Hey Guys,

Recently I've been trying to convince my friends and family members who are on Facebook or Instagram to invest some money in STEEM and join the Steemit community. I'm going to share some of the arguments with you, I've been giving them.

1. Earning Instead of Trading

If any of you know @craig-grant , you will know where I'm coming from with this. If you don't know him yet, I suggest you drop him a follow. Trading is a highly risky endeavour, which will leave most of us frustrated more times than not. Timing lows and highs of the markt on the short term is incredibly hard and also really nerve wrecking. Once you go in on a trade, and see the coin drop during the next 10-15 minutes, many people sell again to cut their loss quickly. Then, once you have panicked and sold, often times the price will go up again. Even though none of us will admit this easily, I'm pretty sure many of us have made this mistake, including me. With Steemit we have the opportunity to bring value of a Cryptocurrency enthusiastic community and reap the fruits of our labour. In other words, we EARN. Instead of sitting around staring at charts and numbers, we are being productive in some in way, either by sharing information or our creativity. This is actually fun, and does not come with all the stress involved with trading.

2. An Investment that you can actively use

Most of our cryptocurrency investments at the moment are either sitting in our wallets or on an exchange like Poloniex or Bittrex while we are waiting for them to go up in price. We have all seen the Youtube videos of experts explaining that one day Bitcoin will be worth 500.000$-1.000.000$- and of course this gets our hopes up. Bitcoin is a currency and it's purpose is to move money from A to B or to use it to pay with. Yet who is actually willing to use their BTC to pay anything at the moment ?

TENX just had their ICO very recently. For those of you who don't know TENX- they have created an App and their own TENX card, which you can use to pay at any place that accepts VISA or Mastercard. While this idea is fantastic and will lead to more mass adoption in the long term, I'm not willing to pay with my BTC, ETH, LTC or DASH at the moment. All of these currencies are ultimately valued again the US Dollar and it would be a waste to use them to pay right now, when they might have double the value within a year.

STEEM can also be seen as such as investment. But as we all know, the great thing about STEEM is that we can use it to "Power Up", which makes our up votes on this platform more valuable and more influential. So while the price of STEEM will be going up in the next few years, instead of STEEM just sitting around in your wallet, you can use it to earn more STEEM in the meantime and have fun in the process. I like to call in an active investment with double earning potential.

3. The future Price of STEEM

Facebook has about 1.9 Billion users. According to Steemd.com Steemit has about 230.000 as of now- peanuts compared to FB. Even though more STEEM is being created as you are reading this, I expect the demand for STEEM to be higher than the creation of new STEEM over the next few years. People on FB, Instagram and Youtube will be realising the benefits of this platform sooner rather than later. Money is always the best incentive to make anybody do anything and when more content creators begin to realise that STEEMIT is more profitable than other social platforms, they will begin to adopt massively, causing the demand for STEEM to go higher than the creation rate. My Upvote is worth around 0.70$ at the moment with the price of Steam being at 1.86$. Theoretically, if the price of STEEM reaches 4 $, where it has been at before, my up vote should be worth about 1.40$. Since I'm earning more STEEM and more Steem Power, the value of my up vote should continue to grow. 1.40$ might not seem like much, but considering the fact that I can up vote 10 times a day without loosing Steem Power, that make my up vote worth 10.40$ a day. If I were to use my up votes on my self every single day, which I don't do, I could potentially be making 10.40$ x 365 amounting to 3796$ / year, simply for doing something I enjoy.

4. Power to the People

People are driven by money, but for me personally something else is much more important: Freedom and safety.
It's funny: When I tell some of my friends about decentralisation and the concepts of blockchain, the first thing they usually assume is: "But isn't that really unsafe if there is nobody to keep it safe"?

This question has become so standard, because not only is our entire system centralised at the moment, even most peoples thought-processes are centralised so far that they have extreme difficulty grasping the concepts of decentralisation and don't realise why it is so much safer if you have 100% complete power over your own money and in STEEMIT's case, content. While billions of people contribute of Facebooks or Instagram growth everyday by supplying these platforms with content, only the Stakeholders benefit. With STEEMIT, being a stakeholder is so much easier, all you have to do is own STEEM. This system represents everything cryptocurrencies stand for for me: equal and fair wealth distribution. It is also nice knowing that nobody is using Big Data algorithms to create Virtual copies of you and flowingly, excuse my french:
Monetize the shit out of you and you're information.
This gives us freedom and safety at the same time. Safety in the sense that your information is safe and freedom in the sense that your information cannot be censored by anybody, thus promoting true freedom of speech! I see this as a really important factor going into the future, especially with the direction politics have been going in the last couple of years (Turkey for example).
Once the masses grasp this concept, I expect more people to join the STEEMIT platform.

I hope you enjoyed :) I would appreciate an up vote or a resteem or a follow!

All and only the best,

Chris