I'm a blockchain designer. I helped build the Steem blockchain. I left the company Steemit, Inc. in December 2018.
I'm simply another member of this community now. I've been quiet for quite a while. Now I'm going to break my silence; I have a few ideas I'd like to share.
Lots of people on the Steem platform seem to be upset. Mostly they're upset at other humans. Upset about who did what. Who said what. Who owns what, and what they can do with it.
I'm sad, more than upset.
As a blockchain designer, I see Steem's current situation as a design failure triggered by human failure. Humans will act like humans. A successful system will take human nature into account.
System design shouldn't allow human nature to cause a system failure. If this occurs, it's a bug in the design.
I'm sad, because too many humans are too busy being angry at other humans. I'm sad, because this grand experiment of a social media blockchain is running into some difficulties. I'm sad, because too few of us are putting on our blockchain designer hats, and truly trying to understand the design bugs that have brought us to this pass.
Greed. Anger. Envy. Sloth. Some blockchain users will act from these motivations. It's part of human nature. A blockchain system needs to be designed to work under these conditions.
So I've decided.
I've decided to learn from the successes and failures, strengths and weaknesses. The hardest part of being a blockchain designer is predicting how users will behave. A well-designed blockchain can harness all the parts of human nature, all the user interactions, all the darkness and the light. To build a machine that can change the world.
From 2016 to today, I and the whole Steem community have been gaining hard-won experience about how users on a social media blockchain will behave.
Steem started as an experiment. Overall, it was pretty successful. What should we do with our experience?
Let's create another experiment.
Let's build a brand-new blockchain.
It will try new ideas that cannot be implemented on Steem.
It will innovate on parts of Steem's design that cannot be changed.
It could end up quite different from Steem.
It might not be successful.
It definitely won't be perfect.
It probably won't do everything that Steem does.
It certainly won't be as polished as Steem right away.
It will certainly be interesting, if you're interested in blockchains.
In future posts, I'll get into the meat of designing and building. I've just now started writing code. Soon a new blockchain will say "Hello, world." If you want to be there when it does, follow me on Steem.
I welcome any comments or suggestions; simply reply to this post. Apologies in advance if I don't answer you directly. I'll probably be too busy coding to personally respond to everyone.
