The aftermath...!!!

Is everything back to normal??

Two weeks on from all hell breaking loose and have we all come to terms with our new reality? There was panic, tears, people disappearing from sight and power outages. The internet version of a natural disaster. It was Mt Vesuvius reincarnate. Even when the power came back on we had people pointing the finger and looking for scapegoats. Not enough resources allocated and not enough preparation put in to prevention.
Could more have been done? Absolutely.
Can we recover from the damage? Of course.
From every natural disaster new life springs again. Often stronger and more prepared for the next event. It's the natural order. We evolve from our experiences.

Where does that leave us now.

For one thing, we have lost a lot of activity since the hardfork. Taking a look at this graph from @penguinpablo we can see the drop off in posting, first as the price of steem goes down. Then the bottom for the hardfork and even after that a lower number of posts since the hardfork.

Now this is not necessarily a terrible thing. We have lost users but these numbers also include comments as well as posts. So a lot of this reduction can be attributed to a reduction in spam comments now that low SP accounts can only post according to there resource credits. I know that I have a reasonable amount of RC but at no stage since recharging my account have i dropped below 99% and that is with a reasonable amount of activity. There were issues for the first two days but i would like to hear from some >100sp accounts to see if there has been a negative effect on your activity?

The opportunities.

A post that i read today gave me a good insight into how some of these new changes might take shape on the blockchain.

https://steemit.com/steem/@abh12345/i-claimed-a-few-accounts-today-is-this-something-that-everyone-that-can-should-be-doing

It's from one of my favorite authors on the blockchain and a person who is heavily involved in helping others to grow on here as well. It's all about claiming new accounts through resource credits, ( You will need a large amount of SP, roughly 3000 to be able to do it). I'll highlight a graphic from the post that shows where the future will be.

You can see that most of the account claims are coming from apps holding a lot of SP like @steemhunt, @steempress-io and @actifit. The idea would be that these apps will soon be in the position to onboard large numbers of users without any delay in the sign-up. If these apps have stored thousands of accounts in just the first two weeks then how many could be created within a year? How many people can actifit bring in the Eco-system if they market and advertise.

Does that matter to the people sitting on 500SP?

Right now it doesn't but that could all change as well. I've seen talk from some well respected users about the possibility of RC delegation. Just like you can delegate SP there could also be a market for RC. If there is a way to do it and a demand for it then there will be money in it. I'm thinking long term where there are apps starting up on the blockchain and want to bring in users without linking them to steemit. That's where the future will be. Decentralized apps with only the minimum connection to the steem blockchain which will be the conversion of tokens to steem.

To create these accounts they will either need to buy some of the account tokens already created or lease large amounts of RC and stockpile their own. It's one to watch for the future.