No such thing as a passive investment on Steem.

I had my infusion treatment about two hours ago, so before the week-long migraine sets in, I thought I would hammer out a very quick post on my thoughts about investing into Steem - you know - just for a change.

What I was thinking about is that it is often heard and many people believe that investing into things like bidbots is a passive investment, but that is not actually the case. This is the same for circle voting. Sure, the activity of the account is passive, but the stake is very, very active. Not only is it active, where it is active has an effect, and because it draws Steem from the resource pool, there is an opportunity cost with how that Steem could have be alternatively used.

Could the 20-30 million Steem that has been issued by bidbots over the last 2 years have been better utilized by going into the hands of people developing, powering up and in general adding value to Steem, other than on the shite that was appearing in Trending? Probably.

When it comes to a passive investment, Steem doesn't qualify because stake itself competes for resources that affect the business model, always. This is of course a pro and con of Steem because unlike the investment when buying a traditional stock, Steem allows investors to directly impact the resource availability and where those resources are going to be utilized.

Normally, this is not the case. You buy a stock and hope it goes up, or that it will pay out some kind of dividend. That stock can't be used (unless owning a very high amount) to affect anything that the company actually does in their day to day. For those of you who own Apple stocks, try getting them to make the next iPhone in your favorite color.

The thing with stake on Steem is, even when it is inactive, it actively affects the ecosystem, because inactive stake means that the active stake is able to distribute a greater percentage of the pool.

The Steemit account (one of Steem Inc's) has 28,903,832.029 SP in it and a vote value of $509. While I don't know what they pay their employees, they could effectively give 10 people 250 dollars and take 2500 in curation a day to cover some salaries and their costs. Would you be happier with them doing that than selling their stake? If they did do that, they would effectively make the entire pool 15% smaller for everyone as there is only 200M potential voting stake on Steem.

All stake is active in some way on Steem.

This is important to recognize because what it means is that we are not actually traditional investors on Steem, we are entrepreneurs who can choose how we use our resources and that means, we have responsibilities. Yes, we can do as we please with our stake including downvoting, but the way we behave as an entrepreneur on Steem is going to add to the future success or failure of the platform.

People love to blame the large accounts for their behavior, but there are entrepreneurs of all shapes and sizes here and if a whale represents a large corporation, there are plenty of people who are running their little corner store into the ground by using the resources they do have poorly.

The headache is piling on fast, but I will conclude this by reminding people that your stake is yours to use as you choose, but no matter what you do with it, it all has an impact on the ecosystem in some way, and when it comes to encouraging the development of the community, using it to actively build rather than actively extract is the way to go.

Of course, I am an entrepreneur here too and I would much prefer my little corner of Steem business to be part of a greater ecosystem of other successful businesses big and small that serve the community well. This means two things, support the businesses that add value, drive out the ones that don't. This is done through active use of stake, and it is up to each of us to decide what we think adds and detracts from the value of our experience.

Your stake, your choice, your Steem.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]