27th August of 2019

This day, 27th August of 2019, will hopefully be remembered as the day when Steem started to get back on track.

While HF21 will not change everything, it will give us a better way to deal with abuse and a way to reward good contributions. It will not fix everything, but it will give us tools which we can use to fix things.

And while I'm at my workstation, making sure everything goes smoothly with my witness nodes, I can't help but think about another event which happened today. Some of you might already know this: World of Warcraft: Classic was released today.

World of Warcraft: Old School Gaming

One of the most popular games was re-released again, after more than 15 years.

Now, the reason I'm mentioning WoW is that I really enjoyed playing it in my teens. And it did go through my head whether or not I should try it out. While it does provide a very unique sense of fun, it also has its downsides.

Besides being extremely addictive, it also has a very big disadvantage: unless you're a really good entertainer (such as asmongold or sodapoppin) or pro-gamer, which will require that person to invest much more time than it's usually fun, everything you're doing in the game is for nothing.

Because we already know what happened the last time, when World of Warcraft was first released. People spent years of their entire lives on it and had nothing besides great memories. Now, I'm not saying that memories are bad or not worth it, but ever since I took the red-pill dive into blockchain gaming via Steem Monsters (Hive account@steemmonsters) aka Splinterlands, my perspective changed.

Why should anybody invest time into something, besides just having fun, where the return-of-investment(time - lots of it) is pretty much nothing. Imagine you've been playing World of Warcraft: Classic for a year, spent tons of time on it and you've achieved quite a lot, nobody will give any woo about it. You'll just be one of the many accounts and the worst thing: you don't own anything. Blizzard does. Not you.

Steem Monsters: The Alternative

Let's take Hive account@steemmonsters now as a comparison. Imagine you've been playing Steem Monsters for a year. You probably invested some money into the game, but that's even the case for Heartstone, where many people invest tongs of cash into cards & packs. But let's stick with Steem Monsters.

So you've been playing for a year, grown your collection, collected quests & season rewards, collected daily DEC and participated in tournaments, where you have won some DEC & other tokens as well. The first big difference is the fact that you own everything you've earned over the year.

You could simply say: okay, I'm done with the game, I want to sell everything. And you could. They are your cards & tokens. In World of Warcraft, you can't do this without breaking the ToS, which might get you banned.

The other big advantage is: you earned cold hard cash while having fun and playing a game. And the great thing is: you don't have to invest more than an hour or two per day to get some really great returns. Try that with World of Warcraft and you'll earn nearly nothing.

Now, this model is obviously possible with World of Warcraft as well, being on the blockchain and adding rewards to it. However, this is currently not the case, but with Steem Monsters and all the other dapps, games & communities it is.

Steem leading the pack?

You can spend time on Steem, play some games, write posts, do whatever you want - and be rewarded.

And this is why blockchains like Steem are the future.

Will Steem be one of the successful OGs? I don't know, I hope so because it does have the potential. But there is no guarantee and we gotta' work for that to happen!

So with this said:

I'll see you guys on the other side!

Wolf