Steem's Bright Future

In times of lasting uncertainty about the future of crypto-currencies and blockchain technology, I think it's time to remind ourselves about some basic facts.

_{Steem Blockchain - source: Flickr}

Congratulations! You're here, on Steemit, which means you're on the frontier of a more decentralized future. No, really, that's worth remembering fellow steemians. In januari 2019 I believe it is that Bitcoin will celebrate it's 10^th birthday. The commercial internet will in the same year celebrate it's 28^th birthday, and would you believe we are just now reaching 55% global adoption of the world wide web? If we count the years from the TCP/IP adoption of the internet's predecessor, ARPANET, in January 1983, the internet is 36 years old; are you beginning to feel how much of a pioneer you really are?

As of June 2018, 55.1% of the world's population has internet access.
_{source: Wikipedia}

Do you think that sending an email was easy back in the 1980s? Heck no! Programmers could email back then, probably compiling some source code before each message could be sent... It took decades before email was something that could be used by our mothers and grandmothers. But we've come so far that now an average user can build a website without even having to know basic HTML. Granted, the average website isn't very imaginative as a result of this development, as most are built around pre-fab templates, but that's not the point here. The point is that new, user friendly applications had to be built on top of the highly technical foundation for mass adoption to make a beginning.

Blockchain technology will follow a similar path, I'm almost certain of that. As it stands now, crypto-currencies are just too difficult for most people to use, just as email was back in the early 1980s, or building a web page was in the 1990s. Even playing a game on a PC could be a challenge in those days; managing your 640kb RAM with EMM386.EXE in your config.sys file, setting up sound-card parameters in the autoexec.bat, dealing with IRQ conflicts caused by the same soundcard, forcing you to setup another IRQ for your COM1 and / or COM2 port... And then finally play X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter on a 640x480 resolution CRT monitor if you were one of the lucky ones ;-)

Mass adoption of crypto-currencies will come with ease of use and nothing else. For this ease of use we need one thing and that's the ability to build Decentralized Applications that run on a decentralized blockchain, powered by it's native currency. Ethereum was the first public blockchain that offered this functionality and is currently running a number of DApps. Problem with Ethereum is that it simply cannot handle the number of transactions per second needed to keep up with user requests on a decentralized blockchain that needs all it's servers to be updated; that's the main advantage of a centralized database over a decentralized one, the speed of operations.

But this is exactly why you, dear reader and fellow steemian, are the pioneer, the scout, the early adopter I made us out to be in the beginning of this short article. Because our blockchain can do what Ethereum can not. Here's the Block'tivity ranking of today (this makes me soooo happy):

_{source: Block'tivity}

This ranks blockchains according to the number of operations (transactions) per day. First thing to notice is that the top three are all @dan's brainchilds; Dan Larimer's blockchains, EOS, BitShares and Steem, are the fastest and most used blockchains in use today. It's not the mere number of transactions that make the top three so impressive though; their full strength and potential is revealed when you hover your mouse over the tiny little "i" at the very end of each row in this table. EOS did 1,890,307 transactions in the last 24 hours, using only 0.16% of the blockchain's full capacity! Steem is equally impressive with 822,519 transactions using a mere 0.07% of it's full capacity! Now compare that with Ethereum: 535,750 transactions, but the network is not managing this because it runs at 100% of it's capacity with 55,304 unconfirmed transactions waiting to be processed.

I agree wholeheartedly with Block'tivity's take on the real value of blockchains:

One way to consider a blockchain project is through its market cap. Another way, closer to the real value, is observing the activity on the blockchain. Lots of FUD and HYPE are responsible for "misplaced" capital in the cryptocurrency space. Here, we are observing which project is actually being used by people, which is in our opinion, the best predictive indicator of value you can have.
_{source: Block'tivity}

Bitcoin will for now stay important simply because of it's 10 year track-record of being attacked over and over again in the media as well as by hackers and surviving all of that; it has earned it's status as "Digital Gold". But that's all it will ever be. It won't be the portal to mass adoption with it's 7 transactions per second and transaction fees. Neither will Ethereum for the same reasons. And maybe it won't be Steem and EOS, no one knows what brilliant technology will be invented tomorrow. But they are our best bet currently. Now that HF20 is looking to be a success after all the initial panic, SMT's are just around the corner, so to speak. And with SMT's, combined with Steem's impressive capacity for processing transactions, I see a real possibility of Steem becoming one of the portals toward mass adoption. I have a strong feeling that it's just a question of waiting for the first DApp that will become so popular that it's users send currencies to their friends to enable them to participate in a game for example. Once a blockchain-based DApp goes "viral", I think the next phase toward mass adoption will begin.

I believe strongly that those who overcome all the FUD and HODL on to their Steem, will be glad they did so when this happens.

But still.... #### This is not financial advice!! I'm just your average crypto-brother speaking his mind :-)

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Thanks so much for visiting my blog and reading my posts dear reader, I appreciate that a lot :-) If you like my content, please consider leaving a comment, upvote or resteem. I'll be back here tomorrow and sincerely hope you'll join me. Until then, keep steeming!

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