I may have this wrong but the impression I have is that, with the right tools, anyone can add whatever they want to Steem, the blockchain. Hmm. Doesn't completely sound right.
Listen, a fundamental unit of data is a page. It also happens to be a fundamental unit of information. What is a page? You use your browser to send out a request over the Internet, meaning, you use it to send out the address of a page, so we're talking about a page request, and the Internet, in response, sends your browser a page, which means it sends your browser some HTML. Your browser does some stuff and shows you the page, which means it shows you the page the HTML describes.
Steem, the blockchain, appears to be a collection of pages. People can use Steemit, and maybe other services, to put pages onto the Steem blockchain.
That's totally cool and awesome, but there appears to be a rule built into Steem that I think is too limiting, namely that once you have posted a page, you can't modify it. Steemit apparently somehow creates a buffer period during which time you can modify a post, but I think it's actually a requirement - of the pages system - that a page be basically eternally modifiable.
Now, in another sense, the fact that you can't modify a post once it's been posted is a powerful asset. In a way, that's exactly what we want, and, in a pretty fundamental way, apparently, that's what the blockchain is all about. Is it or is it not a system that will lock in a unit of data in such a way that it cannot ever be changed again? Maybe that's overstating it somewhat, but isn't it something like that?
The thing is, a unit of data is a unit of data, but a page is a unit of information. We may want our data to be permanently and irrevocably stored, but it's possible we will want our pages to change over time. How can we achieve the latter objective using the former modality, which is to say, using a system that irrevocably locks in data?
And I suppose that is a question I can return to at another time. For now, there's one other thing I want to lock in, here. It's a partial answer to my question.
I'm back, and there's been a bit of a screwup. Turns out I have to link to a whole collection of earlier posts.
pretty charts
the post that went nowhere
the amda wedge
Volcano Allert
Things that work. (didn't work)
"The biggest bank in Japan will start a crypto exchange."
Winter (has link)
But, note the note attached to the last one ...