Preface

I've been around the Internet for a while. My junior year at Vanderbilt, I helped manage and maintain the Classroom of the Future with John Levy, wrote some wonky SuperCard scripts to serially control lights and screens and played with email, ftp and gopher. I started an ISP with two close friends in Nashville in 1992. It was a wild ride through 1999 when we sold it. I was never the best programmer, but I could program. I was never the best hardware guy, but I could persever and get to proof of concept, pre MVP.

Identifying Trends

Ask any of my friends and they will tell you that I am pretty damn good at identifying trends. I've discovered through the years that identifying trends is a sketchy business. Just because the idea is a good one doesn't mean that the time is right for it. Take Tesla for instance. I fully subscribed to Elon Musk's ideology and invested in it, but I was waaaay early. The stock surged and tanked and then finally took off literally years after my initial investment.

The Progression

While I'm not going to compare myself to Larimer based on intelligence, I fully understand the progression of his thinking as Crypto has evolved. First there was Bitcoin. A completely new way to store value without involving a third party. With value, there must be a way to transfer it. Exchanges started popping up everywhere. Some were reputable and some were not.

Bitshares

In response, Larimer creates a distributed blockchain called BitShares whose purpose was to serve as a Distributed Exchange (DEX). Now it's possible to trade crypto without entrusting your funds to any third party. Bitshares 1.0 was a dog with its painfully slow and buggy database rebuild times. Learning from those mistakes, we all migrated to Bitshares 2.0. Additional features included in BTS were various market pegged assets and the ability to create and distribute your own currency. bitUSD is brilliant. Hold a crypto derivative of the USD which stays pegged. GOLD, SILVER, CNY, EUR. Sky is the limit. Bitshares is still rebuilding its reputation from the 1.0 performance issues, but it's where I keep my funds because there is no third party to deal with. Just a dedicated group of miners and brilliant developers.

Steemit

Steemit is the next natural progression for Larimer and team. The reason this crypto is surging is because it has actual utility. It is a disruptor. It's essentially flipping the profit story present in Facebook, Medium and Reddit from a centralized model to a distributed model. Pay those who contribute value with both dollars and equity based upon the opinions of those on the network. Encourage people to stay invested. Ethereum is a blockchain with utility as well, but it's hidden in a way that only programmers can find. Larimer and team picked human communication as the purpose for the blockchain. Think about it. Human Communication. One of the most basic fundamental aspects of a functioning society. They also aligned:

• Profit Motive (Quality writing/voting)
• Reputation (SP Stash)
• Equity Stake (Power Up)
• Price Stability (Power Down)
• Marketplace (coming soon)
• Peer to Peer payments

Conclusion

I've seen so much Dan bashing and he pretty much takes it like a champ, but what I've observed is a very patient, methodical individual taking inputs from many different sources and continually improving upon his ideas. Think about it. He has crafted two crypto-currencies in the top 20 and has inspired other brilliant minds like @xeroc and too many others to name.

Thanks Dan. Keep iterating and Steem On...