It is a privileged position to be able to ask a userbase to go and purchase a token in order to use a product or service. There is nothing wrong with making such a request. The free market will decide what would happen to the price of the said token. Ethereum and many other popular projects can insist on these fees paid in a specific token. Many of these were early comers to the market offering a unique product such a smart contracts.

Some of the later projects rose to prominence through marketing and costing less than Ethereum. All these situations involve heavy interaction from user compared to the regular Web 2 experience. The users are receiving many benefits for paying these fees. For an example, you cannot get banned on blockchain social media. At most you would be censored on a front end. Eg: https://steemit.com/@penguinpablo (Justin Sun didn't seem to like @penguinpablo posting stats comparing HIVE and STEEM)

BLURT is Making Me Buy to Post

The positive aspect of this situation is that after waiting for few days to gather enough BLURT, I have finally decided to simply buy more BLURT in order to post on the blockchain. It is not a large amount of buying pressure. It is at least some demand:

I am familiar with using a DEX, transferring cryptocurrency and mannging finances. There is only a small niche of individuals who are familiar with these tasks. Eventually this technological literacy will improve. The problem here is that the size of the potential userbase become highly restricted.

Paying fees and consuming BLURT on the surface seem like good tokenomics. What needs to be kept in mind is that staking for bandwidth can become far more attractive to the point of creating larger purchases. Those who already own some staked tokens may keep their stake just in case they wanted to use the blockchain again.

Innovation is The Way Forward

Testing help on the way. I like the fact that BLURT exist as a decentralized social media. It is a great place to compare and contrast between HIVE. I keep posting my articles on BLURT because I do enjoy the people there and I want to support real blockchain projects that are trying to make a difference. Better design and building better value for the user is the best way to achieve this.

Ultimate Utility Token Described by @andrarchy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0E5iarBMoLg

KOIN has achieved the gold standard IMO. The reason I say that is because;

Users don't pay fees
Users get bandwidth forever
No additional interact such as staking is needed
DAPPs could take the burden of MANA

What KOIN offer should be the way forward. We have tried other systems. We have seen pros and cons play out.

Reap The Best Out of Open Source

Good competition in open source space can bring forth rapid development of new features. When two projects have a greatly similar technology shared between, the improvements made by one team should be easily adoptable for the other team. When I look at GitLab activity, this is what I see:

A Win for Decentralization is A Win for All

That is why I want to see more vibrant development in blockchain social media. Competition from various EVM chains pushed Ethereum to be better. I want to see the same on HIVE. Instead what I see is HIVE outdoing everything else while simultaneously flying under the radar.

One of my biggest concerns is that some other VC funded, semi-decentralized project reaching popularity (at least for the short term).

Don't Let That Happen

Posted Using LeoFinance ^Beta