Staking Steem, owning the market, building the network directly
As I have mentioned before, Investing into Steem is like investing into an index fund as it will benefit from any value-adding development that takes place anywhere on the blockchain. This is something that I find highly intriguing as an investment vehicle concept, but there is more to it than just investing into all the applications, known or not.
Me quoting a quote taken from one of my posts, and then quoting the reply to that quote taken. Meta.
As I said to @galenkp not too far back who was hoping for a return to the days of stagecoach robbing, crypto is the digital wild west and just like the gold rush periods of the past, the brave are out staking their ground and digging and hoping to strike a vein of gold. (Me)
If the gold rush analogy holds up, we should remember that those who did best weren’t the ones digging with picks and shovels. It was the ones who sold the picks and shovels. The ones who provided the infrastructure. The stakeholders. @preparedwombat
A couple days ago I wrote a post looking at the central point of failure in many platforms being the need for the holding entity being very resource top-heavy and therefore requiring profits to operate and satisfy shareholders. This is a point of failure that is far less on Steem due to the decentralized nature, the lack of central ownership requiring salary and resources and the very diverse set of owners who are distributed globally and all have different motivations and incentives instead of profit at any cost. However, what those centralized platforms have going for them is that they have a distribution platform that requires very little input once up and running but can take a middleman cut from those who use it in multiple ways.
Looking at the Apple and Google markets that take a 30% cut from every application sold on their platform, this allows them to profit without having to invest at all into the development process. With so many application companies leveraging their distribution platform, they don't care much how any individual application profits and whether an app takes a million dollars to develop and sells 100 dollars worth, or takes 100 dollars to develop and sells a million, they profit either way.
Distribution matters a great deal and no matter how good an application is, if no one sees it or can get their hands on it, it cannot get marketplace traction - which is why the platforms have such a stranglehold over the developers. But this is not the only reason.
Not only do the Google and Apple marketplaces provide a distribution hub for applications that they profit from, both also create software and hardware that give those applications a home to work upon, another type of platform. Instagram is pretty useless without a smart phone. This means that they have locked up much of the mobile application ecosystem and market potential in a duopoly that owns the distribution and the use case.
Like @preparedwombat said,
those who did best weren’t the ones digging with picks and shovels. It was the ones who sold the picks and shovels. The ones who provided the infrastructure. The stakeholders.
Are you seeing the potential of Steem yet?
Maybe not. But I do. Steem has the potential to become one of the application markets and one that is able to provide integrated blockchained economic systems that are customizable in a near endless set of configurations that can be designed to suit specific use cases. No special hardware is needed from a user perspective - just access to the internet.
All an application or community need do is integrate Steem into their UI, even if the rest of their application is not some immutable and blockchained experience. The economics of the application will be of course because that will be managed and handled on the Steem blockchain. The coding required to do this is minimal.
What this means for stakeholders in Steem is that while they are investing into every application on and to come in Steem without investing directly into any, they are also going to benefit as owners of the distribution platform and this is in more ways than just the sale of the application, it is in every ongoing growth in any individual application. The better an application does, the better Steem as a whole does, and there can be thousands of applications of varying degrees of success, simultaneously adding economic mass to the blockchain to continuously make the value proposition weightier.
Not only this, with no central hub of top-heavy shareholders and boards of directors in charge of the platform, all wealth generated goes back to the stakeholders and into the ecosystem itself to be added to provide more stability through stake, used to distribute more coins to create more owners and support users and application and community owners.
Because of the way Steem operates, all stakeholders have many options and levels of activity in how they approach their investment, and as such users have many options in which to attract value to themselves to. With SMTs, this will increase exponentially and not only increase the network spread, but add layers of networks on top of the spreading existing infrastructure.
As I have said before, for Steem to do very well, it doesn't need hundreds of millions of users, although it can scale out to that later. Tens of millions will be plenty to add masses of value, and if that happens, it will attract many more in organically. With the lack of organizational hierarchy and resource requirement, Steem never need act as a middleman that skims value from the users, but instead stakeholders earn value by empowering the user base through providing a space to develop, interact and consume. And, those same stakeholders can actively use their stake to empower those users directly in multiple ways.
Because there are direct line relationships within the marketplace, Steem can continually undercut centralized competition and as the space grows and crypto/ blockchain becomes ubiquitous, it can bring in increasing amounts of economic value and spread it back out in a handshake between creator and consumer, and back again to create a much more complete marketplace.
What I see happening in the future is that the decentralized marketplaces for applications that can also provide a range of economic potentials that do not discriminate based on borders, will continually chip away at and undermine their centralized and much slower cousins. This will cause a lot of disruption and engage protectionist actions because while it undermines the likes of Google, it also undermines the likes of the government that benefits from the ecosystem Google maintains.
It is going to get very interesting, especially if the people of the world finally say that enough is enough and make moves to take back control of the lives they have so far, increasingly given up in the name of convenience and entertainment - that has cost them their very economic viability. Funnily enough, we can gain back our economic independence through the very same measures, as long as we choose to support each other over entities that do not draw breath - but suck the majority of value that transacts across our world.
Our world is funny as we think they have the power in it without recognizing we actually hold all the cards. Time to own the network of relationships, instead of letting others manage who we are allowed to speak to.
Taraz
[ a Steem original ]
Thanks for sharing these interesting thoughts and perspectives on the future of Steem. Surely, stakeholders will have reasons to smile in the future. Cheers!
Steem stakeholders always have reasons to smile.
Of course yes, but not so much with the present prices.
Excellent post, very thorough and extremely well explained. I can only agree, this is just one aspect of the Steem Blockchain I have thought about but I lack the background knowledge to explain it in the this. I’m going to keep a link to this post for future reference, and blast it out in social media too.
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Thank you it is very appreciated. There are so many things going for Steem, if only more people got behind it :)
Jah man !!!
Missed you at Steemfest though, see you next year!
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I missed out on a lot of hugs by the looks :D
Next year for sure.
Brilliant exposition with a very coherent envisionment approach of the feasible future regarding the scalability logic of the steem blockchain. :)
Let's say and admit that the new Communities & Resource Credit (RC) system features and above all, SMTs are finally established as a daily, everyday essential operating part of the steem blockchain that would promise that everything you've said in this post becomes a reality.
Let's say that all that technical aspect is solved.
How to address and face the challenge of spreading in time and making known to the world all the benefits of our company in which we are all shareholders with a broad interest in attracting investors, developers, new users and consumers for the benefit of each and every one?
What should be the true Marketing and Promotion IRL fiat money budget dedicated to this vital and important work of RR.PP for the actual campaigns of dissemination, attraction and recruitment tasks which must be done on mainstream media outlets, social networks, crypto markets, corporative world, everywhere, etc. Just so that the world knows about our existence and everything we have to offer?
Should this important budget be fulfilled and provided mainly by Stinc? And all those vital tasks outlined in point 2 carried out exclusively by them?
Should this important budget be fulfilled and provided in a great measure by the biggest steem stakeholders, steem witnesses and so? And all those vital tasks outlined in point 2 also must be carried out mainly by them according to how many skin they invested and have in the game?
Should this important budget and vital tasks outlined in point 2 must be fulfilled, provided and carried out by each one and everyone in our ecosystem regardless their wealth, number of shares, SP stake, earnings in the chain, expectations, available time, etc.?
Whether, if it's feasible that all these tasks and budget could be fulfilled and be accomplished by any of these groups above in solitary or by all of them in a solid community effort.
How long do you think it will take us to take advantage of our pioneering position and achieve the goal of massive and general adoption before new actors in the blockchain world appears out there with similar tech offers and goodnesses showing greater competition?
Do you think that we all will still be present and active here with the same enthusiasm for when that happens?
I've already seen before many fascinating and promising projects that in a short time succumbed to having failed to achieve these goals of mainstream RR.PP, Marketing, Promotion and mass dissemination of their product benefits and goodnesses in time, before the emergence of new competitors with greater budget, willingness and a better strategy & Team to do what needs to be done asap in this department.
I think that this will happen in a couple ways, one being the current community pushing it out publicly, something that hasn't happened much yet. Secondly, the SMT powered communities and apps will do a great deal of publicity work.
I don't think this actually has to happen in this way. what can happen in for eample the next bullrun is that there is publicity surrounding blockchains in general, the applications will be flush and can then independently market themselves.
No. Decentralized community. They can help a lot though.
No.I don't think there should be a budget. This is s decentralized community with application developers looking to capitalize - they better start acting like startups.
Yes, in at least some way, everyone can do something. At the moment, there are a lot of people that talk shit and extract while still hoping that it will help them in the future.
Ok, everything good and dandy. As a 'decentralized' community, I mostly agree with what you say. :)
However, I still believe the greatest weight of the 'budget' in money, time, diligence and devotion to all these tasks of IRL RR.PP, Marketing and Promotion explaining & spreading meticulously on mainstream media outlets like public broadcasting TV stations, especialized Press, cable TV channel news, Magazines and online publications with greater reach and richer detail about all the technicalities and goodness that our 'decentralized' community platform has to offer to the world in order to attract major interest, big investments and the actual feasibility of mass adoption in the general population across the globe.
All these vital tasks should be done mainly by Stinc since they are indeed the only ones who have access to them and actually have the true muscle to develop the convincing jargon with the proper Sales Pitch that would subjugate the attention of corporations, companies and investors in 'our' project.
I am not a big fan of the way governments use budgets, and since a budget requires governance on how it is used and we are already programmed to act a certain way, we end up relying on others to govern for us. I'd rather bumble my way through life than rely on others to make the decisions for me. Steemit Inc have possibilities to add to the processes and budget with what they have as they choose, and it is in their best interest to do so. There is the SPS as a "budget" that can be allocated.
Yeah, that's basically all I'm saying. And I should have been more clear in my statement from the beginning. ;)
Is not Stinc the true and official responsible to carry out all the vital and important tasks of spread the message loud & clear worldwide with the true capacity to publicly answer fully any question & doubts which land on his/her lap about the feasibility of their plans to actually create the Web 3.0 and the tokenization of the internet to attract investment/investors, startups and development entrepreneurs?
Basically are not them the only ones with the official credentials and avowed authority as an enterprise, The Recognized Enterprise, the founding blockchain technology enterprise behind the development of the actual financial infrastructure with a proved use case beyond the scope and reach of any competitor around the cryptosphere so far. Those who have the obligation, responsibility and greater possibilities of represent the community and access easier than anyone else the mass media channels as CNBC, Bloomberg, Fox Business Network, CNN, Sky News Business Channel, etc., etc. And every Satellite, Cable, Public Broadcast TV, Radio, Webcast, Streaming Media, Web television, blockchain events and public conferences and every Business & Financial outlets of mass mainstream media printed, digital or otherwise. Who should/must invest most of their time, effort, money, willingness and provision to run the voice way beyond the boundaries of our tiny, intimate & internal ecosystem?
Yeah, traditional online Social Networks as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and all that childish inefficient Marketing & Promotion stuff can be easily delegated to the enthusiastic underdogs that think they could have some influence or impact in the Serious Financial World to achieve the desired positive changes for our currency and economy of our social ecosystem. But all these pretentions are just wishful thinking if we are expecting that through these insignificant online media outlets this would help to expand & extend the call out and CTA where the real money, financial capital and investments really are.
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No, but it is in their best interest in order to increase the value of their private holdings.
Yeah, I agree and it's obvious this is all in their best interest in order to increase the value of their private holdings.
But I insist they must and have to do much more in the public arena of RR.PP, Marketing & Promotion way beyond to only publish an article once in a while in @steemitblog & @steem.marketing with announcements & updates which are nothing more than simple internal memos for our own already captive community.
Magnificent analogy. Steem is the foundation. Every day its a little flatter, a little smoother, a little firmer; and people build a little more on it.
Once that stability point really arrives (a decade?) people will be wishing for the volatility of today :)
Sometimes I feel or strongly want to believe that this is inevitable. But knowing so many of the people I know, this sounds like way too much hard work and also insert all the excuses about how stuff neeeeeeeds to be as it is because otherwise other people will do the wrong thing and they must be stopped at any and all costs (even if the cost happens but the people they're scared of/worried about are never actually stopped which is what invariably happens).
I kind of like the wild west analogies. I think one of the other reasons this place has been my speed has been the finding out/proving that collective we can get stuff done.
We are trained monkeys who have been programmed to act in a particular way for so long, and that way is to rely on an authority to make decisions for us in a fashion that makes us continually give up responsibilities.
For me too. It is a lot of fun!