The Scaling Issue

In the words of Andreas Antonopolous, the Internet has been 'failing to scale gracefully' since its inception. Every time the scaling capabilities of the Internet were raised developers immediately used that bandwidth for more products that once again melted the Internet and brought it to a screeching halt. He believes the same can be said for crypto.

Truth be told, the world wasn't even aware of crypto's scaling issues until the fateful bull market of 2017 when transaction fees spiked up to $50/trx. It still amazes me that entities around the world were even willing to pay that much for a single transaction. However, on the other side of the coin, I know those days will be back; perhaps in as little as two years.

The advantage of Steem (and DPOS in general) is that decentralized scaling is much easier to achieve (at the cost possible corruption). However, where does that leave us now, at a time when scaling isn't an issue? Steem has been caught in the gutter for quite a while.

The difference between crypto and the Internet is that the Internet is much more general purpose. It's much easier to push the scaling limits of a general purpose information digital highway than it is to do so on a blockchain network. The only way to test the limits of blockchain and force it to grow is to wait for the demand of this relatively niche asset to increase. Until then we are just sitting on our hands.

Arguably, this is another advantage of products like Steem and Ethereum, as they are more general purpose and can be used to create dapps. Eventually, the demand for dapps will grow to much higher levels and bog down these networks, forcing a certain evolution to scale up.

We'll know we've reached this point with thousands of users are trying to use our network but can't. We'll know it because some of the witnesses will have trouble keeping up with all the traffic and upgrading their nodes. The value of resource credits will no longer be trivial, and naturally the price of our native token will rise because they are the source of generation of resource credits in the first place.

Unlike the Internet, which is a largely competitive space full of corporate quarantined zones, blockchain tech compliments one another, no matter how much people try to project their tribalism onto it. Bitcoin helps Steem and Steem helps Bitcoin. It's as simple as that. When Bitcoin fails to scale, we will be there to pick up the slack. So will Litecoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, and everything else.

Just for the record, I am not shilling Steem right now. If someone asked me for investment advice, I would almost certainly tell them to buy Bitcoin in advance of this upcoming halving hype and due to the fact that the price is very near the doubling-per-year lower bound limit.

Regardless, Steem is just a much more interesting platform, even if it is much smaller and disorganized due to its many capabilities and young age. We are one of the only networks that pays users to work, and that's quite exciting, especially in the face of an impending economic collapse. What a 'coincidence' that the war machine is starting to ramp up right at a time like this, but I'll speak to that later.