Ok, I'm a fan boy. I admit it. But I know something they don't. Steem is awesome. Others don't believe it's awesome and think I'm just a fanboy when I say it. Judge for yourself, but here's why I think we are awesome.

What's the vision for blockchain

Blockchain is all about decentralization. It's about freedom of speech, freedom of commerce, trustlessness, and a level playing field of knowledge.

Freedom of Speech centralized companies and governments have proven over and over that they are willing to terminate your right to say things if it goes against their agenda. Youtube demonitizes, reddit takes down threads, twitter shadowbans, Patreon expels, and governments kill a lot of people directly. If you want to preserve your speech you're better off trusting a bunch of devs living all over the world running some nodes than you are hoping that centralized companies are going to let you sit there and say whatever you want.

freedom of commerce Two main things here. Taxation is theft. I'm getting more and more confidant that governments have been pulling a congame and that taxes are voluntary and your citizenship has been purposefully obfuscated. That said, they still have clubs and guns and clearly very little morals. So, you have to opt out of the system. Opting out may be uncomfortable now, but as more and more people are in crypto and the tech advances further you'll have the ability to protect your money from the theives that steal it and the same convenience fiat affords you.

Not only that, you get to decide for yourself who the enemy is. Last I checked some dude in Iran making kabobs on the street isn't my enemy. He's not trying to kill me. So, having sanctions on other countries is the government deciding for me who is the enemy. You think some single mom in North Korea is going to nuke you? I don't. People are kind the world over, but it seems like the people in charge the world over are psychopaths. I'd rather choose for myself who to transact with, when to transact with them, how much to transact, and take my own risks than let governments the world over dictate to me who and what I can interact with. They have friends and somehow their friends are always winning the billion dollar contracts. Eff that.

Trustlessness here's the thing. Code is law. On Steem the code isn't racist, sexist, homophobic. People might be... but the code isn't. That means regardless of your race, sex, gender, color, creed, food choices, hairstyle, religion, age, location, or anything else you have the right to upvote, downvote, trade, post, and vote. When I upvote the computer will apply my vest total without considering those things. If you want something that does you can make it and interact with that. If you don't you can choose to operate in a system that you want. With contracts governed by the chain so long as the chain is operating the hardfork version you support it'll do it says it will do.

Who doesn't do what they say they will do? Governments and corportations. They have laws, but they skirt them. They have policies, but they skirt them. Code doesn't, unless it's buggy. So, stop trusting people, and start trusting opensource code.

Knowledge With blockchain you have more information about financial things than ever possible before. The pentagon can't keep track of 22 TRILLION. I'm sure someone has it on one of the sets of books, but somehow the public can't ever see it. Well, if this shit ran on a blockchain someone with comp sci 101 behind them could whip up an audit on teh pentagon, fed, or all the slushfunds that the states are hiding so they don't have to pay shit to retirees they made promises to.

Why does this matter? because information about money is usually more important than just having the money to begin with. Now you don't have beg your stock broker for inside tips. They may still help, but now you just query the blockchain. Who is moving money where? How much? What are they spending it on? Where are the accounts located? Where it's going? You don't have to trust government or corporate economists. You just look at on chain data. And you really don't have to do it yourself. People can make money by coding up websites that let you search this shit. So, you don't have to learn to code. You just have to prod the people who can and usually ply them with some craft beer and energy drinks.

Crypto Racism

The banks don't make it easy to transact. The tech companies block us. The laws hold us down. And your boomer aunt thinks we're just one operation to run heroin out of Afghanistan (tell her that's the CIAs job). But as this becomes more and more mainstream these feelings aren't going to be the norm. We've done this as a community despite these bastards holding us down (sorry to your aunt). What's going to happen when we go from oddity to mandatory. Gonna be a lot of suited bastards sucking up to some crypto nerds... Blockchain is already the highest paid and most attractive keyword on linked'in. It's not going to happen... it's happening!

That's the future

So, I can't tell you when, but in my eyes it appears to be accelerating. Halvening is coming in. Interest in crypto is rising. Anger at governments is increasing. The things that the whole crypto ecosystem has been putting in place for 2 years of bear market are moving along. We didn't die. We all got lean!

And Adaptive Capital, a blockchain focused hedgefund, has done studies or analyzed the big ones that shows that bitcoin doubles the number of people it interacts with in a bear market and it quadruples in a bull market. Now, we're at 1% now. A year of bull market and we're at 4%. Another year and we're at 16% of the fucking world.

When this sea change hits it's gonna be fucking massive and hit you like sharknadotsunamiavadrought.

Unless you're an old ass boomer you're going to live in a world where applications that were run by traditional databases are now going to be run by blockchains.

So, why Steem? How does it fit in?

In the future people are going to run applications verified by the blockchain. I tend to think they will be less likely to actually be computed by the blockchain. Asking 300 computers in a network to process the same transaction seems pretty dumb except the absolutely necessary ones. Transfer? Ok! Smart contract that everyone does? Sure! Your crypto dog has a baby? That doesn't need to be processed by everyone. We just need to make sure the accounts had authority. You just need verification!

So, the platform has to be friendly for app developers while not being ridiculously resource intense. So, there are a handful of smart contracts that the chain operates, but everything else is left to the app. That's how you go lean, so that your chain isn't bloated and buggy to 7TB in the first year of business.

I run a smart contract platform. I will share this. Smart contracts for everyone for everything is stupid. Just make it live in your app.

I can see things like auctions, transferrable tokens, non transferable tokens, nfts, and a handful of other things being operated by the chain, but your specific gaming app? war system? file sharing protocol? or whatever else you intend to make doesn't have to be processed by EVERY COMPUTER ON THE NETWORK. It's like a Rube Goldberg Device for devs. It's inefficient and not sustainable for any platform that gets popular. Shove that shit back on the apps.

What network operates that way? Steem!!!

Look, don't get me wrong, at times it's been unbearable to have Steemit be at the center of this ecosystem, but don't confuse that with the devs being idiots or bad. Communication hasn't often been the best feature of their merry band, but the notion that they're baffoons is totally wrong and fairly prevalent. Find me another chain with 22 hardforks ( that aren't all just with like 100 users) that still has one main community. Find me a chain that's really well positioned to scale 16x in the next two years. Maybe there are a handful, and it's going to be that handful that separate from the pack in this next round.

Ninja Mine

Oh, and what about the ninja mine? Well, again, some good future sight there as it's likely going to keep Steem's ass out of being a security. While it fucked up distribution that's been changing over time. Turns out the whales didn't sell off at the top, but they did at the bottom. Now, it's more distributed than it was in the last run and in stronger hands. That's a combo I like to see.

So, what are the major benefits?

We can scale

Steem can scale. Having Mira in our back pocket is awesome. I'll tell you something else though. There's more wiggle room in Mira. Steemit took a bunch out of memory and shoved it into harddrive space, but there are other areas of the block data where that can happen too.

So, not only can we scale without any additional effort, if we have to scale harder than we can right now there's still some wiggle room.

Steem makes it easy to develop

Don't know if you know this. But you don't need your own secret language to code shit. Actually it's better if everyone can use it. Steem's approach is through custom json. It's a sticky note on the chain that any app can read and do shit with, but doesn't require the whole chain to follow each and every instruction. Who uses json? Basicaly every web developer out there! You know, the guys that have been making websites for 30 years!!!

Steem Engine makes users create custom jsons when people use it. The effect is that tokens get made or transferred. Steem verifies it. The witnesses log it. But not every node in the network has to do shit with steem engine transactions other than verify which dude with which keys published which json.

Steem creates a permanent, immutable record that allows steem-engine to use steem as a database, without making the data base process all our commands too. Same for Splinterlands. Same for any app that wants to come here.

Human readable account names

Eventually people are going to use blockchains to do more than speculate on prices of blockchains. When that happens you're going to be doing business. You do business with people. You're less likely to do business with randoms. Companies could use bots, but you'll want to know they are controlled by people you trust rather than scam bots. So, having human readable account names and the ability to interact with humans and develop relationships with humans is a big deal.

Social Media

You know what's really hard for companies? Customer acquisition. You know what they turn to? Social media. Which blockchain is actually really good for social media.... DING DING DING! Steem. The value prop of combining your business with the ability to grow it and have that growth be coupled with others is amazing. You don't have a log in for steemit.com and a different one for splinterlands. It's one log in. Every company that gets a user into the ecosystem suddenly is enrolled effortlessly in all the stuff happening on chain. There's still only a handful flagship apps, but as more come online that ecosystems of apps, social media, and sharing new customers is gonna help us grow like gangbusters.

Text... not images or video

There are other solutions out there to video and images. Those things will bloat the chain. You will want the ability for those things to be stored in a decentralized way, but it's unlikely that blockchain is the right way. Blockchain forces everyone that participates to store everything on the chain. That's not a good solution for video because it's so big, and many videos dont' have any utility or need for blockchain. Purposefully excluding those sets Steem up to succeed. We're designed for lean text. That's going to scale!!!

Steem is fast and free

Steem can handle your block in three seconds and it does it in a way that's pretty hard for anyone in blockchain to figure out how to game it. Transactions are also free. You can rate limited without SP, but the transactions don't cost money. This is huge for the user experience. No one likes having to pay money every time they want to do something. it's bullshit, and a crappy experience. So, if you want to develop on other places you have to start with your own chain or side chain, both of which cost you money at the start of the project that capital is likely really precious to you. Skip the bullshit. Just use Steem.

The big one... The community

I keep saying this and I saved the best for last. The community here is awesome. It's a little slow right now... but that's not the end of the story. This place is driven by wages, and in the low wage time period we get a little decimated. In the high wage time everyone and their mother will come here because it's better to make your money blogging than working in a factory all day. And having steem gets your more steem. So, all the guys and gals that left are about 74 cents of Steem price away from their madlibs...

Hi Steem I'm back, 
I had to shampoo my crotch for 2 years, but I've learned a lot about that and now I'm ready to share it with you.  Follow me here, on instagram, youtube, and watch my daily vlog on 3speak.  see you guys, and oh, I just put some nude nfts up for sale on steem-engine, so be sure to get one of those if you want to support my work, see me naked, and own a rare collectible. 
Chao!  

And so it'll go that all your favorite authors of yesteryear will be back, and they'll play with communities, and they'll play some games, and they'll do shit that wasn't here 2 years ago and say "hey, this is cool." They'll also be able to do it here because the chain isn't going to be completely unusable in the next bull run.

what will that do to price?

Well, I'm not your fucking financial adviser. I'm not you and I don't know your family situation. So, I'm not here to future forecast shit. My partner thinks my fortune telling numbers are absurd and I don't want to get in trouble with anyone. So, you gotta make up your own mind. But try to get your head out of the corona virus, kobe bryant, and the senate impeachment trial. Ask yourself how you envision the world of crypto will look after the halvening takes place.

How many dogs will still be in the hunt?

Look at that chart. Ask yourself who is still gonna be left standing after a few doublings of the user base ... and if the userbase doubles is the transaction volume going to double or rise exponentially? If it's increasing faster how many of those guys are going to be usable and what will happen to the chains that still have capacity?

Get a plan

You need a plan for a bear market, a sideways market, and a bull market. Choose your lunar and hellbound coins carefully, and may fortune cast it's wind at your back.

In my view Steem is really well positioned. Not in current price, but with current tech

And that sounds cool af to me. And in the end the people that shied away from Steem are going to realize the number of really smart decisions that have been made.

Call me a shill. Call me a fanboy. Call me a dreamer. Call me what you will. But I think Steem is a bad ass motherfucker.

I'm feeling excited!