In order for a digital currency to catch on there has to be a way for people to earn it globally. If it's impossible to earn then no one will hold any of it, and no one will be able to spend it.
Mining Bitcoins doubled as marketing. Anyone could earn Bitcoins by mining it, and learn about Bitcoin by mining and spending it. Earning Bitcoin also has to be a micropayment based process because not everyone is a programmer, or deeply involved in the community, so you need ways for every day people to do mechanical turk type jobs to earn tokens.
We can't expect most people to be business owners. Most people aren't entrepreneurs and it shouldn't be a pre-requisite that you have to be an entrepreneur in order to acquire smart coins. Sure that is one way to acquire them but if it is to go mainstream then people need a reliable method of earning them.
Tips aren't reliable because some other human being has to consciously give you a tip, so it's not going to create an economy. The only way to create a real economy is to start with micropayments, otherwise you're talking about people getting paid in their national currency and you're trying to convince people who don't know what Bitshares is to go and buy BitUSD with real USD? Why would anyone do that?
On the other hand I could imagine many people would want to earn a penny a second, and if we look at psychology, the reward structures work on the fact that the rewards are frequent, consistent, immediate. When the rewards are inconsistent, or when rewards are infrequent, it doesn't have the same effect. This is why people on Facebook receiving likes are more rewarded than people receiving tips, because likes are more frequent and consistent to receive than tips which are a novelty.
Micropayments in my opinion are the only way cryptocurrency will ever catch on with the mainstream. If it's just like Paypal then people will just use Paypal. If on the other hand people can earn some micro fraction of a cent every second, that is how you could literally make everyone into an active participant in the community. After everyone is receiving these micropayments, getting paid by the minute, or by the second, instead of by the hour, now you have a use case that Paypal and banks cannot duplicate.
An economy where people get paid by the second is faster. At the same time micropayments would be more inclusive because you could take in the whole global economy, where in some countries and in some situations, people are willing to work for $1 an hour, and when they are able to see their money rise by the second, it has a huge psychological impact. People who have played video games know what I'm talking about.
So I hope developers figure this problem out in the long term. In the short term we can get away with not having micropayments but in the long term we can't. If we want Bitshares to have useful currencies that people outside of Silicon Valley are willing to use, then we have to bring in micropayments because honestly that is how most people get paid or will get paid on the Internet.
An idea for a proposal:
We need a site called "EarnBitshares". This website could be a sister site to "MineBitshares". The purpose of this site should be to show people who have time and no money, how to earn Bitshares through a sort of mechanical turk, or through watching advertisements, or through some other guaranteed mechanism where if a person is willing to put in time they are guaranteed to earn Bitshares at the end of the process. It doesn't even matter how much they earn because different people around the world don't have the same cost of living.
Reference
http://www.bitcoinget.com/ 
Topic: Payments in real time (Read 4772 times)
