If Cryptocoins can be Social, why aren't They on Facebook or Twitter?

Edgy Labs shows you how cryptocurrencies are being adopted as a social currency and explains how this will affect large-scale social platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

Imagine you could connect with other people online who consistently produced high-quality content instead of posting selfies and talking about their cats. Now imagine they all got paid. That’s Steem.

Steem & Synereo: New Social Platforms on the Rise

Critics have called it a “ponzi scheme” and worse, but Steem is one of the first truly relevant social media platforms to use cryptocurrency.

Think of Steem like a high-stakes version of Reddit. Members are rewarded with cryptocurrency called “Steem” for producing content that is widely shared and upvoted by users.

Money matters aside, the Steem mechanism is a revolutionary concept. For the first time, digital content is being produced en masse for a singular digital currency.

Synereo, founded by Dor Konforty and Greg Meredith, is still in stage alpha, but remains a promising social media competitor.

How? Simply put, Synereo, like Steem, wants to create a decentralized social media protocol.

In other words, this social media protocol, or code, helps you communicate directly with tons of other users instead of trapping your conversations in “status” updates or messages.

Peer 2 Peer Connections are Growing

Recently Cryptocoin News briefly mentioned an Atlanta-based hip hop artist who may very well be the first musical artist to be paid in cryptocurrency alone.

“Yes folks. I may have made history”, he said in the Dogecoin Reddit forum. “I am and or would be the first ever hip hop artist to accept Dogecoin as donations in exchange for my mixtape. My name is Geechi Dan. … I teamed up with a Norwegian producer by the name of Vizcatia”.

He added: “We spoke different languages so we had to use Google translate to communicate. But what would come out of us deciding to make a collaboration was a mixtape you would think came straight of 1995. Check out “Smoking Cigs” by Vizcatia and Geechi Dan. Check out the donation link if you like what you hear. The mixtape is absolutely free, but Dogecoin makes it a great way to easily support good music.”

Looks like technology has some incredible potential for collaboration in the arts. It’s unclear how cryptocurrencies will play into this, but it is very clear that existing companies need to leverage the social aspect of connection to cryptocurrencies like DOGE or new companies need to pop up to fill in the gap.

Facebook and Twitter: Are they Falling Behind?

With blockchain-based social networks, content creators have greater control over the media they produce. Users control their personal information and produce content that can be monetized within the small communities.

Unlike Twitter or Facebook, these blockchain applications don’t store data on their users and cannot sell the information to third-parties. Instead, the platform works through transactions on a private blockchain that’s only available to network participants.

Recently, Facebook launched its own P2P payment system in response to both the bitcoin boom and WeChat competition, but it seems many are still hesitant to trust a corporate entity outside of the banking sector with their personal funds.

As peer-to-peer content sharing becomes more normalized, it’s a safe bet that Facebook and Twitter will either need to change their strategy or lose out on a coming market boom.

Have you ever used Facebook’s P2P money system? Do you feel Bitcoin is more or less reliable?