We all have heard stories of the fortunate few who happened to mine at the start of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Litecoin and other coins... and how these people made a fortune, or could have made a fortune with their early mining...
Right now we have a situation where our early blogging could be likened to the early mining opportunity.
Steem rewards are high for content creation and these rewards are shared between a small pool of creators. That will be true until a lot of people come onboard. At that point, say if 1000x more people arrives, the reward pool for blogging will have to be divided /1000 and everybody will be competing for far less money. This is the equivalent of "difficulty" going up x1000 in mining.
The above can be mitigated by a price rise - to some degree, but price rise cannot scale to the same level as adoption. For example it is possible to multiply the user base x1000, but is it probable to multiple steem's marketcap x1000, to 300 billion USD?
So this means that content creators here have a unique and historic opportunity in what they will do with their posts. Every second counts.
Article authors, photographers, story writers, bloggers, youtubers, simple men and women who want to introduce yourselves to the world, I can only say this: Make it worth it. Give it your best. Such an opportunity is indeed rare and may indeed be a "once in a lifetime".
I agree, early bloggers have a real big opportunity. Every second, minute, day it will become a little more difficult and the payout a little less. But put all those earnings in steem power and watch it grow.
I like the analogy, but from my understanding of steem, the arrival of more people wont necessarily be equal to an increase in difficulty. Steem has a dollar peg controlling its value and all new accounts are created holding the same amount of steem, so more people may actually serve as a difficulty decrease. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.
I'm talking about content rewards. If, say, steemit now gives 100.000 USD per day for content creators to 10.000 users, that's 10$ per day, per user, on average.
If userbase escalates to 100.000, then that's 1$ per day, per user, on average.
If userbase escalates to 1 million, then that's 0.1$ per day, per user, on average.
A price rise can increase the rewards but the price curve can't compete with booming adoption curves. So naturally, rewards per author go down and "difficulty" in getting proper rewards when blogging, goes up. This has already happened. It is already more difficult right now to blog and get rewarded than it was in June or May. And this "difficulty" will increase as time progresses.
One aspect that I didn't think about until I was reading your reply is that as the user base increases, so will the number of people with moderate size wallets (dolphins). These new users will have the effect of spreading around the wealth if they behave independently and up vote subjects of their interest and not just popular content. So it should be true that the $ per user per post should go down, it will actually serve to more equally distribute the available steem. But again this all depends on the behavior of the new and existing steem users.
This is a really great point. I'm very new to this world, but I've had a great sense of urgency and you've helped me to understand why.