I’ll be honest at times and especially in the last six months I did not know if the young blockchain would actually make it to the next birthday, it could have quite easily been consigned to the startup graveyard and we would all talk about it from the deck of a ferry or in polite conversation about times we spent back in the day in those discord channels bigging up each other and talking about our rep and steem power levels.
Photo by Adi Goldstein on Unsplash
But here we are, steem turns three and while I’ve not been here since the start (I was a year late to the steem party) I feel in the last few years of my time here I’ve learned (and still am) about myself and the people out there in the greater world, what people hold dear to them and what value means to others, in some ways, the blockchain brought me back to blogging and social media again — I had given up totally on twitter in many ways.
But now I’m back and while I’m not intently gassing each day in discords or interacting in a heavy level in comms in communities I do feel a sense of balance with my conduit space, my place of being able to ‘post it note’ out to the ledger without judgement or intellectual battles, it’s calming, I’m thankful to the notion of the decentralised web, the ability to drop in, drop out, play with a dApp over there and yet still have some kind of remote connection to the ecosystem that makes it all work.
get the balance right
it’s often a constant battle of course with wanting to have an opinion on something but you just move forward, after all, you are either living or existing in this world right, you can get wrapped in the battle of the mind and the drama of the way you are influenced by that or influence the way the your local world works, living as a node fits me better anyway, this time in my life right just seems faster and faster each day, just trying to make the best of the time we have I guess.
I’m a more face to face person anyway, that’s why I enjoyed (we both did) steemfest two so much, it was drinking, chatting and just hanging out, probably the highlight of the whole steem blockchain experience so far actually but boy have things taken off at an incredible rate in the last year — maybe it was all the talk at steemfest 3 (which I watched remotely) about apps but it seems like everyone just went HARD on that.
even thou the price today is under $0.50 and we are nowhere near the seven dollar steem heights or 14 SBD crazy prices (yes that happened) we are still here, dapps are bigger than ever, 
oh how you’ve grown.
We have games, we have decentralised exchanges happening, we have a user signup and retention problem but we have squads on that, we have weekly video and audio shows, we have people working on worker proposal systems — for a ‘startup’ that’s in it’s third year without outside investment as such the fact that the ads route is keeping the lights and the teams of the steem blockchain at some level employed and still focused is awesome.
it does feel very much like a race at the moment for steem blockchain sparta now however with EOS, Tron and all the other blockchain communities spinning up their 360 solution to wanting to be the be all and end all to all things — what steem strength we have is in our maturity, in being so well developed and battle tested in terms of doing what it says it does, we have thousands of hardcore users that use it daily for a variety of things, different blockchain lives and we have a mass of stories that are being told daily throughout the hall ways of steem.
where do we go from here my dear?
Man, the scope is kinda massive right. ..
so.much.is.happening. ..
I think if I was to predict anything I’d like to see a realm, a veritable raft of witness nodes servicing the chain, like a 500/1000 grouping of witness nodes where the SERVICE was not be known as a the elite few in the top twenty gamification zone but more that we had this global decentralised node network movement of reliability and redundancy — sure we ain’t no VISA numbers moving TPS kind a unit but we are remembered like the difference between PEPSI and Coca Cola, it’s all taste preference anyway right before you start pulling out the data sets and specs.
I see tokens making a big play, Mira should be liberating to the chain, frontends are gonna evolve fast, VR and AR are here and are maturing, gaming is gonna evolve fast, marketing will improve as more people come into the scene and firm up their offerings.
I’m not sure where the old SMT narrative fits in the equation, it seems in some ways we have kinda leapfrogged that, we have an almost amazon mechanical turk nature of video bloggers over on dtube that can be an army of advocates for bigger tasks moving forward.
you can build here
The biggest thing I’d say thou with blockchain is that steem is doing what twitter did for sms and phone numbers — we have built a place that says whatever you do in life you can now do decentralised, don’t be in debt or tied to a corporation structure you don’t believe in anymore.
If you don’t want your data sold or leaked, BUILD HERE, if you don’t agree with the ethics of the centralised services you use or you don’t want to contribute at a community member for years to see your platform pulled away from under you, BUILD YOUR OWN HERE.
you don’t have to do communities if you don’t want too. I would suggest that you get more value out of the chain if you do but if you don’t want to you don’t have too, you can wield the same ledger blocks as the rest of them, you can build out your own digital footprint and influence another block at the other end of the chain and never know about it.
the chain is going polymorphic
Polymorphism, in biology, a discontinuous genetic variation resulting in the occurrence of several different forms or types of individuals among the members of a single species. A discontinuous genetic variation divides the individuals of a population into two or more sharply distinct forms
And that’s fine, like some kind of exquisite virus that adapts and changes, moves memory location or disguises itself to avoid detection in many ways steem has done that with it’s blockchain over the last three years, it’s been everything to everyone and nobody batted an eyelid, it just sat there, stacking blocks like a boss, maybe the witness code should be renamed WALL-E as it turned up for duty everyday and just stacked DEM blocks!
polymorphism refers to a programming language’s ability to process objects differently depending on their data type or class. More specifically, it is the ability to redefine methods for derived classes
And that is where we are at in my mind, we have SO much data here now, so many communities built around interest, intellect, education, varying from beginner to expert class, we have a whole damn Petri dish of people from all walks of life and aside from a few tantrums we have diversity.
And it’s in this diversity that I have derived great comfort from the assurance of my fellow block chain brothers and sisters. In a world of AI, Climate Problems and a clawing back to calming times and quantified moments of wonder the chain continues to provide a bright light to follow along by.
__humble
pinterest epic wins pinboard → brand advocate for nokia, 1000heads, verisign → won vloggie for node666 (san fran 2006) → television for time team history hunters 1999 → sold me.dm to evan williams in april 2011 → went to phil campbell, alabama to help raise money after tornado (was on sky news, bbc news)→ CNN for sxsw 2013 about austin sxsw → video chat with robert scoble → music video can you spot me?
