Those are two cool updates, thanks for that.

On the "soft consensus" vs smart contracts argument, well, that's just dishonest. Soft consensus is nothing new or exciting. Soft consensus is nothing more than a receipt that you are owed something, it isn't in and of itself possession. The truth is that if you don't possess the asset (due to on-chain execution) you might have to sue to get what is yours, and that doesn't always go well.

If your fancy digital asset is recorded on the Steem blockchain in soft consensus but actually exists on a centralized server that one day shuts down or gets hacked, its gone. Sure, you can look back at your Purple Demon Staff of Purple Doom recorded on the blockchain, but it will be nothing more than a reminder of what you no longer possess...

Soft consensus is allowing us to do some cool things, like connecting Steem Engine data to Steem. Nevertheless, SE assets are not as secure as ERC20s on Ethereum and run the risk of not actually existing on Steem if something terrible were to happen to SE.

Saying that:

"We do not believe that blockchain’s superpower is 'smart contracts'"

Then saying:

"Steem’s superpower is that it reduces the cost of Soft Consensus to a fraction of what it would be on any other chain"

...is kind of like saying the gold of the gold-backed US dollar was not awesome, but these shiny new US dollars that are not backed by gold are awesome because you don't have the same limitations as gold-backed USD.

Look, I'm not out to be a dreary drew, but I just feel the need to point out the obvious logic error here. Its like trying to suggest to people that something less secure is better than something more secure simply because its cheaper. Of course its cheaper, you're not paying for security.

Steem does some things very well, but it doesn't do smart contractions, and soft consensus is no substitute. People are trying to make the same claims for Bitcoin, but reality is that you can never secure more things on Bitcoin than bitcoins. Sidechains can lose their peg and are responsible for their own security.

Bitcoin and Steem are application-specific blockchains, nothing wrong with that. Blockchains can be valued with limited applications. However, pretending that they can also be all-purpose blockchains like Ethereum too is just inappropriate.