Is Steem doomed to be the next MySpace because the first product is rarely the one that corners the market? How many times have we heard this? Will we only get 40 million users instead of a billion users? These questions have already been asked countless times on this platform.
I've been obsessively watching Andreas Antonopoulos videos on Youtube recently. I thought he had nothing to offer me because he usually focuses his speech in a way that caters to people who know very little about blockchain. Regardless, I'm still learning a lot from him.
He uses a good analogy about Bitcoin being like a Lego set. Let's say you make a train out of Legos. This train is inferior to a plastic mold-injected train built at a factory, but that factory will only be able to make the train. The Lego set can be used to build anything.
Once one comes to this realization, it's easy to see that Steem is not social media. Steem is a Lego set, and the first thing we decided to build with that Lego set was something that looked like Social Media. Just like the banks look at Bitcoin and scoff, so do Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram look at Steem and say, "Haha! You gotta be fuckin' kidding me!"
It is impossible to compare a blockchain with a corporation. Everyone really wants to understand this technology, so they do the only thing they can, compare it to something that they do know using projection. This logical fallacy (Halo Effect) will prove everyone wrong in the future.
How is Steem similar to MySpace? Short answer: it isn't. MySpace is a closed off privatized service being developed and paid for by a private corporation. You can't access their databases. Code is obscured. If you want to program an application for it the functionality has to be present in the API that they have provided.
At it's core, the Steem blockchain is very simple. It has to be. It was basically programmed by a single person. Steemit Inc. took the Legos that @dan made and built a very rag-tag social media with them. The Legos of Steem can be rearranged to build a million other products. JavaScript can be embedded directly into the blockchain using custom JSON operations.
With Steem, everything is visible. Nothing needs to be secure. Satoshi Nakamoto solved the Byzantine Generals’ Problem and the world will never be the same. If you have resource credits the witnesses are obligated to process your transaction. There are no invalid transactions and with that comes zero censorship and immutability.
Developers can create decentralized apps that allow clients to spend credits rather than the developer having to pay for server bandwidth. This allows dev teams to increase the value of the entire platform with very little overhead cost. It becomes the job of the witnesses to scale, decentralizing the responsibility of everything and the reward of everything.
How could we possibly compare this to a corporate service? What are the chances of another community creating a Lego set that eclipses ours in every way and they somehow outrace us in development even though we've already been around for 2.5 years?
Conclusion
How many users will the Steem blockchain acquire? As many as it can accommodate. If you believe that this platform can scale up to millions of daily users overnight because the whitepaper said so you are sorely mistaken. Scaling is the #1 main issue of all trustworthy blockchains because the only way trust is attained is through inefficiency. Our blockchain is already 140 gigs and hardly anyone uses it when compared to other social media.
Is Steem the next MySpace? Is Apple the next orange? Is orange the new black? The only way Steem can fail is if witnesses are allowed to post bad blocks or if there are no witnesses left to produce blocks. The likelihood of this happening is almost zero due to the ability to fork and the financial incentives imposed by cryptocurrency on a global scale.
Great post. Pushes me to think deeper. To bad i am not a person who can code, therefore some things is hard to understand to me.
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I think that this analogy makes things even worse, because there are so many Lego sets out there and the Steem blockchain is way behind in many aspects. Instant transaction times with no fees and tokenization (SMTs) are actually a standard with other chainOS like Tron.
Steem wants to position itself as the first and best Lego, while in reality, they are behind in development. The only advantage - whether we like it or not - are actually the active userbase of Steemit (or what is left of it) and not the blockchain itself.
Technology-wise the Steem blockchain can only surprise people either new to crypto or coming from a slow and/or expensive "currency-only" crypto like old BTC - for them, Steem will be a revelation, but for experienced people in the blockchain sphere, I really doubt that...
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Real users and community are everything.
Like Bitcoin was "good enough" to be workable digital money, Steem was the first "good enough" blockchain lego set.
Steem has by far the largest community and number of active users doing legitimate things of any blockchain platform. See https://www.stateofthedapps.com/rankings?sort=dau&order=desc
Steemit is now a clear number 1 with 8 times the users of the best ETH dApp. EOS is basically just a gambling platform which is not sustainable.
See more details here https://steempeak.com/stateofthedapps/@apshamilton/half-of-top-10-dapps-steem-smashes-ethereum-and-eos-for-legal-dapps-and-why-eos-is-in-big-trouble
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Yeah, as I said, active users are the true advantage - but the Steem blockchain itself is just one of many Legos out there. I also think that chains won't survive if they just deliver gambling dapps, but this is, unfortunately, the first and seemingly most profitable use case. (Like porn was a huge selling factor for the internet itself)
That's why developers will focus on it first. I'm not a gambler myself, but profit-sharing on dapps is actually a huge advantage and novelty in this field. Tron has more transactions than the top 5 cryptos combined each day and yes, over 50% at the moment is also about gambling. This development won't stop there and there will be many more other and valuable content coming over the next months.
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You can’t build a community based on gambling. If you already have a big community like Steem you can tolerate a bit of gambling but if it takes over your platform it’s bad news.
It provides no stickiness or commitment to the platform. Gamblers will very quickly move on to the next gambling platform.
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That's true, but I wouldn't say, that the blockchains were really looking for gambling dapp developers - it is the other way round... I'm also the content guy and prefer dapps that provide value content, but you can't blame the blockchains for developers and their work. You can't blame "the internet" for porn, memes and spam, that still are over 50% of its traffic 😉I'm also no big fan of EOS anymore and never have owned a huge bag, but for other reasons....
About the community I agree, but I wouldn't call the Steemit community "big" anymore - it has been some months ago, but now after all the troubles it remembers me more of a ghost town. Let's hope this will change, but I still think, that Justin Sun should buy Steemit and let it run on Tron - I don't have much hope that STINC will survive under the current situation and leadership.
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I'm new to blockchain development and like you said Steem feels like a revelation to me. I think we can build a lot of stuff on top of the current Steem blockchain without any hard-forks. For example, have a look at the vapor-chain protocol which allows to create tokens without any modifications to the blockchain.
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Yeah, Tron is cool, sure. They have a lot of money and they are doing a lot of development. Justin Sun is also a greedy shill and the governance of Tron serves mega-corporation block producers. At Steem, anyone with coins controls 90% of the inflation rate of those coins. The other 10% is basically payment for Resource Credits.
Tron pre-mined everything and no more new coins will be created. Their economy is completely different than ours. There is no competition here. During the next bull run we will be up to our ears in scaling problems just like every other coin.
I'll also be writing a post very soon about how redundant coins still have value. Litecoin is the perfect example. Even though Litecoin doesn't really do anything that Bitcoin can't do, it will still retain value. None of the new Lego sets are going to be so good that they stop the old ones from being played with. In addition, many apps will be modular and be connected to multiple blockchains. The end-user might not even know or care about which chain they are on.
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You might want to check out my steem-state project which allows arbitrary DApps on Steem which are much more scalable and quick than other existing DApp platforms such as Ethereum.
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I like the analogy, more people need to think objectively like this! This blockchain has much more potential than the detractors want to give it credit because they are probably mad they didn't come up with something themselves. The big companies obviously want it to fail because it's their most direct competition if you think of the future.
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Nice comparison and - maybe more importantly delimitations - not sure if Steem actually matches lego. Imo it would be closer to playmobil, you can make some adptions, but not too much... EOS is more like a real lego to me...
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Programming in general is a modular Lego system so every coin is basically it's own Lego set. The original analogy was referring to Bitcoin.
The problem with EOS is that it's the least trustworthy cryptocurrency in existence. @dan thinks it's more important to scale than to have the trust that he's sacrificed. It might turn out to be a great platform if he's right.
Every blockchain has it's niche and community. EOS will attract applications that require high speeds but don't necessarily require that much trust.
Ethereum has a much higher chance of being a platform where you can buy and sell houses, cars, and other high value properties, whereas EOS has a much better chance of being a platform where you can make $5-$10 an hour playing video games.
Steem has custom JSON operations. Which means you can store code directly on the blockchain and have very easy access to it. Anything JavaScript can do (everything) can be done on the Steem blockchain. The only limitation is Resource Credits.
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The other big problem with EOS is that 70% of its top dApps are gambling which is likely illegal and a real threat to the blockchain itself. It certainly is not the way to build a community!
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EOS appears to have a governance problem with nearly half of the BP's now owned by Chinese statist whales with a different agenda. @jeffberwick pointed this out in his recent TDV newsletter, but I was noticing that those BP's I had voted for last summer are nearly all gone from the top 21 spots.
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First off, thx for your comprehensive considerations. As for versatility i don't see that too much with BTC, which would ideally be a means of trustless transactions, so whereas this in itself is great, i don't see that much of potential to do things other than just that, so if you dont mind, btc is rather like a barbie, shiny but one-dimensional. The lego idea in my view, originated from the promise of ETH, that you will be able to deploy any application on that chain, but in its current implementation, just can't deliver.
Assuming that you qualify EOS as least trustworthy chain, is based on the fact that it uses the DPOS concept, how does that now also apply for Steem? Despite some issues, this doesn't seem to be that big an issue for Steem. Where is the difference then? And why is it less trustworthy than the mining conglomerates we know from BTC and ETH? To me the lesson of the recent BCHABCSV fork, is that proof of work is well attackable, and the hashpower in the hands of a few can pretty heavily disrupt and harm a chain, and a holder or user can just do nothing about it....
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Cryptocurrency is creating a vast spectrum of programmable use cases.
Some people have said Bitcoin is flawed because you can't reverse transactions. Ironically, this guarantee is one of Bitcoin's greatest strengths.
It is also false. Using code one can create a reversible Bitcoin transactions by adding a layer of code. The Lightning network is another layer, and there will be another and another.
Every blockchain has it's own set of building blocks. Just because we think that the Bitcoin Lego set is a bit boring doesn't mean doesn't mean that it's not a Lego set.
I'm not sure how much different EOS DPOS is from Steem/Bitshares, but they've already ran into issues with account freezing and reversed transactions. Many "experts" are now even claiming that it's not even a blockchain, and I don't hear the same arguments for @dan's other creations.
The EOS airdrop business model gives Block.One 10%+ control of every product that gets created there. It seems like EOS centralization is going to breed even more centralization. SMTs will be 100% owned by the developers/community.
In the end, none of these projects are in competition. We have yet to see the market cap of one coin bleed out into another. Every blockchain is a community, and you can't force one community to become part of another through violence or competition. Cryptocurrency is a pacifist solution with the goal of consensus governance.
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The great thing about Steem right now is it’s potential to truly be decentralized as Steemit Inc takes a lower influence over the protocol, its infrastructure and development. The community is what is driving value and will begin to influence the future of its growth and model which will continue to foster DApps that will demonstrate the scalability and flexibility of the protocol at relatively cheaper prices. Thanks for sharing!
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Great article @edicted.
You make some terrific analogies in here that I think are helpful for people to understand. People still have a difficult time understanding where the value lies in blockchain versus the present internet. While applications can have value on blockchain, the underlying "lego" has value since it is monetized. In the world as we know it, Facebook or whatever the app is has the value. Nobody puts a price on TCP/IP.
After ready through the comments, I have a suggestion:
It appears you did a fair bit of research on some other blockchains. Perhaps do a write up of them, stating in your view the pros and cons. You could do a post for each one. Like you made some statements about Tron...it would be good to see them in a post with some elaboration to understand your thinking.
There are a lot of blockchains out there which gets overwhelming to begin with. Then, the average person on here does not have the technical expertise to see some of the points you mentioned and potential pitfalls.
Instead we just get the regurgitation of xxx is the next steem killer without having any idea what the benefits or shortcomings are of xxx. They just feel it is better than Steem because Steem isnt perfect.
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Good idea. I've tried to study, rank and explain individual blockchains in the past but it's very difficult to get all the information needed in a timely manner. I've done hours of research on some coins before realizing it was an erc20 token. Figuring out premine and decentralization is very difficult as well. then there is the research on the dev team and they never reveal how much money they have or how they are going to spend it. then community, speed, scalability, application, and inflation distribution.
It's a lot of work, but I've always believed that Steem is the perfect place to organize the information of all these technologies. What I'd really like to do is create a way for anyone to 'fill in the blanks'. kinda like Wikipedia except with the chance to get paid.
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A terrific idea. Not sure how you go about doing it but it is a great idea.
I do agree about Steem. That is why I think you research is helpful. Plus you can put the technical terms in a layman's fashion, something a lot cannot do. They talk over people''s head with the technical stuff.
But it is helpful. Like Tron. I knew there was a lot of money since Alibaba was involved in some way. I did not realize they issued all the tokens. That is news to me. That really changes the view of the chain.
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Yes, Tron, almost identically to Ripple XRP, has 100 Billion coins. If you look at coins in circulation XRP only has 40 billion and Tron has 66 Billion. Meaning that the dev team controls 60 billion coins at Ripple and 34 Billion at Tron.
Not only that, Justin Sun has the audacity to pat himself on the back by saying he burned a few million coins and Ethereum never did that. LOL!
Still, I think these platforms still have a chance of becoming decentralized. Money can only be spent once. I just think Steem will do it faster, our model is superior.
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I wish Steemit would become the next Myspace. I loved Myspace.
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The lego set analogy especially applies to my steem-state project. The first wave of Steem DApps was interfaces to the social network. Next we got more complex interfaces that showed the blockchain in a different light (e.g. steemhunt). Now, we are coming into the territory of arbitrary DApps, such as Steem Monsters and MagicDice, which I hope steem-state will be the backbone of.
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