New technologies tend to attract people looking to get rich quick. Greed is often the primary motivator for early adopters because there are not practical reasons for most to adopt new tech (e.g. the network effects which make a social network useful are lacking in early days). Without practical uses, one has to suspend disbelief about the promise of the new technology. Greed helps suspend disbelief.
 
Crypto tokens take greed in new tech to a new level because anyone can now easily own the new tech and benefit financially from its success. In the early days of Bitcoin, greed was the driving motivator for consumer adoption. To this day, the main use case for BTC is speculation and millions of speculators a year buy and sell bitcoin looking to make a quick buck. Long-term, BTC will become much more than an asset for speculation but speculation has played and continues to play a huge role in getting BTC to where it is today. 

# Similarly, I suspect greed is the motivating factor for the thousands of new users that join the Steemit platform everyday. People watch folks like the [Dollar Vigalante](https://www.dollarvigilante.com/) and [Rick Falvinage](https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rickard_Falkvinge) make $15K+ worth of Steem per day and want to jump in and do the same. 

http://i.imgsafe.org/b00cacbc80.png

Intuitively, one may think that an early community being based on greed is a bad thing. There have been some good posts lately that have made that argument, like [this one](https://steemit.com/steemit/@steve-walschot/are-we-only-here-to-feed-the-narcissists#@smooth/re-anduweb-re-smooth-re-anduweb-re-steve-walschot-are-we-only-here-to-feed-the-narcissists-20160810t081045000z) by [@steve-walschot](https://steemit.com/steemit/@steve-walschot). 

I think that view is shortsighted though and I think greed is inevitable and there are also a few big reasons why greed is actually a good thing for crypto tokensl like Steem:

* **Greed drives a passionate user base that becomes brand ambassadors and defacto sales reps, which drives new user growth** - Greed has never been the primary motivating factor to use a social network. As a result, Steemit has a truly unique hook and when users become hooked they become powerful brand ambassadors and sales reps, selling the product like an employee of the company would (because all users are incentivized like employees).

* **The [casino effect](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2123160/), which plays on the greed of users, drives engagement of the product** – Engagement on Steemit is incredibly strong and the casino effect is the main reason for that.  The variable rewards that Steem offers keeps users coming back and on Steemit, users are not betting their money on a big payout, they're betting their time. That is, even though there's a very small probability that your carefully crafted post will earn you $15K+, you'll keep coming back for more trying to get there by seeing that it is possible.

Greed is a bootstrapping mechanism for the network. Now to be clear, if the network is not providing value to users long-term, then it won't sustain itself - I'm certainly not arguing that greed will be the only thing that makes Steemit succesful. But it's natural at this stage, and appealing to the greed of users is in fact a core feature of the crypto token model (whether we'd like to admit it or not). 
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http://i.imgsafe.org/7347989cc0.png

* Follow me on [Twitter](www.twitter.com/ntmoney)
* Hear about why I'm excited about Steemit [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZknEN-xt6s)
* For more on crypto tokens, read [here](http://continuations.com/post/148098927445/crypto-tokens-and-the-coming-age-of-protocol)