From the Dune book series
Paul Atreides uses intense psychological training combined with a drug called Spice and strong genetics to divine the future. The future is uncertain. You could think of it as a cone spiraling outwards. The closer one get's to the tip of the cone (present time) the less options the future contains. This is one of the foundations of the Butterfly Effect.
Paul sees a great darkness in space-time. This darkness is a Jihad; a war lasting possibly thousands of years and consuming the entire galaxy. He takes it upon himself to "thread the needle" so to speak, with the intention of limiting the Jihad to the least amount of years possible.
Through his scrying of the future, Paul discovers the solution. Unfortunately, the answer terrifies him. He calls it the Terrible Purpose, and you don't even figure out what that is until book 3. By the start of book 2, Paul has disappeared into the dessert and has rejected his fate to fulfill the Terrible Purpose.
The Golden Path
Paul Atreides had a son Leto II (because Leto was literally murdered as a baby during an epic battle). Leto II decides he will fulfill the destiny that his father rejected, but he doesn't want to get trapped like Paul did by knowing everything.
Instead, he creates the Golden Path. Instead of looking far into the future he figures out the actions that need to be taken to get there. This way, when the time comes, he will fulfill the destiny of the Terrible Purpose as it will be too late to turn back.
I think about the Golden Path a lot. Really, when you get down to it, we do this all the time. It's the ultimate form of speculation, except we don't have superpowers to ensure it all comes true.
In the context of the Steem blockchain, I can see that we are in for a lot of crazy developments over the next 5 to 10 years. There's even a small chance that Steem (or more likely a fork of the Steem community) becomes the number one coin on the market cap for a short period of time. However, in order to get their we have to follow our own Golden Path to make it happen.
Before I describe wtf I'm getting at here, I'd like to note that this isn't about money. The #1 slot on the market cap doesn't matter; it is simply a side-effect. The motivation here is political. Humanity is enslaved by its own greed and centralized power structures that can't scale up. The first blockchain to free humanity from these constraints will obviously become the #1 coin until other projects begin to follow its lead and improve upon the system.
This is a solenoid. You may or may not know this, but all electric current creates a resulting magnetic field.
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/electric/maxeq2.html
I know right!? Fuck that!
Physics: Electricity and Magnetism was the hardest math class I ever took by multiple factors.
Calculus is a major prerequisite because it's basically all integrals. My teacher was a useless burnout and I would get high on the weekends and spend like 10 hours a day trying to figure this shit out; most of which I have forgotten because I never use it.
All you need to know is that electricity and magnetism are linked at the hip. You can't manipulate one without the other. If you try to measure the magnetism from a power line it radiates outward (counter-clockwise?) and gets weaker and weaker the farther out you go, as one might expect.
HOWEVER
That's where the solenoid comes in! Someone figured out that if you coil a current the magnetic field inside the coil is is even. It's a trick that simplifies the math (integral) into a constant, making is much easier to control magnetic fields in very useful applications.
Why are you talking about this? Stop giving me a headache.
Just like the solenoid simplifies the process of calculating and controlling magnetism, so does the blockchain need to find its lowest common denominators.
Decentralization is the key.
Rather, I believe that a shift from decentralized tech to distributed tech will be the key to humanity's salvation. The logistics of such a shift today are quite ridiculous and nearly impossible given the tech, but I believe if we walk the Golden Path we'll get there eventually.
Phase 1 : Distributed Blocks
In my mind, the foundation of distributing a blockchain is to force every single user to run a node. As most of us all know, running a node can cost thousands of dollars a month, so requiring everyone on the blockchain to do that would be asinine.
However, when we look at the basics, it's totally doable. The maximum size for a Steem block is only 65KB. The average size of a Steem block is obviously much smaller than that.
Is it really so ridiculous to assume that a community within Steem would arise where everyone in that community is downloading every block? As it stands now, the bandwidth requirements would probably be less than 5KB/sec per person. A 56k modem could handle those speeds (if you even know what that is... lol).
What do we gain?
If everyone has access to block information, it takes a huge strain off of the centralization of full nodes. As they stand now, full nodes can't really scale. If millions of people were querying them for information they would melt. It isn't sustainable, and it isn't decentralized (much less distributed).
But if everyone has the block information, they can just ask their own local machine to run the computations. The database information will exist right on your solid state drive and users can customize it to be faster for whatever common actions they perform on the blockchain.
Play a lot of video games on the Steem blockchain? Use the database that optimizes those functions. Do you curate content a lot? Use a special database that helps you do that better. The applications are endless when every single user can setup their own customized ways to interpret blocks without having to ask an external node for help.
Why are current nodes so inefficient?
A true node has to have EVERY BLOCK. That's three years of blocks! And it keeps getting worse every 3 seconds! Ouch! Not only that, it has to verify the encryption of every transaction. It has to verify the inflation distribution of every coin and keep track of resource credits and curation and a million other things.
Most of us here don't really give a damn about any of this. Let the witnesses and Steemit Inc. deal with all that noise, amirite? It's far more likely that the average user is going to be inspecting other parts of the blockchain that they care about. And in doing so we can forge a system where we can trust the information (blocks) that we are receiving without really having to verify it ourselves from the genesis block.
Checkpoints
This is a technology that gets talked about but doesn't even exist yet. What if we picked a block (say three months ago) and everyone came to consensus about the exact state the blockchain was in at this moment? Now, anyone wanting to run a Litenode (as I call them) wouldn't have to download 3 years worth of blocks and verify them. They'd just need 3 months (or even 3 weeks depending on where the checkpoint was).
For the vast majority of things we do here, we don't need to be downloading old blocks. In fact, due to the one week payout period, a lot of the things we do here only require one week's worth of blocks or less. If you were playing a competitive video game using block information, you'd only need the blocks that contained the game (example: 5 minutes worth of blocks for a 5 minute game).
It's easy to see how this could greatly reduce the server bandwidth costs of all nodes in existence. Who cares if you have to pay a tenth of a penny to play a game on Steem? The micro-charge economy is coming.
Micro-charge economy
Speaking of micro-charge economies. If everyone is running a Litenode of Steem then everyone has a resource worth money. Block information is worth money. Bandwidth is worth money. It only makes sense that peer-to-peer networks would emerge where we pay a very tiny amount to get the information we want. In fact, this is the foundation of the Bit Torrent token on Tron.
Micro-charging for valuable information in the digital age totally makes sense, and we just now are coming into the technology to make that a reality.
In the context of Steem, this means that when I run a Litenode, I can sell information to users who trust me, and they in turn can resell that information, and so on and so on. That information can then even be downloaded multiples times from multiple trusted sources to verify that the data is true and correct.
SteemDAG
The entire process reminds me of a Directed Acyclic Graph. For every block of information one receives, that information should be confirmed by at least one other trusted source. I think this is where Steem (or whatever ultimate blockchain arises) will really have a chance to shine.
Pretty soon, we'll be asking ourselves:
Wait, we are all running a Steem Litenode. We know how we want information to be confirmed. Why are we even running a blockchain? Why do we even need witnesses?
And this is where Steem will take a huge turn and dominate the entire cryptoverse. This entire 'blockchain' is going to be rewritten from the ground up. It would have to be for the world to take us seriously. Our code is a fucking nightmare.
This is why I think Steem will eventually evolve into a DAG. DAGs can scale to infinity and beyond and mesh perfectly with how I believe block information will eventually be shared between users.
Of course it won't be called Steem anymore, because the people who control Steem today would never let go of their power and join this new superior fork. Let them flounder alone, because the rest of us are going to the moon. Eh, you know what F that. Steem is going to the moon, the rest of us are going to Alpha Centauri.
Easy there Tiger, hold your horses.
Obviously, a ton of things need to happen before this dream has the potential to become reality. For example: the Internet itself is centralized. We'd have to decentralize the entire internet with mesh networks or some shit before sharing block information became truly distributed. These are the kind of pipe dreams that are like 20 years out at a minimum. My head is in the clouds. Fantasy trumps reality.
However, I can see where this is all going, and I can guarantee you that everyone is going to be surprised (including myself). Steem is the only coin I want more of these days, for precisely these reasons. I've been researching blockchain for 2 years now, and Steem is the most undervalued asset on the market IMO.
I want the price of Steem to flash crash. I want 10 cent coins. I want as many coins as I can get over the next year. If other people don't see what I see and want to cash out, let them!
That being said I have exposure to a ton of other projects, so even if Steem turns out to be an epic fail I'll still be sitting pretty, but honestly, I just can't see that happening.