Surf's up - 2017!
All big waves start small, even in the cryptosphere. If you're here reading this right now, let it be known that you couldn't have been more at both the right place and time. This little wave right here just recently cruised past #8415 in global traffic ranking. In order to continue its march into dominating the attention economy, Steem and its ecosystem will need to focus on strengthening its core value of being the gateway into freedom.
There will be a million and one different communities / apps / tokens in the future. People will need a platform to discover the ones that are suitable for them, seeing that the beating heart of the capital world is now snowballing into a globally shared pool of assets through smart tokens, each with varying flavours of function and distribution. It's just blockchain technology taking on a life of its own, manifesting itself as many different kinds of tokens out there, to appeal to as many people as possible. The way to achieve this level of adoption is principally through social means, so Steem is in a great position to make this happen and be the center of it all.
This may all sound quite delusional, but is it really?
Huge chunks of the attention economy are in fact, captured by platforms like Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, Weibo, and so many others. These are all at their core, social and trust networks. That's the layer of the Internet that Steem is in position of improving, all by enabling the sharing of value creation. I can only imagine the expansion of Steem's capabilities further down the road as we experience growth in adoption. It could even become a decentralised exchange, the mother of community tokens, a place for app discovery.
So after spending the past couple of months diversifying my crypto assets, it just dawned on me today that it seems rather odd for anyone not to be dividing up their cryptocurrency holdings proportionately to their time and attention. I've seen users going big into other coins they never spend time in, and weirdly, light on the platform they're investing most of their attention into like Steem. In that sense, it's pretty much full Steem ahead for me now because it turns out, I'm hardly using any other coins at all. But of course, not everything in one basket. It's just that I'll remain heavy on Steem since I happen to gravitate towards it!
"And that, I think, was the handle — that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply PREVAIL. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave..."
"So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high water mark — that place where the wave finally broke, and rolled back.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
We will never know where this grand experiment will take us
But I believe that the future of decentralisation is already on its way to distributing itself far and wide into many good hands. Massive changes will happen with the coming of the Big Wave, and you may soon find yourself resisting from within, hanging onto your board before the wave breaks. Ride it out, and you shall be free.
