RE: Dear Witnesses and Stakeholders... The Value is the Community!
The way the blogging/social frontends are built on the steem blockchain make content creators into non-value adding entities. In order for content creators to add value their presence needs to attract resources from outside the network.
Just having some people posting on steemit, busy, palnet, etc does not generate value. So in the current enviornment content producers are a financial drain. I dare to say that the majority only take money out but do not bring money in (directly or indirectly).
Steemit is doing this now with ad placement (you would have thought that this was a no-brainer considering that it's a proven model to monetize the traffic that it generates...but I digress). Althought their ad revenue does not bring additional value to us (other than their reduced need to sell stake to cover their costs).
So the real question...is can we create ventures that can capture value from the outside for all of us?
Other than blogging platforms can we take advantage of the blockchain as fast, zero fee and immutable record keeping tool to offer something to the outside world?
Maybe we should start brainstorming of ways that we can use the properties of steem to offer services to the "real world".
What you are saying about content is simply about content.
You are forgetting those people who create the content, create the traffic, play the successful games, gamble, market, volunteer to do things like the foundation.
They hold the eyes that people buy bids on the bots to see up and coming projects, they hold steem, they do all the things that are the only value steem currently holds.
No one comes here for the posts, they come here for the community.
Not exactly, of course all those things have some value. Without them steem would be at zero. The fact that I use my voting power to support the spanish speaking community and seldom do it on myself means that I think that it's in my best interest to have a more widespread distribution (however small my contribution maybe). I am hoping that some of them are smarter than me and can make things happen (you never know).
I am just exaggerating to make the point that rewarding people here is not enough. We must give to those that work on bringing resources from outside of our steem bubble. With some notable exceptions most of the "projects" built here are just geared towards milking the reward pool (directly or indirectly).
If I had the resources I would meet and backup anyone who is willing to come up with out of the box ways of using this tool (steem) to acomplish what I outlined above while increasing the value of my holdings. Unfortunately I have neither the funds nor the time to do it.
Oh! I missed your point. I agree, we need to market, do PR, highlight our top features, but first we need a sellable vision. We don't have that.
Anyway, thanks for clarifying what you meant, I agree we need people outside of our bubble.
People posting is the primary mechanism that markets Steem. When you run a search with the SE of your choice you will sometimes find Steem posts amongst the choices, at least I do. More mechanisms to draw eyeballs is good. Games are a good way, probably better than ads.
One way I thought of was through archival services, for folks using facial recognition tech, archiving info that is likely to be purged from the wider net, and etc. The blockchain is very good at that.
Anything that needs to query a reliable record of any piece of data is a candidate to take advantage of the properties of the steem blockchain. We could even run a payment procesing service with a fiat backed asset at a fraction of the cost of visa (regulations aside).
Regulations, sadly, aren't aside, they're right in the middle of the way of folks speaking freely and doing honest business. IANAL, so am not well informed regarding regulations affecting payment processors, nor escrow services. Jurisdiction is definitely an issue, and getting worse as time goes on.
Julian Assange is being charged for breaking US law, despite not being a US citizen, nor breaking any US laws on US soil. It seems that the US is asserting that it's jurisdiction extends to the entire world. This seems to be the reason that some blockchains are attempting to put servers in orbit, so that no jurisdiction extends to them. However, neither would any legal protection I am aware of, so criminal actions taken against them would not be able to be prosecuted, not even in corrupt American or British courts. It is extremely important to note that Julian Assange has been so tortured in British custody that he can not even speak coherently to his legal representation anymore.
It is a terrible threat to every free person in the world, that savage and brutal fiends claim jurisidiction over the entire world, and apparently use that claim to torture victims criminally.
Regulations can be crimes against humanity, and this may impact Steem's ability to conduct business.