Steemit: The Killer App For Blockchain Mass Adoption (BarCamp Nashville Talk Proposal)

This past weekend I gave a short talk at RESTfest about Steemit, and it was really well received! Thank you for all the encouraging comments.

My friends here in Nashville have helped organized BarCamp for going on 10 years now. BarCamps are unconference style meetings where anyone can speak on just about anything. I've spoken there multiple times and was asked by my friend @chuckbryant to be on their SpeakerUp panel discussion this past Tuesday to help other new speakers know what to expect. They also wanted to set the tone for this year by inviting more thought-provoking, challenging talks instead of just a series of skills presentations. A talk I gave a few years ago about the disruptive nature of Bitcoin was used as an example.

That got me excited about talking again this year! BarCamp Nashville is October 15th and, if selected, I'll get 35 minutes to speak.

Here's my talk proposal. If you're in the Nashville area, please come check it out and favorite it on the site. That helps attendees plan out who they will vote for the day of the event which then determines who gets to speak.

Let me know if you have any corrections/suggestions for the talk outline:

Facebook is worth around $350 billion. Twitter: $10 billion. Reddit: $500 million.

How much of that value did you create? How much were you rewarded for the content you created?

Steemit is a decentralized, blockchain-based social media platform which pays content authors and curators in real tokens of value. Launched in May of 2016, it has the potential to radically disrupt not only the dominant centralized social media platforms today but also the very concept of money itself.

In this session, I'll give a brief overview of what blockchain technology is (the decentralized ledger system which powers bitcoin) and how Steemit's advanced blockchain (100k transactions a second, 3 second confirmation time) creates a fully decentralized social media platform which can not be censored by any government, has no central server to be attacked, and can be viewed by multiple blockchain browser clients, including your own computer. I'll talk about how my account is currently worth around $10k, and where the money comes from. I'll give examples of friends who have made $8k or $3k on a single post and show one of my own posts which made over $1k.

And then things will get interesting. We'll briefly explore the very nature of money and how Steemit is not only bootstrapping a currency, but also a marketplace for its use, all without the use of force of any kind. Technologies like Steemit, with their smart contracts and built in escrow systems, may lead to a voluntary society and render governments useless. This is an exciting time to be alive. I hope you'll join me on this journey.

For a preview, see my blog at https://steemit.com/@lukestokes

What do you think? Do you have a BarCamp in your city? Have you thought about giving a talk on Steemit?