Seeds of trust

On July 4th you can be "smart" and cash out. Or you can act responsibly and let this amazing experiment continue.

There have been recently several attempts to address the "July 4th issue".

Some of them offer financial insight to back their claims.
Some of them try to convince you that in the long-run you'll be better off if you keep your investment.
Some of them propose various ways to attract you to spend steem dollars within the ecosystem.

Those are all good arguments, nevertheless I'll try to offer a slightly different approach.

Be responsible

Don't be naive, don't sacrifice anything, don't count on a big income in the future.
Just act as a responsible human being.

You have not been given money.
Instead, you have been given seeds of trust and good-will.
So be an adult and make good use of it.

More than deserved

It's obvious that in the last couple of weeks some of us have earned much more than they deserved. Nobody can argue that so many posts, however good they are, can be worth $500 or $2000. A few of them - yes, but most of them - not.

However, this is the way this new economic model needs to work in its bootstrapping phase.

This is an experiment

Steem is in fact a huge social experiment.
It's not really about technology, however spectacular it is.
Instead, it's about people interacting with technology.
We humans are as much subject of this experiment as the underlying technology is.

This is a brave attempt to create a new economic model where you don't need to be brainwashed with ads to be able to reward content creators. It's a big deal. It's a mind-blowing change if you think about it carefully.

It's vulnerable

The thing is Steem is likely to collapse, if in the initial stage most of us act in a short-sighted and selfish way. If it survives, it will need to adapt the existing model of sponsored content and we'll end up with a decentralized incarnation of Reddit or Voat. It will still be cool but not ground-breaking.

On July 4th you can be "smart" and cash out.
Or you can act responsibly and let this amazing experiment continue.

The deal

So here is the deal: on July 4th just cash out as much as you feel you deserve for the effort committed here and leave the rest to vest. Take your payment, as you surely deserve it, but leave the rest on the table.

It's like food

I don't believe that people are altruistic by nature. We are hard-coded to be selfish. But I think there are special situations where exceptions to this rule apply and for me July 4th might be one of them.

Imagine you are in a restaurant, in a remote place you will probably never visit again. You can easily leave the restaurant without paying but somehow you don't. Why?

This is one of those special cases when most people (most, not all) don't abuse the trust they've been given. I don't know why, maybe there is something special about food or the act of eating. But the fact is, people (usually) don't cheat in those circumstances.

The hypothesis

My hypothesis is this: most people don't cheat when they feel deep in their heart that they are part of something big. They just don't.

To be clear: I'm not advocating a blockchain-based solution powered by faith in the good side of human nature.

All I'm saying is this:

• the trust in people acting responsibly is only needed during this crucial initial stage
• there are reasons to believe that on July 4th most of us will act just as we do after eating a surprisingly tasty dinner in a restaurant

Would you really sneak out through the backdoor without paying, even if you had a 100% guarantee nobody will ever find out?

Conclusion

There is surely a social and emotional factor to be considered when trying to predict events on July 4th. If we were a collection of "random" people, the outcome would be quite obvious. But since some sort of a notion of a community has already emerged, the outcome can be surprisingly positive.