User base and use case

Not long ago I was in a meeting where someone was explaining how a customer had taken our product and completely changed the way it was presented to their end users and, it blew them away. A full immersive experience that was so unexpected that they were jealous that we had not done it, even though it is not our area at all.

This is what is likely to happen on Steem.

Steem is a content delivery Blockchain but it doesn't care what that content is or in what format it is delivered. Three years ago this was a blogging platform, today it is what - a gaming platform - gambling - video - VR - investing - charity - ..? Which? Take your pick because it has the potential to deliver just about any form of content in just about any form of media. the limit is the imagination more than the capabilities and, most people aren't very imaginative.

Currently, the general goal is to take what has already been created and replicate it on the blockchain and this is fantastic but, eventually what is going to happen is that there will be decentralized groups of users that will develop and present views of the Blockchain like no one has seen before, that no one sort was possible. This is the process of innovation and to get the 1 in a million idea, 999,999 other ideas have to be created.

I very briefly read from @exyle in the morning that @steemmonsters are welcoming in TRON holders to play SM and that they might not even know they are on Steem at all, depending on how it is implemented and even though they will need a Steem account. Remember me predicting this some 1.5 years back? It is only going to get more hidden over time and with the introduction of Steem tokens and SMTs, the Steem blockchain is going to get buried under use cases and users who will never see the infrastructure empowering it. Of course, some will know...

Investors.

Eventually, I see steem being a predominantly investor-centric platform where the Steem holders are able to use their investment to empower the applications and SMTs via things like delegations and Resource Credits. Remember when I said that bidbots will eventually be pushed out of the market? That is happening as we speak as soon applications like @steemhunt will offer a better return than vote selling and that'll mean, the maximizers will shift to maximize. The difference will be that the applications will use that Steem power to empower their own users and enhance user experience as that is from where their value is derived.

While Steem spirals out as the infrastructure, the applications upon it become the face and just like what is happening to the product I work for, no one is going to know what shape or look of faces will arrive but, there are going to be an increasing amount. this is why scalability of the platform is of paramount importance over marketing and onboarding currently as if successful, the flood of new users could be massive and near immediate and - spread across multiple interfaces.

The more users in of course, the more competition for creators, but this also means that there will be more consumers for creators too, and competition and consumers for application developers. There is something like 300,000 mobile app development companies in the world and only a fraction of them take the lion's share of reward. Are the others screaming and hollering about how unfair it is or, are they competing to create their own unique and compelling user experience in order to take a piece of that pie? Everyone wants to develop a killer app - how many do?

Just like the users who realized that the centralized platforms had no place for them in the mass media driven markets and wound up on Steem, thousands of those application developers are going to wake up to the possibilities of the Blockchains and look to get in on the new industries. They already have experience that they can leverage and probably have some very good ideas but, competing with million dollar marketing budgets has not been possible. What will they do here?

While content creators on Steem are currently competing for the pool, the real application developers understand that what is more valuable than that is the audience and while it is quite small now, it is not shrinking. You might think that it is because of all the people who have "left Steem" but, most of them will be back when hundreds of thousands and millions of others arrive too. In fact, those accounts with a few hundred Steem could be worth a small fortune in a few years, Even if dormant now. You think they aren't going to come back to collect?

I love the impatience of Steem and crypto users because it gives a chance for the people who look long to stack up on some coins, build a foundation and distribute themselves throughout the communities. So many people only look at the distribution of Steem but for the long-term active participant, there is more to it than just what is in the wallet. In time, the relationships and social capital combined with the Steem will be much more valuable than the Steem itself and, it will benefit everyone as it will be the relationship network that connects economic value continually to the Steem ecosystem - the Steem family of applications - where most users have never heard of the protocol that empowers them.

Sure, I don't know much of how it will all play out in detail but with the way things are currently positioned and moving, the blockchain and tokenized technologies are only going to gather in user base and use case - and that gives Steem a massive opportunity as it already has many foundations to spring from and, it is expanding every day.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]