So this post is touching on something I've written about before. And it's something I was thinking about a bit today. Currently while the price of Steem is low, the amount of money that it would take to support someone whose content you appreciate is pretty ridiculously out of proportion.
Currently I have a little over 7,000 Steem powered up, which if everything was at 100% that would give me about a 15 cent upvote. If I didn't own any Steem, to get to where I'm at would cost around $2,300 USD. As a new user this is not very compelling if I wanted to come to Steem to curate my favorite content creators. I think that a very simple detail that just about every Steem frontend is missing is an easy to use and an easy to see UX for donations. Now I understand that you can always just send any user some Steem. It's not at all a difficult thing to do technically, but it's the UX. People want to be able to donate and have it be visible to the world, it's not an accident that every platform that allows for content consumers to donate to creators has the donations visible, public, and clearly in context. ie I'm donating to you because I like THIS thing.
I feel like this wouldn't be a huge feature just to allow donations to be visible in the same context as author rewards for a post. This also wouldn't need a 7 day expiration date, it could go on forever which I also think would be extremely powerful.
So this isn't actually the crux of the idea I've had, more of a minimum viable product. The real idea is an expansion of what @fundition is already doing. That is accepting donations of numerous cryptocurrencies on Steem as well as fiat currencies. So this is a huge feature/product, but I think it would add a ton of value to Steem.
Imagine a Steem frontend where along with normal upvote author rewards you could also receive donations in every major crypto and fiat. The frontend would also have it's own one way exchange where it would take all these donations and buy Steem with them behind the scenes, but as the end user you'd just donate some TRON, or Litcoin, or ETH, or Bitcoin etc. Visually the payout would say how much moneys worth of each crypto you received and also a total, so for each post you could see which community supported it the most.
Another layer to this is that, this frontend could take say a 10% beneficiary reward, power up a considerable amount of that Steem and use it to incentivise people to donate. For example, it could have it's own token, similar to @partiko's points, and let people exchange those points for upvotes. The end result is that it would incentivise people to at the core convert their other cryptos to Steem. It would also progressively earn them a stake that they could then use to be more involved in the Steem community.
I think right now there's a lot of people hodl'ing cryptos that they can't actually do anything with. If they could use them here to donate, and it doesn't have to be much, .25 cent worth, $1, etc. When I write those amounts, it's really nothing, but to have a $1 upvote right now on Steem would take 47,500 Steem! Basically you'd need to be an Orca. The current cost of that is $15.6k. I've got a dollar I could give someone, but I don't have 15k to get a $1 upvote. The other positive of this is it doesn't depend on the markets. Right now when prices are low, Steem is a bit dead, because(let's just be real) a lot of people come here for the rewards, but with a system like this it wouldn't matter, you could still be rewarded regardless of what's happening with the prices, and all of this would be constantly adding value to Steem.
This would make Steem THE social network of crypto enthusiasts especially, but also add a lot of value to Steem since all the donations would actually be buying Steem. This would be especially powerful once communities roll out as each crypto community could donate with their favorite crypto and earn some Steem for doing it.
What do you all think? If I had the knowhow to build this I'd just do it and I wouldn't be publicly giving away the idea, but alas, I'm not a coder or rich enough to hire engineers to build it for me. But if anyone has holes to poke in this I'd love to hear them, also if you'd like to shower me with praise for my genius idea, I'll take that too. If you read all this, thanks for hanging in there, now leave a long comment! :D
Thanks for looking peeps!
*Edit
Since @jarvie of Steempeak actually showed interest I just wanted to further visualize what what I'm suggesting could look like.
Again the main difference here, being that it is VISIBLE who, and how much people donated, as well as a total. If this is something you'd be interested in seeing implemented, head over to the Steampeak discord and let them know.