We all need sweet dreams, right? Admit that reading this title made your heart pump a bit faster and harder. Adrenalin rush! You won the big lottery!

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Now back on Earth, I was rather thinking in terms of "total market cap" rather than the price per STEEM!

And given that currently the former stands at around $800 Mln, going to $10 Bln would "only" mean a "times 12" or so, which, while not easy, does not strike me as outlandish. STEEM at $50 - but how do we get there?

The Era of Content

Content is King! Everybody knows that, at least since the advent of the Internet!

Whatever happens, the only yardstick that the world at large will use to measure the value of Steemit (and by extension that of STEEM) is the quality (and quantity) of the content on the blockchain!

Yet what do we see around? Proportionally few accomplished bloggers and content creators and instead a lot of:

• geeks, tech afficionados and blockchain monks (like myself)
• crypto-enthusiasts
• photographers
• "almost bloggers" (people who can write and have something to say but didn't quite mustered the courage to do it before the "steem catalyst" came around)
  
  

Imagine what this platform could be if, after HF20 and the launch of SMTs, @ned and the others from Steemit Inc. decide to use a bit of their financial firepower and manage to bring some big names on the platform!

Or, instead of money, they could use an uplifting plea in favor of a new, freer and fairer model for rewarding great content creation and community building!

Imagine having these authors (which are all below the Top 20 on Medium) blogging primarily here on this platform.

That'll be then. What about now?

The main goal of this post is not (only) to get you daydreaming. It's also to point out two important things:

Positive reinforcement works better than punishment

A lot of discussions and commotion happens around "circle jerking", "reward pool raping", "bid-bot abuse", "haejin", "spammers" and other negative developments which seem to have only got worse lately. Many articles are dedicated to these issues which are indeed upsetting.

Yet hand wringing and obsessing about them only reinforces negative sentiment and drains us of motivation and energy. Instead of creating content that speaks to the people who don't know this platform, in order to attract them to come to curate and engage, we create content that is inward-looking and bitter-tasting.

Moreover, they focus on the wrong thing, on money and rewards instead of the "3 most important things" which are (of course) content, content, and content!. The kind of content that draws people from all the corners of the Internet to Steemit (and Busy, and all the other apps). The kind of content that gets tweeted and retweeted around and linked in LinkedIn and quoted in the mainstream media!

As I was pointing out in a recent comment:

You don't need rewards to have great content on this platform. Take for instance Unenumerated, the blog of Nick Szabo: he didn't need rewards to produce outstanding content for many years blogging. On his blog, for which I bet he never received a dime, he made history.

Like him there are many bloggers with outstanding content - they would produce that content regardless of the rewards. However what they do need is serenity, a creative and stimulating atmosphere and community.

Nobody likes negativity, acrymony, flame wars.

So instead of producing statistics that display the dark side of steemit, why not turn around and look at the positive figures? I would like to see statistics for the people with the most cumulative words posted (as daily average), whether as posts or as comments (a split between posts and comments would be good too).

There is a body of research showing that encouraging positive behaviour leads to better results than punishing bad behaviour.

Thus, to paraphrase the Agile Manifesto, "While there is value in fighting reward pool abuse, we should be valuing more and strive harder to encourage great writers to produce original content for Steemit".

Account Creation is the Biggest Drag

Bringing outstanding writers to Steemit is in every user's best interest so one would think that we would be all "out in the field" trying to get our friends and our friends' friends to sign up on this platform faster than Zhi Yin manages to create @zhiyin1 to @zhiyin80.

_{Zhi Yin, a.k.a. "The Bladder Meridian"}

Yet that is unfortunately not possible. Two decades of "free" account creation, since the time of Hotmail.com have created a mental block: we cannot imagine a platform where the accounts are not free. Hence people sign up and expect to get blogging the next minute ... and the disappointment and misunderstanding are all the greater when they are confronted to an indeterminate waiting period.

Actually, if Steemit Inc. wanted to discourage people from signing up, it could have hardly come up with a more devious plan!

We are thus left with the possibility of ... buying accounts. Paying the network to create them for our friends and then handing them out. Even that though is very complex, time consuming and rather expensive. I'll list here some of the ways I know of:

• one can buy a steem account from blocktrades.us for 6 STEEM (or other cryptos)
• one can buy a steem account from Steem Connect (follow the link for instructions) at about the same price
• one can use the steempy Python API to the blockchain and create an account from the command line (even more involved, technically speaking) for around 7 STEEM
• one can also create an account anonymously using https://anon.steem.network/ for (currently) 5 STEEM or 0.1 LTC

Only part of these sums are fees, each time about 3 STEEM are converted to VESTS (a.k.a. Steem Power) to allow the new account to interact with the blockchain (so you may consider them as a gift to the friend you are creating an account for).

Conclusion

Thence my (rather logical) suggestion: what if the Big Elephants and Whales combatting spam and abuse out there were to divide the time and effort they devote to it by half (or even less)?

Don't get me wrong, combatting spam and abuse is important, if at the moment a rather sisyphean task.

_original

What if instead the @heimindanger and @smooth and @berniesanders a.k.a. @nextgencrypto a.k.a. @ngc a.k.a @thecyclist were to spend the time thus freed to reach out to famous people from the blogosphere and offer them accounts and "put them in their steemauto fanbase" in order for these authors to feel the difference between the true (e)steem this platform can so eloquently express and the "claps" (more like "slaps") of Medium?

I bet we would be giving the salute to Steem ...

_source
BTW: look at the necktie of the guy in the picture! Does it remind you of something?

If you enjoy my posts, why not optimize your own rewards and benefit from my pledge as explained in this post:

1. Help Yourself! (steemit for dummies) (in short)
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3. Communauté d'intérêts sur Steemit