Ned Scott First Steem Saturday, Johannesburg 29 Oct 2016 [Transcript- Part 2]

That's impressive, that's really impressive, kudos to you guys. How many people have used bitcoin? Okay almost the same number, that's really amazing. So you guys can relate then, you understand how impactful it can be on our lives, the idea that there is now this borderless finance, its truly amazing. So with that technology kind of in hand we also look at the other problem we are trying to solve. We look at censorship, corruption in government, corruption in banking. How can we take this new cryptocurrency technology and apply it to these other paradigms of our lives to make things better for us. The end of the line technology of cryptocurrencies is the block-chain, the block-chain is really just this open, public database thats regarded to be immutable and when we think about a database, the database stores data, right? So there is this opportunity now to not just have a sort of cryptocurrency built on the block-chain but have other sorts of information incorporated on the block-chain to build all types of applications and if we think about the databases used by social networks. They are collecting all sorts of data about our whereabouts, our interests, who our friends are and our entire social graph. They collect all this information so they can sort of re-pack it and sell it to other companies who then want to target us, and buy our attention. They wanna buy our attention so they can point our attention to products and services that they want to sell to us. So then these platforms in the middle, the twitter, the instagrams, the facebooks, they are the middleman and they are extracting our value in this transaction while these advertisers come to get our data and our attention, its the platform that is extracting our data. So with this unique moment in time now where we can take the block-chain and the cryptocurrency concept and we can apply it to these social networks in a way that creates more synergy between the end-users and the platform and the businesses that want to tap into the platform to get our attention. So we ended up building this thing called Steem and its not meant just to be a database for any specific application but its meant to be a database that completely flips the model of content creation and rewards for creating good content in a way that has excellent synergy between all of the users of the platform and the people who are kinda running the platform itself.

Back to the adspace concept, one thing that hasn't before been seen in cryptocurrency - cryptocurrency today is kind of this, its this institution of speculation - if we look at bitcoin, litecoin and dogecoin and these concepts of cryptocurrency and what really makes them popular, what really gets them **** is their market capitalization, how bigger they ****, and I think that's very interesting and I think that's how most of the currencies around the world actually operate, they are really just instruments of speculation, but the cool thing about Steem. It's the first sort of cryptocurrency to tap into what has been referred to the attention economy. And the attention economy is this idea that you have this sort of cryptocurrency underlying a community of people and the cryptocurrency is of course trading on the markets and people can speculate on the cryptocurrency. But in Steem there is also this concept of author rewards, as people speculate and the market cap grows there is more of these crypto-tokens rewarded to the people who are participating in the network and are contributing content and that sort of thing. As those people are contributing they are also paying attention to an interface based on Steem, so there is this other element that cryptocurrency hasn't seen before, which is that people can come and purchase the communities attention. What's cool now is we can mandate that to buy our attention as a community, we can say you must use our cryptocurrency, you must use Steem. So the advertiser now must come along and they must purchase Steem and actually spend Steem to get use to pay attention to their products. In that process the Steem can be burned by the platform and if you think about that that's really sort of the first revenue model that cryptocurrency has ever seen. Now we are entering an age where cryptocurrency - it doesn't look like any global fiat currency anymore , it also kind of looks like equity in a company. If you think about that, what we really tapped into is a new tool for empowering a community and that's really what a currency is meant to do, a currency is meant to be this medium of value that is empowering the people who are using it. But now we can take the same vehicle, we digitize it, we put it on the block-chain, we incorporate it with this social network and now we can do so much more. It has these gateways to attract more value for us as members of the community.

Steemit has seen more than a hundred thousand sign-ups since July, there has been a lot of early adopters like everyone in this room who have come from the cryptocurrency space, the libertarian space or just generally people who are looking for new and disruptive technologies and looking for solutions in other parts of our lives. Because the early adopters have come from these specific backgrounds, there is a very educated and intelligent group of people on the platform today and its truly special to be a part of - to see people contribute such valuable perspectives and ideas. But there are still challenges in getting that network effect, in July the numbers were skyrocketing, the numbers are still growing but there is a very competitive landscape out there and companies like Facebook and Reddit have actually shadowbanned links from Steemit.com, we look at something like that and its truly a validation for what we are trying to do. They see Steem and its sort of, you know, they are competitive, they are in a competitive market so I completely understand why they would do something like that. But yeah, we have our challenges ahead of us and we certainly want to meet them head on continue to grow and bring this movement to more and more people around the world and that's why events like this are so terrific cause we are getting the word out, getting more people involved. Since July there have also been more than 95 applications built on top of Steem, there is of course Steemit.com which is the company that I run and that's sort of your reddit.com style of interface, your sort of social network for seeing all sorts of articles and following people and all that. But what's really, really incredible and has really moved me is actually the sheer number of entrepreneurs and developers who have come to this open platform and said "I want to build alongside you guys, I wanna build our own tools leveraging this technology to either targeting a new group of people or augment the system in some way by building a statistics application or a mobile application" and that's truly special because everyone who comes and builds an application or a business on top of Steem is contributing to the community and network effect and there is this very friendly competition that's going on, as I see others launch mobile applications I'm of course thinking "wow, I should be working on a mobile application too right now" but at the same time (we are all working together?) and there's lots and lots of synergy between the developers at Steemit.com and the developers for all these other 3rd party apps.

If we think about our roadmap, there's really two sides of the coin here, there is this new financial paradigm and the rewards and the incentives that come along with Steemit and one of those aspects is this idea of a budget so for the first time in the history of cryptocurrency, Steemit is built in a way that the budget is allocated to posters of content and the curators of the content and that's a very unique new thing for the internet that has never been seen before and there is the other side of the coin which is the social media side of things. One of our big goals is to build this social site that completely stands on its owns, irrespective of the fact that there is all this new value in this new budget of cryptocurrency dedicated to content-creators. We wanna build a site that is completely sticky and loving and caring for all the people who use it, even if they don't realize there is cryptocurrency involved at all. I think if we do that we are double as strong as if we were just relying on the financial side of things. At the end of the day what we are really trying to build are systems that empower our communities and block-chain today has not necessarily had that feeling about it. The first sort of block-chain, cryptocurrency has been bitcoin and bitcoin paved the way for what we are doing today with Steem.

Ned Scott First Steem Saturday, Johannesburg 29 Oct 2016 [Transcript- Part 3]