Although I have popped on here and there to upvote posts using the wantwiserupvote tag, I haven't been around as much on Steemit lately. Part of that is real life craziness. I don't know what it is about the school year ending but there always seems to be a million things going on.
But the other reason is that I decided to read the VIVA project whitepaper, and I liked what I read.
The reason I even looked at the whitepaper has to do with a different project I got involved with earlier on in my Steemit journey. @williambanks set up this self-reporting science experiment and invited people to participate. What did it take to participate? Nothing more than a commitment to record everything I ate and how I felt throughout the day for thirty days. I can do that, I thought. There was going to be compensation for that which was good news to me as at the time getting "compensated" for anything else I published on Steemit, well, let's just say it wasn't happening quite like the trending page indicated was possible. When it comes to earning money for my writing work, I'm much more risk adverse. I will always favor an opportunity to get directly compensated for my work over one where I might get rewarded more indirectly. In other words, I'm happy to post on Steemit and hope for lots of valuable upvotes... until someone comes along and says I'll pay you x amount to write y. And then suddenly posting on Steemit is much less interesting. But in the case of the science project, I did get to post on Steemit and get directly compensated for it.
So anyway, for thirty days I recorded what I ate and how I felt, and at the end of the thirty days I got paid in SBD for my work. I converted half of it to Steem and powered it up, and the other half I used to buy whatever alt coins I fancied at the time. That single payment easily dwarfed all the other monetary rewards I'd received from Steemit.
So when I saw @williambanks' name listed as one of the four main developers on the VIVA whitepaper, I thought I had to get involved. So I reached out to him and it turns out there is a task he invited me to work on that he says is tailor made for me. And it's been that task that has consumed my scarce Internet time lately.
I am very much a VIVA newbie, but there are a few things I like about this project which I'll mention here, I mean, besides having had a positive experience working for a lead developer.
VIVA will roll out a social media component that I'm guessing will be similar to Steemit. One key difference, though, will be in how upvotes are distributed. Like Steemit, overall upvote strength will be based on some pile of coins similar to Steem Power. However, rather than everyone getting 40 votes a day, all with different reward strengths based on how much is in that pile of coins, the amount of stake instead determines the number of votes each user gets, because every vote is worth exactly one Dollar. So, if I have a small pile of coins, then maybe I only get one or two votes per day. As my pile grows, so will the number of upvotes I get, each valued at one Dollar.
I am all over that. I can't adequately express how frustrating it is for me as an occasional Steemit user to not have the time to cast all forty of my upvotes in a given day and have each upvote not even crack the post payout estimate from zero to 1c. I would much rather combine my forty daily upvotes in to one or two supervotes that were actually worth something. Well, the VIVA project basically forces that on everyone. Some users might only get one vote a day, but at least they can know that they made a real difference to whoever they chose to upvote that day. Sign me up!
Another thing I like about VIVA is that even though the project is in its initial stages there are already real world applications. There are a couple of actual VIVA ATM machines in Tijuana, Mexico. There are some actual business partners who are going to participate in the VIVA network as it rolls out. In other words, it isn't all just a bunch of nice theory. There are real people getting involved, and even Newsweek Magazine took an interest in the project.
A third thing I like about VIVA is that there is an actual strategy for seamlessly converting the VIVA currency into whatever national currency the user will want. This will take place through a debit card that is tied to each user's VIVA account. The debit card makes the exchange at the point of sale. This trade is facilitated by a larger strategy to keep the value of VIVA to within 10% of around $5.50. The strategy involves expanding or contracting the supply of VIVA as needed. If the price is too high (more than $5.50), then that means there aren't enough VIVA coins out there and the mints need to make more. If the price is too low, then the mints don't produce any more, and might even buy or burn the extra coins (I'm fuzzy on the details).
This stabilizing of the VIVA value is the reason why further down the road I fully expect to actually spend my VIVA coins for goods and services. I don't have any intention of doing this with any of the other coins I hold, even though I really like these coins. The other coins move around too much. One day they're worth a lot, and the next day they could be down by 40%. Ever tried to budget under those circumstances? Yeah, me neither. But if the price of the coin only moves around within a few percentage points, then I can feel reasonably confident that if I spend them today, I'm not missing out on being able to buy more stuff with them tomorrow, nor do I have to worry about suddenly not having enough money to buy some big ticket item that under normal circumstances it would be prudent to sleep on the decision. A plan to stabilize the currency is going to really help with real world adoption, and it will be interesting to find out if it's even possible to sustain that kind of stabilization.
As I said I have a lot to learn about VIVA, and it's possible that even the parts I think I understand I haven't represented in the best way. But this is a bit of what it looks like to someone getting newly acquainted with the project. Those readers who are interested in learning more, please check out all the links in the article that I resteemed about ten days ago. It's packed with information that I need to work through myself.