When will Steem takeoff?
It is the question that everyone with any Steem is likely pondering from time to time and the answer is of course...
It already has.
You might be questioning my position considering that from the all time high of $8.30, we are a long way down, but not only is the entire market down, the entire industry is, and every blockchain project including Bitcoin, is just a baby.
Yeah, Bitcoin is a 10 year old baby, but prior to January 2009, no one had any idea what a blockchain was, that there could be digital, decentralized currencies and even once known, that the tech could deliver much more than just a way to track finance. What many people miss is that everything is a transaction of some kind and being able to track and verify information is going to get more and more important in this world.
While privacy is getting the attention, the up and coming discussion is going to be the ownership of content and while most people don't really need much ownership over their cat videos, once the question of all-user monetization comes into play, the only way to verify and manage it across all of the interfaces and sharing points is through blockchains.
As I see it, the next hardfork of Steem is the welcoming in of the discussion as it provides the potential for owned communities and an explosion of tokenization that can be used beyond monetization of a user base and instead as tracking chips on content itself. On upload, the content is married to a non-fungible token that acts as a VIP stamp that platforms will check before allowing them to be seen on their interfaces. 'No stamp, no entry.*
SCOT tokens demonstrate this to some degree already where the stamp is the tag used, but push this out to larger use cases like music publishing and photography, and a whole range of middlemen services are able to be removed, and a great deal of legal action can be avoided.
Being able to handle our own content ownership rights means that there can be a great reduction on costly middleman services and once this begins, it will snowball rapidly. The drive won't come from endusers though, it will be businesses that take blockchain mainstream as a simple ledger designed in the right way will give them more granular insight into their supply chain without having to spend man hours on it.
All of human and non-human interaction is transactional in nature as there is a transfer of something between and while we might not want to track every detail, a huge amount of data we currently handle could be removed or streamlined. While there is a lot of complexity in the space currently, I am highly confident that the simplification of the industry has already started.
If we think that the average phone these days has about a million times the computing power of the Apollo mission we can get a hint at the simplification processes of technology where complexity falls until - any idiot can use it.
Steem is the blockchain for idiots, smart idiots, but idiots none the less in regards to average user technical skills. Most users who post on Steem are not rocket scientists, they are not programmers and coders, they are not tech wizards - they are people who can use a complicated social media. In comparison to the technology involved and what goes into the management and development of it, most Steem users are outside of their comfort zone.
That is pretty incredible in many respects as the barrier to entry at this stage of the next technological revolution is so low even the non-technicals can take part. Not only that, it doesn't require wealth beyond nearly anyone with an internet connections means to benefit. Taking part doesn't necessarily mean being able to retire on it, but how many "normal people" could have sat in that Apollo building and created anything with the computing power that sent people to space.
The world is changing as economies are collapsing, 5G-driven application, questions of privacy and ownership, government errors, employment reduction, educational systems failing, censorship crush, environmental pressures increasing, migration of populations continue and a host, AI and automation make people irrelevant and - questions are raised.
Here we are transacting on Steem and doing what 99% of the world have no idea about at all, but they will. Just like the change in bidbot behavior required the right conditions to align, the conditions for Steem success are converging on a point where what we are doing here is a no-brainer to participate in. While people question it all now, at some point it will be ubiquitous in our world.
And what that means is that instead of bringing friends and family into a space that is not ready to house them, friends and family will sign up independently from multiple points that provide them with use case and value of various kinds. With them come supporting businesses and new innovations to capitalize on the marketplace.
Steem is on the fringe now, but the world is unraveling from the centralized points outward and, what Steem offers is a home for individuals and communities as they abandon that centralized rule of authority. There is a global cultural change building and we are part of the first ripples.
When is takeoff? It is a question of infrastructure as, we don't even have an airport yet. But, we have taken flight through the introduction of a social use for blockchains and created a marketplace of decentralized ideas to leverage and build our international and decentralized, transaction hub.
Communities, tokens, applications, developers, contributors, consumers and an economy tracked on a blockchain that connects them all.
Taraz
[ a Steem original ]
