When we talk about delegation on the Steem blockchain, we understand a certain clear process as I explained it in a previous post.

But maybe before we think of how this helps us in the Steem ecosystem, maybe it's best to analyze delegation at a broader level, as it comes in our day-to-day lives.

Delegation In Real Life

Delegation outside Steemit comes as a necessity, because we have a limited amount of time daily, and we often encounter situations when we need to:

1. screen ourselves from tasks that negatively affect our productivity
   This has obvious benefits:
   Would a company be better served if its CEO answers his phone or if he has an assistant to filter incoming calls (among other things)? Of course he'll have an assistant (or more).
   
   If you are a busy person, is it an effective use of your time to clean your house and do the lawn? Most likely not.
   
   If you have lots of manual data entry in Excel, do you do it yourself? Not if you have something better to do and find a suitable virtual assistant, for instance.
   
2. delegate a task to the best fit person to do it (to whom we have access both in terms of availability and price)
   If you are a project manager, and you have in your team a programmer (who is also a mediocre designer, by necessity) and a professional designer (who has better chances of reading the Matrix than a programming language) how would you delegate the programming and design work for a project to the two team members? Seems obvious, doesn't it?
   What if you are the programmer working on your own project by yourself? Would you outsource the design work?
   
   But you can also delegate an attorney to represent your interests, because he's better prepared for the legal matters and it saves you the hassle and the time.
   
   You can delegate a fund manager the responsibility to invest some money on your behalf, if you prefer, and expect passive income in return.
   
   And you can delegate someone else to vote on your behalf. Not in the political elections, there it doesn't work, but in a shareholders meeting you can do that.

I'm sure if we think hard enough we can come up with a few more use cases, but this is enough for our purpose.

Relation Between Delegation In Life and on Steemit

Delegation has been introduced on the Steem blockchain with the 18th hard fork, most likely as a way to limit the amounts paid by Steemit Inc. for the creation of every new account.

Before delegation was introduced, Steemit actually funded every new account with the necessary Steem Power to assure a minimum bandwidth. This pressure was removed when instead of giving away those funds, they were delegated for a limited period of time.

But as we've discussed before, delegation has many uses on the Steem blockchain.

One thing is certain: the more Steem Power you have, the more you can afford to delegate, if you wish to.

If we want entrepreneurs on the Steem blockchain, and I know we do, they are rarely solopreneurs. They work with teams and delegation may be a way to power up team members' accounts, so they can take care of different aspects of the work involved.

We already see delegations power up different projects, witness accounts and bots accounts.

If we take a closer look at the use cases of delegation in real life I've described in the first section, you will see we can find correspondences, not necessarily stricto sensu, in the Steem ecosystem for all of them (if we include direct payments of Steem or SBD, for services).

Even so, delegation is probably still underused, and we can think of new ways to empower it.