Is Steem doomed to be the next MySpace because the first product is rarely the one that corners the market? How many times have we heard this? Will we only get 40 million users instead of a billion users? These questions have already been asked countless times on this platform.
I've been obsessively watching Andreas Antonopoulos videos on Youtube recently. I thought he had nothing to offer me because he usually focuses his speech in a way that caters to people who know very little about blockchain. Regardless, I'm still learning a lot from him.
He uses a good analogy about Bitcoin being like a Lego set. Let's say you make a train out of Legos. This train is inferior to a plastic mold-injected train built at a factory, but that factory will only be able to make the train. The Lego set can be used to build anything.
Once one comes to this realization, it's easy to see that Steem is not social media. Steem is a Lego set, and the first thing we decided to build with that Lego set was something that looked like Social Media. Just like the banks look at Bitcoin and scoff, so do Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram look at Steem and say, "Haha! You gotta be fuckin' kidding me!"
It is impossible to compare a blockchain with a corporation. Everyone really wants to understand this technology, so they do the only thing they can, compare it to something that they do know using projection. This logical fallacy (Halo Effect) will prove everyone wrong in the future.
How is Steem similar to MySpace? Short answer: it isn't. MySpace is a closed off privatized service being developed and paid for by a private corporation. You can't access their databases. Code is obscured. If you want to program an application for it the functionality has to be present in the API that they have provided.
At it's core, the Steem blockchain is very simple. It has to be. It was basically programmed by a single person. Steemit Inc. took the Legos that @dan made and built a very rag-tag social media with them. The Legos of Steem can be rearranged to build a million other products. JavaScript can be embedded directly into the blockchain using custom JSON operations.
With Steem, everything is visible. Nothing needs to be secure. Satoshi Nakamoto solved the Byzantine Generals’ Problem and the world will never be the same. If you have resource credits the witnesses are obligated to process your transaction. There are no invalid transactions and with that comes zero censorship and immutability.
Developers can create decentralized apps that allow clients to spend credits rather than the developer having to pay for server bandwidth. This allows dev teams to increase the value of the entire platform with very little overhead cost. It becomes the job of the witnesses to scale, decentralizing the responsibility of everything and the reward of everything.
How could we possibly compare this to a corporate service? What are the chances of another community creating a Lego set that eclipses ours in every way and they somehow outrace us in development even though we've already been around for 2.5 years?
Conclusion
How many users will the Steem blockchain acquire? As many as it can accommodate. If you believe that this platform can scale up to millions of daily users overnight because the whitepaper said so you are sorely mistaken. Scaling is the #1 main issue of all trustworthy blockchains because the only way trust is attained is through inefficiency. Our blockchain is already 140 gigs and hardly anyone uses it when compared to other social media.
Is Steem the next MySpace? Is Apple the next orange? Is orange the new black? The only way Steem can fail is if witnesses are allowed to post bad blocks or if there are no witnesses left to produce blocks. The likelihood of this happening is almost zero due to the ability to fork and the financial incentives imposed by cryptocurrency on a global scale.