I like to ask questions about stuff I don't know. A lot of times, that means I ask a question that is pretty stupid. But that's ok...asking stupid questions got me interested in Ethereum and Bitcoin in the first place.
It seems like there is a negative correlation between confidence and intelligence, at least on the internet. And yet, the smartest, most successful people will often talk about how much they read (because they don't know everything) and will often ask follow up questions and press when they don't fully understand a concept.
I try to write clear ideas about the crypto market, but am going to inevitably fail at it. The fact is, most "guarantees" you see in this space are hogwash...especially when price speculation is involved.
Is Bitcoin going up in price? Is Steem? It's a lot of fun to read articles that focus on why your favorite cryptocurrency is going to the moon, but do we do ourselves any favors by reading these articles?
No. In fact, these are the equivalent of watching tv news for tips on the stock market.
My Best Indicator
Rather than focus on prices, which vary wildly (and are often subject to manipulation and don't necessarily accurately reflect value), I like to focus on whether developers have incentives to develop on a platform. This is why I think Steem is so great: let's face it, if we had to wait for Steemit Inc to develop everything on here, this platform would be dying. The plans are great, but we've been waiting for quite a while for product to be shipped. We've all had followers who used the platform for a month or two before getting sick of the interface and early 2000's feel of the tech.
This is the truth, and we can't sugarcoat it.
But the fact remains, there are a ton of other things to do with a DPOS platform like Steem, and developers are busy finding out what those are. Right now there are seven projects giving payment implementation options using Steem and SBD, meaning website owners can sell their goods using the Steem blockchain (no fees and instantaneous!). Steem Projects shows over 300 projects that people are building on top of the Steem blockchain.
This project really is a grassroots effort.
The Takeaway
The reason I brought all this up is this: Steem is a great platform which is far bigger than it seems to be. If we look at it with new eyes, we'll see that there is enormous potential to bring in new users, regardless of some of the short term pains we're dealing with. Last week's interview with 
Steem may fail: EOS might come around and take all the great aspects of Steem, repackage it in a better UI/UX, and take a huge chunk of users from here...depleting the value of Steem and SBDs with it. But even if that were to happen, even if Steemit Inc were to go bankrupt, I think we're going to see the Steem blockchain power on. There are so many incentives to keep people acting as witnesses, to use it as an instant send option for value transfer (it's "good enough" for 90% of the population), and developing on it is fairly easy.
Steem is more than a blogging platform. The more Steemians realize that, the more we're going to realize how powerful this platform really is.
-Jeff
What are your ideas on how to make this platform better as users?
