the two year window has arrived // a normal startup would get acquired, be on life support for a year and then close - I believe we have 3/6 months of runway, let’s see.

---

Firstly, I gotta lot of love for this blockchain, the people, the web apps, the services, the explosive nature of compassion and creation and creators that exist here, it’s got a soul, a beating heart, it’s alive not like some random chain where people bought at peanuts and hope for the moon — our moonshot is based on a need to be part of a compassion community that has the ability to dialog here in an open and democratic way.

Look, I get it, we are in a bear market that has been crushing, ned was smart to pull out some funds when steem was high to pay for costs and development and such like and I’m sure he’s got some interesting things to ‘float’ to us for ideas to make ourselves sustainable, I’ve got a few of them myself, including building a tendering engine for data centres and witnesses for the redundancy and dependancy of our blockchain, I’ll do that in a separate video thou.

I talk more about that ‘two year startup’ cycle in my vlog but I’ve watched that happen year after year, a great idea comes along, heads down in development, meerkat moment, the runway money has been burned through, the in-house chef is fired and then people look for other jobs.

nobody talks about how much was spent, the next startup does not learn from any mistakes and it just depends on the next punt of an investor who made money elsewhere to put in with the next big thing and so the cycle goes again — of course, with crypto that’s a little different, we are trying to sustain from our own version of scratch money, effectively self printing it with the steam emission engine ;)

So, I just wanted to get some thoughts across of things I saw recently coming from steemfest and ‘the bridge’ that got the mini internal alarm bells ringing but why actually I think our CEO of steemit, the main driving force behind the actual infrastructure and chain itself has a lot of guts and why together we need to make sure he and us can celebrate this home-brew ghetto fabulous social blockchain and rise way above all the other blockchain technologies because we have something they don’t.

each one of our nodes will be called on in the next 3/6 to go above and beyond what we have done here previously, if you want this chain it’s gonna take more of your time to shout about it, more your own fiat into it, build sustainable businesses on the chain, ramp up quickly, like steem monsters did, what we’ve had out of the platform, we need to put back in — I also get it’s rough and hard times for everyone as well, this was never gonna be your ‘golden ticket’ moment, we have to face facts that services across the internet eventually cost a fiat bill that has to be paid.

i have incredible respect for each and every one of you that has put time and effort (and money) into the platform so far — I don’t believe that the big players did it based on a whim or excitement, I believe that they genuinely like the technology, the people it’s attracted and the passion they feel falling out of each and every one of you that frequent these blockchain ledger halls, your here because you want something different, something else, something accepting of all, where effort pays off and where you can become your best version of yourself.

I’m not going anywhere, I’m going to increase my efforts on my own financial survival journey and pump back in time and fiat into the blockchain where I can, put out little videos suggesting ideas that might form into bigger ideas, open dialog and debate instead of getting trapped in ‘could of done this’ past history — we have what we have today, we have to move forward from today.

what we have (let’s not forget that)

• incredible group of witness nodes
• daily active users and traffic
• twenty hard forks in two years to get to where we are
• a growing middle class
• hundreds of applications that exist on top of steem
• decentralised thought leaders, compassionate change makers!
• head start of years on other blockchains that never made it to market or won’t for another two years

what we need

• to optimise and share the costs of running the chain
• investment, exposure, awareness
• daily engagement outside of the chain to bring people in
• realism, not hope and dreams.
• a plan we can all vow on for the next two years
• marry distribution of delegation to current successful dapps
• potential crowdfunding but with accurate costings breakdown

. .. and that’s just a few things I could think of, I’m sure you have a lot more to add to that but I really want to finish this post up and get recording the video before the momentum ran away from me, it’s time to put our money / time where our intention for this chain is, and that’s gonna require us to become even more nimble/lean and take on tasks to elevate the awareness of this chain.

for @dtube alone, we are about to see a massive influx of people getting really hit hard by article13 when that drops in december or January time, that’s gonna effect a huge bunch of you tubers that have been working for the last decade in the minority and a large middle class of creators who’ve been doing it for 3-5 years — the big channels have millions of followers and they are about to get hit hard in the payments department.

From a sheer exposure to the blockchain and conversation / buzz point of view we have an opportunity to take a bunch of that fall out from that cause and effect and ride that out for another six months before the article13 starts looking into how to deal with blockchain — it’s survival of the fitness out there right now and will continue to get even more difficult to be able to just interact if we just allow our ability to connect with each other get hindered.

up for the challenge

For me, nothing has changes — I’ve made some friends here, I love chatting here, I love making here, i love what the blockchain offers us, the humble person in the street, it’s a place we can frequent in whatever shape fits our life, we can build businesses in the way we want to see them, build active, thoughtful, insightful spaces where we can literally live our our digital passions — if you can think it, you can probably build it here…

. .. now we need to sustain that, and if we want to have a steem blockchain in the next few years we need to roll up our sleeves and deploy on that, it’s the age of optimising my friends, it’s mad max the steem dome, it’s DUNE, with steem instead of spice! :)

---

Went out on a limb
Gone too far
I broke down at the side of the road
Stranded at the outskirts and sun's creepin' up

Baby's in the backseat
Still fast asleep
Dreamin' of better days
I don't want to call you but you're all I have to turn to

What do you say
When it's all gone away
Baby I didn't mean to hurt you
The truth spoke in whispers will tear you apart
No matter how hard you resist it
It never rains when you want it to

__humble (me along)

---

▶️ DTube
▶️ IPFS

pinterest epic wins pinboard → brand advocate for nokia, 1000heads, verisign → won vloggie for node666 (san fran 2006) → television for time team history hunters 1999 (burton on trent) → sold me.dm to evan williams in april 2011 → went to phil campbell, alabama to help raise money after tornado ripped up the town (was on sky news, bbc news)→ CNN for sxsw 2013 about austin south by southwest event → video chat with robert scoble from rackspace → music video can you spot me? → won the digital derry contest for 5k euros → crowdfunded digital signage concept called pi street → now living life through digital blockchains.