When I got into Bitcoin, I saw a much bigger picture than simply carrying some money around on my phone. I saw digital scarcity that was transferable in a permission-less way through a decentralized, growing network. I also saw a whole lot more getting built out.
Bitcoin solves a lot of things right now, such as enabling an individual to be their own sovereign bank, with the backing of one of the most secure networks on the planet, but there is hope for much more. We can handle remittances better than traditional banking, if we innovate better on and off ramps to fiat around the world. We can handle micro-transactions better than alternatives, if we improve Bitcoin itself with the Lightning Network or something better. So much more is coming to make Bitcoin a fabric of our world.
We know these improvements are being built out. Just look at Yours, 21.co, and so much more. It's all getting better. Sure, some stuff will fail, but there are a lot of reasons to be optimistic.
The way Steem was designed, there are no fees on transactions. We take it for granted here, shifting our Steemtoshis around with ease while not worrying about a single fee, but this is a big, big deal. With Steem Dollars having an approximate valuation of $1USD, one can safely and freely send a stable unit of account to anyone with a Steemit account, anywhere around there world. Not only that, but it enables microtransactions without fees that just aren't possible today.
Not only does Steem not have fees, but it can handle about 500,000 transactions a second. That's only about 100,000 times as many as Bitcoin. Some other alt coins claim this capability, but without use cases, many test this transaction limit only when holders start to panic sell. Steem's multi-layered use cases are built into the blockchain, and open up a plethora of incredible, stable options for us all without having to wait years for innovation.
Steem also processes transactions at a fraction of the speed of Bitcoin, much closer to the transaction times of Visa and other major credit card companies. Why wait 10 minutes to an hour for your Bitcoin transaction to confirm, when you can just use Steem or Steem Dollars instead?
One thing Bitcoin does has to its advantage is that there are thousands of people working in some capacity to build out apps and use cases to make Bitcoin better. Steem has a fraction of that, but still has magnitudes more talent than most other crypto projects out there. Really quality tools, apps, and more are getting built out quicker here than any other project I've seen since Ethereum. With time, our tool belt will only grow.
There are many reasons to have hope and optimism about Steem. We can do so much more here with this project than just blog for votes. We can build Steem out further than you might have been able to imagine. However, you don't need to be a developer or coder to understand this.
Just take this into consideration when working in a beta project that is about four months old, which is the first application on a relatively new, and completely innovative blockchain. Subjective mining is a massive concept. The three token design is brilliant. There are so many things fundamentally right about this project, and we are only a few yards down the field on our first drive.
Many thought Bitcoin would be dead by now. Some still think it will die. Many worried about petty price fluctuations every step of the way up and down to where we are today. However, there were some throughout who believed in building something bigger than many around them understood. They didn't care what others thought and held strong to their beliefs because they knew that they had valid reasons to believe what they did. Through six years of hard work they took Bitcoin's value to the world from under $500,000 to $10,000,000,000.
What can we do here if we put our minds and hearts into this? What can we build in 6 years? I think we can build a lot and I can't wait to see what's possible. Perhaps we can make Steem permeate the Internet and lives in the real world in ways we never imagined. I have a lot of hope and optimism about this project, and I hope others reading this do as well.
Each time I make a Steemit/Steem related post I will pick two contributors who you may have not met:
