Greetings! How Steem will Save the Planet... For Real

First of all, I’m honored to finally make my first post amongst this incredible community that has matured so quickly. Bravo!

My name is Stephen (quick intro I promise) and 5 years ago I co-founded an environmental clothing company that plants trees for every item sold. We sustainably manufacture all of our items and have planted just over 15 million trees to date.

I absolutely love this planet...So much so that I wanted to focus my introduction to this network on the important ways that Steem, Bitshares, and EOS can/will contribute to a global shift in our attitude towards a more positive and progressive future when it comes to interacting with the blockchain.

Ok, hold on a second. Before I get too carried away with myself here, I want to disclaim that I actually don’t quite understand the extreme technical side of all this (yet). So I will do my best to keep this high level and provide sources to where I get this information from.

Here we go :)

Since I have focused the last 5 years of my life around planting more trees I’ve also earned an honorary degree in Internet Troll Self Defense . So let’s take a slightly different approach at this energy issue shall we :)

Clearing the Air (no pun intended)

A few years ago I read an article on coindesk that broke down the “environmental costs of mining bitcoin”, and being the naive new “technologist turned environmentalist”, it hit me like a punch in the face.

*If you think the subtle puns are gonna stop...they wont, I’m just getting started.

It outlined the insanely high costs to mine bitcoin with a PoW model and how it will not be sustainable in the future. Now some would argue that the operating costs and environmental impact that other currencies have in comparison, matches (or could potentially exceed) the mining cost of bitcoin. This is a discussion I will not participate in at this point in time.

However, I think we can all understand and agree that PoS requires a fraction of the resources compared to PoW, so rather than regurgitate stats I pulled from 3 year IBM powerpoint presentations, I’ll move on.

Change for the better

The technical efficiencies that define a PoS model, do not always tell the entire story of the creators of the Dapps which have inherited it. The other day I was listening to an interview with Dan Larimer where he called out the wasteful process of the PoW model in comparison to EOS’ delegated PoS. And what I realized was that the community of Dapps his team has built, and the shift in the way we collaborate, interact, and lift each other up, is paving the road for a positive shift in a complicated ecosystem.

I believe this community will amount to incredible things and I’m very grateful to be a part of it.

Thanks and I look forward to chatting with you all!

-Stephen