Hey, My name is Ryan.
I'm from the Bay Area, CA. I'm in my late 20's.
I've lived what I've heard called an Illegible Life, which means it's hard to pin me down in a bio.
I've been a NEET, I've done construction, I've worked in the weed industry, I've done property management for a while, I've worked at an online auction house... and now I'm going to work in the crypto space.
I stumbled across Steem sometime in 2016 thanks to a hacker called Geohot
George Hotz, formerly known as Geohot, was the first person to jailbreak an iphone. He did it when he was 17. Now, he's the creator of Comma.ai, which is a kit that you can add to certain cars to give them autopilot.
I was reading a Bloomberg article on how George built his first self driving car in the garage of a house in SF called the Crypto Castle (years later I'd be spending many late nights drinking there and get to see this garage in person).
Crypto still felt new and mysterious then, and here was a nearby house dedicated to the space. I looked into the castle, and started googling people that were associated with it. That lead me to find the intro of a girl that used to live there on Steem.
I was blown away by the concept of Steem in a way that I couldn't put my finger on.
I wasn't the only one Steem left a big impression on
Months later in early January 2017, while riding BART to work, I came across this post on Medium written by the Founder-CEO Ev Williams (Ev also founded Blogger & Twitter). It's called 'Renewing Medium's Focus' and it was obviously heavily inspired by Steem.
We had started scaling up the teams to sell and support products that were, at best, incremental improvements on the ad-driven publishing model, not the transformative model we were aiming for.
Upon further reflection, it’s clear that the broken system is ad-driven media on the internet. It simply doesn’t serve people. In fact, it’s not designed to.
This led to Medium adding a 'clapping' feature, where people are given money based on how many claps their post receives. A cheap imitation of Steem's DPoS, tokenized-upvote system.
Medium was like the Substack of the time, and I viewed the fact that Medium was taking inspiration from Steem as a big deal, and a sign of how the world is turning.
I made my Steem account in December of 2017
Though I never ended up using it, the inspiration I got from Steem remains the cornerstone of my thesis for Crypto.
I'll unpack this more in a future post, but the gist of it is this:
• crypto allows us to directly monetize things that the current system doesn't do well
• (D)PoS chains like Steem and Hive monetize the most valuable asset on Earth, Willpower
I'm here now because I'm going to build
I'm happy to have settled on Hive, which is the true successor of Steem.
I've been brainstorming on things to do and have finally settled on something (shoutout to our Witness @gtg for letting me bounce ideas off of him this past few days!).
I look forward to introducing it sometime next month. Stay tuned ⚡️
Thanks @acidyo for the mana!