Thanks to the efforts of a group of tireless Steemians led by @jacor and sponsors including @sportspodium, QuadroIT and Norton Rose Fulbright, last Saturday was a red-letter day in the calendars of many Gauteng-based Steemians and some from as far afield as Limpopo. The event was live-streamed.

Steemians are real life people

This is what some Steemians of South Africa look like in real life. I had the privilege of meeting several members of @teamsouthafrica, and realising there are far more connections between us than I had previously known. There I am, flanked by @cheeto.blue and @marcel1965, two of the most faithful Steemians and expert "herders" of @teamsouthafrica.

There are brothers, sisters, sons (not that many daughters - hmmm), friends, husbands, wives and all manner of other connections already active on Steemit or looking to become more active. So @marcel1965 and @rynow are brothers, and @jacor is related to the Bear clan of South Africa's South Coast. So much to find out about this group of intrepid travellers into the crypto-unknown.

We realised we knew each other by our Steem handles, but not necessarily by our real names, so scribbled our Steem handles by hand under our names on our nametags.

Fun with geography

For non-South Africans, Gauteng and Limpopo are provinces in South Africa; Johannesburg is situated in the heart of Gauteng. That yellow star just to the north and a bit to the west of Johannesburg is Fourways.

The map above shows where Fourways is located relative to Johannesburg and Pretoria, while the one below shows you how Gauteng is nestled between four other provinces. Limpopo, where @cheeto.blue hails from, is quite far north but not that long a drive on our excellent highways. We were so glad he could make it in person!

Image source: By Htonl (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons

The programme

The day started bright and early on a typically stunning Joburg spring Saturday. After some get-to-know-you-in-real-life coffees and breakfast bites, we kicked off with a bang with Steemit Inc VP Marketing, Mitchell Loureiro (@zurvanic) providing the keynote speech.

From there, @gavvet gave us a thought-provoking perspective on whither the crypto-future, followed by BTC maximalist Lorien Gamaroff (@gamaroff) giving us some insights into the potential future of Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash.

The next round really was a gift to entrepreneurs - Matt Brown, podcaster extraordinaire, and Natalie du Toit, South African swimming Olympian, both spoke to the hearts of entrepreneurs with the kind of reality check that reminds us it is all worthwhile.

Next up was @SportsPodium speaking about their soon-to-be-launched platform, then we had "The Legal BIT" from Norton Rose Fulbright lawyer and Smart Contract/Social Media law expert Rohan Isaacs.

Finally Mitchell summed up the day for us briefly before we headed off to a quintessential lunch in the Indaba Hotel's renowned Boma.

Quick recap of each talk

Caveat: if you want great photos, have a look at @cheeto.blue's post here. Since I'm more of a note-taker than a photographer, I'm relying on the rest of the crowd to give you an idea what the event looked like. I'll give you a quick summary of what the speakers said.

Mitchell Loureiro

Mitchell spoke to us as Steemit pioneers - he emphasised, "You ARE early adopters!", and focused on the short to medium term challenges facing the Steem blockchain and the Steemit platform.

1. The user interface (UX)
2. Scalability
3. Adoption

UX

Most of us regular users have gotten used to the general unfriendliness and difficulty of use of the platform. It's when we try to introduce someone new to the platform we find ourselves saying we'll carve out a couple of hours to help them get started understanding how to use Markdown, how to insert images and how to set up a post for Steemit.

According to Mitchell, Steemit's ultimate purpose is to provide proof of concept of the Steemit blockchain. The Steemit platform is not the ultimate end goal of the Steem blockchain, and the Steem team is actively seeking ways to help creators of applications interact with the technology.

Scalability

It's terrific that there are currently about 100 000 active users on Steemit daily now. One of the reasons people are attracted to blockchain transactions is the security.

However, there is a significant cost associated with the security provided on the blockchain - transaction verification makes it slow. Bitcoin is throttled, and Ethereum is capped. Steem currently does some 1 million transactions per day, the most in the crypto world. The next biggest in terms of transactions is Bitshares.

This is a significant challenge for Steem - if it wants more users (hundreds of millions rather than the already impressive few hundred thousand users it has today), it will have to be able to cope with far more than 1 million transactions per day. To the moon, Alice!

Adoption

Let's face it, the UX is not the biggest attractor to new entrants, and it has kept some new entrants from persevering as users.

Big announcement

Image source

Smart Media Tokens (SMTs) are on the way. They are Steemit Inc's solution to the three challenges of the UX, scalability and adoption. Mitchell referenced a Blue Paper which came out shortly after the revised White Paper. That sounds like something we should all go and read! It's about us owning the attention economy, rather than Facebook, Twitter and the like. If we produce value, including cultural value through the production of content others want to read/view/consume and share, we should derive rewards beyond "likes" for that value.

SMTs will help make the Steem blockchain easy to build on for any application which involves the attention economy. Previously, building on this blockchain has been difficult because there's been no interface. Mitchell emphasised for those who aren't aware that they've open-sourced the entirety of Steem, and any developer is free to use it. Steemit Inc does not control the Steem blockchain.

How does this address the UX challenge?

My understanding of this is that in addition to the Steemit interface, there'll be multiple on-ramps to the Steem blockchain, built by many app developers. One thing app developers are usually pretty good at is making their apps easy for their users to interact with.

There was a mobile app developer in the audience. While I didn't get a chance to chat with him after the event, it would be terrific to hear from him and other developers (How? Excellent question. There must be a channel on steemit.chat where these guys can air their views - if they know it exists...) on the utility of SMTs as a basis for building their blockchain apps.

How will SMTs help with scalability?

Making it easier for app developers to create new ways for this blockchain to be used means that more and broader audience bases can be reached. With just a few clicks, new players will be able to use the Steem blockchain for whatever their specific purpose might be in the attention economy.

How will SMTs solve the adoption challenge?

These challenges are all interlinked in the end. New players, greater adoption. A White Paper on SMTs is coming soon. Currently, Steemit Inc is in talks with some 10 or so projects which will use SMTs as their link to the Steem blockchain. Every one of these projects will be inter-operable with Steem and each other.

He did another skirt lift by pre-announcing another piece of tech, to be formally announced shortly, which is designed to enhance inter-operability.

Check out @steemitblog for more, sez I.

He closed on an inspirational note, saying that Steemit intends to transform the internet so that all of us go beyond being consumers of value on the net to creators of value.

@gavvet coined the term "Vinternet"

Gavin's presentation was a crypto-futurist archetype.

He coined the term "Vinternet" meaning the "internet of value", which we as Steemians are part of creating. The current internet is a means of exchanging information and to a certain extent, payments. However, the Vinternet will enable micropayments and smart contracts to enable the exchange of value at much smaller scale than currently, unlocking value which was previously undervalued.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution

Referring to global conversations at gatherings such as the World Economic Forum in Davos, where the Fourth Industrial Revolution and Internet of Things have become coffee talk, Gavin reminded us that whatever we know now, chances are these will change dramatically during the 4th Industrial Revolution.

The crypto bubble

I hope that @cheeto.blue has a photo of the so-called 2011 crypto bubble. You can't even see it on a graph of the USD BTC price through to 2017.

@gamaroff

That was a good segue into Lorien's presentation.

As a BTC maximalist, he gave a terrific overview of the BTC versus Bitcoin Cash (BCH) debate, what SegWit (segregated witness) was about. Essentially, the debate is over bigger blocks versus decentralised smaller blocks, and the fees that miners derive from mining. He explained how bigger blocks are at the root of BTC's current challenges; miners need bigger hard drives, more bandwidth and more energy to mine the fewer BTC available to be mined. Those who've transacted in BTC know that transactions can take up to an hour - unconfirmed transactions are waiting for blocks to fill. In particular, he referred to the constraints of 1MB per block for BTC mining, and miners' thinking in whether to fully populate a block to 1MB or just go ahead and hash it with 500kB of fee-generating transactions.

The small block crowd are the BTC crowd, and the big block crowd are rooting for BCH.

A potential solution, currently only at the concept stage, is to keep BTC in the "settlement" layer and create a "transaction" layer, or the Lightning network. So far, the Lightning network isn't even in production.

His key advice was to watch the BTC/BCH charts rather than the Bitcoin to USD price.

Matt Brown

Matt spoke to us on how to prepare ourselves for the future.

Geez, he was potty-mouthed. And hysterically funny. And inspiring. What a great speaker choice.

He shared his personal journey which most of us Steemians can relate to - after all, we're entrepreneurs at heart and need to hear (often) that for all those fantastic success stories we see, there are many stories of failure...and putting in the hard effort is a great way to not be one of those failure stories.

Our journeys will be full of roadblocks, difficulties and seemingly insurmountable obstacles, but persistence and a "never say die" attitude of really wanting our success, not listening to the naysayers and staying cool on the cliff edge might just get us through.

Natalie du Toit

All you have to do is Google her, and you'll find out plenty about this incredibly talented swimmer who at the age of 14 lost part of her left leg when a driver taking a shortcut in a parking lot drove into Natalie on her scooter. She was already competing at top level when this happened and had already gone through a number of challenges. She shared with us how she didn't let those smaller challenges and then the Big One of losing her leg stop her from pursuing her dream of competing in the Olympics. She did, and she made South Africa extremely proud, and now she's supporting SportsPodium.

SportsPodium

Through a Q&A to SportsPodium's CTO and CMO, Natalie helped @sportspodium to present their vision of SportsPodium as a way of transforming sport - "Levelling the playing field". They've written plenty of articles on Steemit already and I urge you to follow, upvote and resteem them. Plus you might want to get yourself some PODs.

Rohan Isaacs

Ah, the Legal BIT. Some of my best friends are lawyers (really!), so I was ready to enjoy his presentation and was not only not disappointed, was keen to chat more with him afterwards. He gave an excellent overview of Smart Contracts and the legal dispensation which governs these under Common Law. The most important takeaway for me was that Smart Contracts don't stand in for real life contracts - they can enhance these and introduce efficiencies by eliminating aspects such as verification. He gave a number of insurance and farming industry examples which should cause most insurance adjustors to start looking carefully at their alternative skill set. They might soon be out of jobs.

Rohan also gave us some impromptu insight into protecting your privacy on the internet (don't have a social media presence at all) and being safe on the Dark Net (it's fine, really, but there are things there which can't be unseen once they've been seen).

Mitchell closing

Mitchell's closing was short and to the point:

1. the Vinternet - you heard it here first.
2. Study your protocols and do your due diligence when choosing a crypto course of action.
3. Ask the right questions.
4. Grit is worth everything - if you can take the pain you'll get the rewards.
5. SportsPodium is an example of how crypto and Steem may indeed transform the world for the better.
6. Smart Contracts could change how the insurance industry is governed.

In fact, thanks to crypto and the Steem blockchain, we could see a dramatic shift in how societies are governed - sooner than we expect.

Many thanks to the organisers for putting together this great event! Look forward to Steem Saturday 2018, and in between some mini get togethers.

Team South Africa banner designed by @bearone