The other day I wrote how the largest companies, by market cap, are those with the strongest ecosystems. It doesn't matter the product or service, the value lies in the ecosystem. Take Uber and AirBNB as examples. These two companies own very little. Uber operates sans a fleet of cars while AirBnb does not have one hotel room. Nevertheless, both these companies were able to upend their respective industries. In fact, they are so disruptive that they are causing pain for their cometitors.
STEEM is a disruptive force since it using blockchain technology. While this is still in its infancy, we are going to see blockchain radically shift the landscape of the world we live in. Power structures will be altered. Abundance is coming before us yet most people still fail to see it.
One of the most successful companies the last 15 years has been Apple. This company was a marginal computer company that created high end products which focused on specialty markets. However, it went through a stretch where it totally revolutionized a couple different markets. The first was the music industry with the introduction of the IPod. After that, the IPhone, really upended the cell phone market. These two products were able to garner billions in sales.
At the core of all this is the IOS operating system. A large part of the ecosystems we see today are some type of operating system. Microsoft made a fortune with the Windows platform that is still widely used on all laptops and PCs. Google really started to take over the cell phone market with Android. We see that what lies "underneath" can be very valuable.
Yesterday, I read an article talking about the "IOS Economy". How much is this entity worth?
It is important to note that one of the advantages Apple (and Google have) is it created a system whereby people are free to use their own creativity to develop products (apps) which can go on Apple's ecosystem. Of course, it requires their approval and Apple takes a decent cut of the proceeds. Hence, the power of owning the operating system.
In this sense, they decentralized. They created a huge market of developers to create an assortment of apps which help strengthen the Apple ecosystem. This also provides enormous revenues for the company.
According to the research in this article, it is believed that the IOS economy generated $380B in revenues last year with the hardware. Even if we remove that from the equation, we see that it produced $180B for Apple. This company generated almost $200B in digital files which were created by people who do not even work for Apple.
For full article:
http://www.asymco.com/2018/01/08/the-ios-economy-updated/
Can you now see the power of decentralization?
Apple was able to expand the potential of its system by letting others do the creating for them. For this "benefit", Apple paid almost $90B to developers, almost half of what it generated.
So how does this compare to STEEM?
It is vital to mention that STEEM is 100% decentralized and enables anyone to put whatever they create on the blockchain. There is no permission required. Apple is known to have a rather tight approval process which means a lot of effort was wasted if one's creation did not meet their criteria.
This is where STEEM differs. One does not meet the approval of some committee. Everything created can be put on the blockchain. Here, the community decides. If people gravitate towards the app, then you have success. The question of whether it is accepted is not in the hands of a few but, rather, the users. It is up to each of us to determine which apps we use.
Blockchain is a much different structure than the traditional business model. However, it does have a few similarities, at least from an analogical perspective. A blockchain can be thought of as an operating system. Everything is built on top of it. Just like app developers create their products to interact with IOS, those on here design apps for the steem blockchain.
Please bear in mind that Apple is the 3rd ranked operating system in terms of placements behind Android and Windows. This exemplifies how loyal people are to that ecosystem to generate such huge revenues.
STEEM, at present, generates more transactions than any other blockchain even though it is newer than most. This is a big deal in this environment. People are still trying to determine how to value these entities. However, one of my basic points is what is taking place on the blockchain is crucial. That is the real barometer. If people are using the network, then Metcalfe's Law kicks in at some point. Over time, with continued effort, the number of nodes (users) should grow. This only makes a blockchain more valuable.
Also, there is a major difference between STEEM (and some other blockchains) and the traditional models. On STEEM, many, if not most, of the transactions are "new" money. The reward pool means that people are acquiring tokens. These transactions are coming from the blockchain and putting never used-before STEEM in people's wallets. I think it is safe to say that every dollar spent on the IOS platform was money that was issued out. From an accounting perspective, the IOS purchase mean a deficit (in terms of money) for the individual while, on STEEM, it is a surplus.
The final piece of this puzzle is the fact that anyone can enter this ecosystem at any time....for any reason. With Apple, one needs to basically purchase the phone to partake (although ITunes does work on Windows). This is not the case with STEEM. Some might have no interest in Zappl yet D.Tube is attractive to them. At present, we are dealing with similar apps (social media) but over the next few years, we can only imagine what people will create. My point is the barrier to entry to this ecosystem is nothing.
Can STEEM be as big as IOS?
That will depend upon development. As long as people are creating applications for this blockchain that are attractive to people, more will be joining us. The real kicker could be the Smart Media Token technology. Through this, STEEM has the ability to draw millions of users to the blockchain via their present interests. STEEM does not have to convince millions of users to come over, only the site owner to embrace tokenizing his/her website. The crowd will follow.
The social media platform contains billions of daily users. This is one of the largest markets on the Internet. STEEM is the premiere social media blockchain (actually eliminate social media...premiere blockchain). If 50K daily active users can create 1.5M transactions a day, can you imagine the volume of activity when there are even 5 or 10 million on here? Let your mind ponder if D.Tube and Zappl take 1% of the traffic away from YouTube/Twiiter.
As you can see, it does not take a large penetration in any one market for STEEM to be enormous. Is a $1T blockchain out of the question? Down the road, I do not believe so. Ultimately, I believe we will see hundreds of billions of dollars worth of transactions done on this blockchain.
Billions of people are posting, upvoting and commenting on a daily basis but only 50K of us are truly getting paid for it.
This means there is a bit of room for growth.
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