Over the last few days, I have been thinking quite a lot about the various potentials of the investments I hold and whether I have over extended or under invested myself. After talking to someone I trust, I do think that I have under-extended in the Bitcoin arena, but I also feel that in Steem, I am at a pretty good level. If Steem does well, I will be okay, as will thousands of other people, which is pretty cool - isn't it?
I was saying to my friend that no matter what traditional work I could have done in the last 2.5 years, there is no way that there would be as much upside potential that Steem has. Yes, I could have worked more and invested in, but to have the same upside, it would have been an investment into crypto itself.
The colleague I was talking to yesterday was saying that he has invested into managed funds through his bank and I was wondering, how much potential such investments have if people are apply getting 10% a year on them. How much would one have to put into these kinds of investments to make a significant difference. Of course, if one starts early enough and heavily enough, it does make a difference, but I am 40, I don't have that time anymore, nor do I have the chunks of funds to do it now.
So, with a few hundred Euros here and there to invest, what would make a significant difference to my life 20 years from now? Unless extremely lucky, I am unlikely to be able to pick a unicorn company early enough to be able to benefit heavily as the attrition rate and level of growth is highly unexpected. Even one of the founders of Apple didn't see that the share he sold for 2000-odd dollars would one day be worth 300B or something like that - and that was his own startup.
How I see it, to make any significant inroads with my few hundred Euros I have to invest long-term, it has to be in something that is going to be mass-adopted and of course, I need to be lucky. While Bitcoin might be a great store of value that will be adopted by the institutions, for the institutions to be able to really make the money they are looking for on it, they will have to be able to use it to empower their business clients who need to be able to use it to service their user base in some way. With the value of Bitcoin itself, I think that it will likely be that tokenized layers will be used for the currency mechanisms.
I think that Steem works in a similar way with Steem eventually becoming an increasingly locked-up investment layer that allows for businesses to build upon a stable foundation and then, the tokenized layers are how they service their clients. Steem doesn't need billions of holders to be successful, in the same way that most companies in this world don't need billions of investors to be successful.
Some people think that Steem should be simpler to use and I disagree, the tokenized layers and businesses should be. As far as I see it, because Steem is an investment layer required as a foundation for what is to be built upon it, it should require learning in order to invest into it as it is always an "invest at your own risk" position. Sure, anyone can buy any stock but to be part of the development team, to have influence, people should have some understanding of the way things work and on Steem that means understanding some of the technical aspects, as well as the community points.
Steem can be an investment vehicle that pulls its value from all the utilization on the layers above it, much like an indexed fund. What this means is that while content creators are the future, those content creators don't need to be on Steem in order for Steem to do well, they can create on the various business experiences above. And while Steem ownership can be decentralized, those business layers are independently and potentially privately owned and invested into, and can do as they choose to service their clientele. That means centralization.
Centralization seems to be a dirty word on Steem, but it is not. Steem is decentralized through centralized experiences already, as each user makes their own decisions in a centralized manner - they make their own choices. Some of those users will decide to create a business, some will choose to use that business because it offers them something that they are willing to utilize and potentially pay for the availability.
For my investment purposes, Steem fits the bill as there is massive upside potential and distributed income streams available and, it is a long-term value proposition, meaning that my few hundred Euros here and there has the chance to mature into something significant in the long view of things. I believe that most of the projects around today are going to fail to produce anything other than speculative value, whereas Steem has the potential to actually generate many points of value over time.
Then the luck comes into it where with enough built experiences, eventually one of them could hit the masses and then, everything changes. One highly adopted company on Steem attracts more attempts and, the index gets to work to calculate the values of the investment layer of Steem below them.
One of the things that is interesting with Bitcoin is that in order to profit from it, one needs to pretty much sell it, and once something is sold, it is no longer owned. Steem can offer income without selling, that is a massive benefit in itself. Upside potential is a tricky business on Steem as most people will of course look at the price of Steem as the indicator but, there is also all of the opportunity to earn from the distributed experiences, businesses and services that will arrive - which makes calculations more complex than a buy and sell value.
This is good in my opinion as what it means is that in time, Steem could become a true economic environment with all of the complexities and opportunities that come along with it. While many people may not agree with my views on this, they are also not the ones doing the work or door investing in what I am investing in.
While I am open to influence, my decision making process is centralized -
I make my own choices on Steem.
Taraz
[ a Steem original ]
