Is right now the best time to ask questions? I believe so.
It comes down to patience. I honestly believe 10 million DAU on Steem is one the worst thing we can do right now. I'm an investor in Steem, but I will be the first one to say we have a long way to go before we start onboarding the masses of normies. Set the economy aside (I think the economy is broken it incentives bad behavior while disincentivizing good behavior, but let's set that apart) - we don't have RC delegation pools or enough accounts to sign up even 5% of Facebook, let alone go for the throat. So, let's say you make a killer app on Steem, you have 10million people beating down your door for accounts and RCs. Are you going to tell your grandma to go to Binance and buy some Steem, or are you going to delegate 15 SP to 10 million people? If we had a foundation in place where people can lease RCs to apps, like Chintai or REX on EOS, then apps could handle the traffic.
I'll tell you a little story about NLC. I invested in NLC when it was 10 Satoshi, and had 0 - 24vol. The site was old and beat up, but I noticed it had a legal license for fantasy sports in more than half the USA, so I reached out to the CEO. I liked Rafael as a CEO, so I helped rebuild the website. I funded the work and brought in the workers. The site went from having words misspelled to rivaling Fan Duel with the features and UI. I went HAM on advertising, did all I could and before I knew it the price was over 10,000 Satoshi! There were tons of players, and we were getting shout outs from everywhere. Life was good, but I knew there was a big flaw I saw and knew it was going to bite NLC in the ass, and that was that there was no dollar peg. So, as a player, I was forced to be at the whim of the crypto market. On the way up, as you imagine it was great, but as soon as the market turned, and players logged in the next day to see they have less USD, that wasn't good. All the work I put into advertising NLC backfired because every player we had started to lose USD values during the bear market. Every player we brought basically hurt NLC at that point, gave a lousy user experience. The dollar peg I envisioned would require a hardfork to add a inflationary/deflationary wallet (sorta took the idea from Bitshares/SBD but tweaked it) so it got pushed off. I learned from this, now NLC is building out a robust dollar peg for players, and next time they kick advertising into high gear, with the dollar peg, it should be able to get players but most importantly keep them.
Now, getting everything as close to right before we blow up should be the goal. We have community members that go up and beyond, look at the work with Steem Engine and how it stood up and made an SMT like protocol; before this, we didn’t even have a way to scale rewards. Imagine 10 thousand sites with millions of users all using just the inflation from Steem to reward new content? Ya, you may get one upvote a year if you are lucky.
My point is, I invested a lot of $$ into Steem, and I did it fully aware of all the issues we currently face. If you never invest in something because it isn't fully grown, while a safer bet, don't expect to achieve great things in investing. I like taking the risk, I love it when my vision pays off, and I believe Steem will be a top 3 crypto, despite any flaws.
I do believe this is the best time to make changes and experiment when we have 10-20k DAU across the board. Look at what happened to Bitcoin; it became so big that no one could even agree on a block size limit without causing billions of dollars in drama. Changes to Steem, esp. the base layer, will become much hard to get passed as Steem grows up. When you have millions, even billions using the platform the weight of every change is magnified much greater and the politics start to take over. Before we get to that point, I believe we should be keeping everything on the table and really taking the time to get the base layer right. Am said the base layer is broken? No. I'm not even saying the distribution of 25/75 is broken, I am saying I think it is broken, but this is just my opinion.
I also believe the core groups of 5-10k Steemains we have here are the lifeblood. For every Steemian we have that is 10-100 FB users. Your avg Steemian uses exchanges, knows proper private key protection and most importantly are on Steem already and have stayed here. Early investors that HODL and don't dump Steem to 1 cent are heroes IMO, it takes balls to power up a lot of Steem, plan and simple. Look around at other blockchains, and you would be hard pressed to find what we have on Steem. And we are only getting better, so let's not neglect our own in the pursuit of 10million future normies. Let's build something we as a community like to use and we will be beating normies away with a broom because they will takeover and our small town will turn into NYC before you can realize.
While I have high self-confidence, it isn't nearly high enough for me to think I have all the answers, that is why I spend my time focusing on me, not others. Now, you are free to do whatever you want; you want 10 million people here? Go post some twitter ADs, go hire the next PewDiePie, go do whatever you think it takes. I could easily do that, shift my focus from building to deploying, but I don't think we are ready yet. I not asking for anyone to do anything, I am too busy building infrastructure and using countless hours to brainstorm ways to help Steem. So, you do you, and I'll do me, and at the end of the day, the chips are going to fall where they fall anyway.
And this is to all the buidlers, do you, don't listen to the noise that will only slow you down.
"If it's not broke, don't fix it" - I dislike that line...
Replace it with: "If it can be better then it currently is, then it's as good as broken."
Keep challenging ideas, keep asking questions but most importantly always speak your mind!
