another song by one of the featured artists. I also experiment with @steem-bounty for those contests too. Occasionally I just gift SBI. If somebody does some work for me, I like to include some SBI in the reward ... for that long-term encouragement.
Wes: That's quite honorable I think; gifting others that help you with SBI. That goes back to your interest in community… quite impressive. So how did you learn about Steem Basic Income? Do you remember who sponsored you into the program?
@eturnerx: I can't recall how I learned about SBI. My apologies to any reader who introduced me! I think I heard whispers from multiple sources so it was floating around the ether. I read the content available at the time and was convinced to try SBI. I emphasize try because no matter how good things appear, no matter how awesome the system looks, it still relies on human implementation, running and some level of trust. I tend to gradually extend my trust as things become more proven over time. There still is an issue that SBI could take the money and run and we have little recourse. So trust is important.
Wes: Fair enough; it certainly doesn't matter who brought you in. Rather; just glad to see you do trust enough to stick around to see how things go. Where do you see yourself moving forward? Will you be utilizing the Steem Basic Income initiatives in your daily activities, or current projects?
@eturnerx: A bit of a long story. Not long after arriving on steem, I saw an astute observation from @world-travel-pro: that steem had the structure of a third world economy. That got me thinking about economic transformation. Go add that guy to your auto-voters btw... his consistency is amazing.
How do we create a middle class? The answer is normally to raise them out of the red-fish/minnows somehow. I noticed that I was time poor, but had some resources (SP), while there were a lot of people doing the labor of community building on extremely low resources (SP). So, I try to support community builders where I can.
I'm not particularly married to any particular project, provided it fulfills its goals of building community, because that where I think the middle-class rises (for the most part - there are exceptions). There are a couple of communities where I delegate SP to their moderators/admins - most notably MSP - so that their mods can at least have a voting slider. @msp-makeaminnow supports community builders with a sizeable delegation for a month - and also confronts community builders with the selflessness issue of giving now or investing in their own personal strength to give more later. @we-are started because I wanted to give community leaders fewer headaches to getting upvotes for their community; no need to curate, no need to attract the technical skill to build a bot or convince people to follow a trail etc ... and for donors ... no need to directly pick individual communities. @we-are is maybe working too well in the sense that it just does its thing so is barely noticeable. Set and forget is too easy to forget, heh. That also goes for me and my dev efforts... remind me to put more time into that bot :wink:
I think SBI has complementary goals to some of my own efforts, which is why I use SBI but still continue with my own projects. Most notably; SBI is for encouraging individual content creators to be consistent; its main community building function comes about because of the give-one-get-one reciprocity. But otherwise, SBI isn't as particularly focused on community as other projects. That's not a criticism of SBI - we need the plurality imo.
Interview Conclusion
After looking at @eturnerx's blog, as well as the various topics we discussed, I think it was a very positive choice to share his ideas about SBI, and I enjoyed chatting with him. As you can see, he is very committed to community standards, through various programs he has running. We even had our own little "question and answer" session while conducting this interview. I hope it helped to provide a relaxed atmosphere, as well as show the transparency being projected by the Steem Basic Income community. Thank you for taking the time to read my interview; if you'd like to see more about @eturnerx and what he's about, you should definitely view his blog.
Sustainability Coverage and VP Management
Sustainability Coverage is currently at 87.77% and rshares reward rate is 702,162,100 per SBI unit per day.
The rshares reward rate for bonus units (delegation reward) is not decreased, and you can help increase the sustainability coverage (and thus the rshares reward rate on regular units) by delegating to @steembasicincome.
For more information, please read Into the Heart of Sustainability.
Upvoting Reward multipliers are currently at 1.10x until our Voting Power recovers to 80%.
Questions?
Please read our FAQ. If you still have questions, ask in the comments section or join us in our discord channel.
Steem Creators Conference is now Global Block Builders. We are happy to have been invited back for our third appearance. Join us in Austin, TX, USA from April 10 through 13.
@steembasicincome's eighth member interview!
@katysavage
@wesphilbin 
@eturnerx) and was interactive for a short time. But I was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis in July of 2016, so being active was a difficult thing to do. I have since returned and tried to be more active, M.S. allowing. I recently became interested in SBI, after being brought in by a good friend 
@tattoodjay. After looking through the various concepts of SBI, I decided to research further and met 
@josephsavage. I discovered there was a need for writers in which to interview potential SBI members, and like the above says; gain a better understanding of why Steemians are indeed choosing to be a part of SBI.
