Okay, so there are a couple of ways to earn on Leo Finance including writing and posting for reward, staking and tokens and voting, as well as taking part as a Liquidity Provider - and of course, speculating and trading tokens on the DEX. These are all well and good, but there is another value that many are taking advantage of, yet I am not sure how many recognize it.
Leo Finance is a community built around a niche topic, Finance. This includes a range of content buckets like trading, economics and plenty of "coin price" and "coin shill", as well as the regurgitation of public news releases. Yes, there is also a heavily supported "LEO content" segment, which is natural, considering that those with stake are interested in supporting the platform, though my warning would be of course that we have seen where too much support for inwardly-facing content leads.
For me, I stay away from most of these areas, other than for using them as highlights to point at other factors that interest me, which is mainly human behavior and how it is affected by environmental conditions. In regards to Leo Finance content, I do what I normally do, which is to observe and analyze the way people operate from my perspective, in regards to the economy and personal finance factors, with perhaps obviously, a heavy crypto and blockchain perspective. Personally, I don't read that much as I prefer to think for myself and while I might be wrong at times, it makes what I learn and the lessons carried, far more valuable and applicable to my own life.
Before communities were introduced, communities existed, it is just that they were less formal and more centered around initiatives and projects of various kinds, with the most successful of them having one thing in common - Stake. Stake gave incentive for people to post into the content niche in the hope for votes, which also meant that people who might not be interested in the area, would still participate. If there was a whale who wanted to support Haikus, the amount of Haiku poetry on the platform would explode - in the same way "translation" of technical content exploded under Utopian back in the day, yet who does that now?
This is not a bad thing, it just illustrates how incentives drive behavior and it is natural that on a crypto platform, people are interested in earning crypto - though many convert it into fiat. It also shows how people may not actually care about their preferred content genre as much as they say they do, as many are very, very willing to change what they write for money. Again, natural behavior, as we act on what is important to us and what is important can be affected through the incentives on offer.
With LEO being about 3x the value of HIVE currently, it has obviously attracted a lot of attention within the Hive community and is starting to get a bit of traction externally as well. Not only this, the Leo Finance team is not focusing solely on the tokenomics of their platform, they are also thinking about the User Experience (UX) through the way they order their content and the introduction of the Leo Lightning Database layer, to speed up the usage on the frontend, by stacking transactions into a queue at the back. Leveraging attention on the token price to build usability and enduser support is a smart play and something that Hive needs to do, as Steem failed quite miserably at this. The value of Hive is the userbase, but that means UX needs to be a focal point.
But, this isn't the added value I mentioned at the start.
How many syllables in a Haiku?
I know - because I Googled it.
This is the value. Because Leo incentivizes finance content, it means that people who might not have spent that much time in this area earlier, are now roaming the internet looking for content that they can use as a basis for their posts. As a result, they are learning far more than they were earlier about finance and economics, because they are spending more time surrounding themselves with and writing about these areas.
Normally, we spend our time and energy on the things that we enjoy, even if those things don't have much value or are even detrimental to our own well-being. Rather than disincentivizing these behaviors, it is possible to create change by incentivizing better alternatives. In regards to finance and economics, it could even be the case that once a person starts learning about these areas, they will recognize the cost of much of their current activity and take the opportunity to change their behavior. This means that the change is not only incentivized, but also an internal shift in mindset that can have real-world implications on personal finances.
Essentially, incentivizing economics and finance exposes people to areas that are generally disincentived culturally, as they are not integrated well into education systems and are made a taboo topic to openly discuss. Plus for many, they are made to look complicated and boring. Yet, they affect us all and affect us heavily, personally and as a society as a whole.
The more exposure people have to the theories and practical application of economics and finance the better and of course, when there is also the intertwining of blockchain and crypto into the mix, the more chance there is of making significant change to the global economy, one person at a time. As more get involved, the chance that they will start looking longer into the future than the payout window, as well as start becoming advocates both online and on the ground at the local level.
In my opinion, this is highly valuable.
As mentioned multiple times and likely from many sources, what needs to happen to the crumbling global economy is wholesale replacement, but in order to do so requires a paradigm shift in the minds of the participants. This has to be an organic process where people take what they learn and make it their own to the point that they act differently in the economy itself.
While people focus heavily on the earning potential of Leo Finance and LEO, the greater value to the industry is the support it offers as an incentivized point of collection, distribution and learning for people who might not otherwise participate in this field of study, eve though they are in need of the information to support their daily lives and improve their own well-being and that of their immediate community.
What this means however, is that from a content perspective, Leo Finance could look to support the continued growth development of the userbase in ways that help them change daily behavior. This comes through incentivizing the development of knowledge itself, which is through content distribution or the encouragement of creating content that requires learning to create, the immersion into information that can shift activity toward a better outcome, which means that which drives long-term thinking and behavior over the short-term cash grab mentality. As people start to make the mental transition, they can move further from a hand to mouth mindset to one of an investor, owner and facilitator of the future, where they themselves become instruments in the decentralization of ownership so more people at all levels can take ownership themselves.
In a world that incentivizes instant gratification through the consumption of low-grade content, the process to shift the paradigm is slow and laborious. It is because of this that the economy as we have built it thus far, is so hard to change, as most participants just can't be bothered taking the time to learn how - let alone help others learn along the way.
This was estimated at a 7-minute read. How many do you think made it this far?
Everyone wants better life conditions in some way, most spend very little time learning how to direct their activity toward the outcome they seek. When it comes to personal finance, in the long-term, it is less about what you earn and more about the way you use it. How you earn also has an impact, especially if what you do helps others grow for the better as well. Platforms can facilitate, but it is up to the users which behaviors are incentivized.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
