@ned Designing A New User Interface??? Not Steemit!!!

Life on the Steem blockchain is full of twists and turns. You can say a lot about what takes place here but you can never say it is boring. Each day is full of new challenges and, at times, drama. If you do happen to fall asleep through the chaos, you might miss something important.

Over the weekend, there was a witness call that showed a great deal of promise. The witnesses were open about the issues as they say it with Hard Fork 20 and owned up to the fact that they need to do better. The same idea was echoed by @andrarchy, the Steemit liaison with the community.

One thing that was brought up was the site, steemit.com and how it is a poor representation of the blockchain. It is outdated, confusing, and poorly designed. As I type these words, access of the blockchain via this interface is below 50%.

@andrarchy stated that the Steemit team felt the best use of their resources was to focus upon the blockchain. The applications are best left to the other developers outside of Steemit. I could not disagree with this at all. I feel better knowing the Steemit development team is focused solely on the development of the blockchain. No need to confuse their direction with a side issue like an interface.

Which brings up something that I learned. I want to thank @trevonjb for bringing this to my attention. He brought it up in his video a couple nights ago.

https://busy.org/@trevonjb/dkldpojl

@ned made an appearance in one of the Steemitblog posts about the Hard Fork. There were a few situations where some drama took place as some used the opportunity to voice their views to @ned directly. I won't get into that since it is there for all to read.

What is important, in my view, from the comments was this:

Wait a second. Does that say what I think it says?

@ned is working on a UI that is going to take the mantle of onboarding "normies"? This is rather big news don't you think?

Of course, when I heard this, I asked myself what is going on? Is there a disconnect between @ned and his communications liaison? It is possible especially with all that took place over the last few weeks. Perhaps @ned decided this was the time to announce it and something was in the works for a while and he hadn't transmitted that to the entire Steemit team.

The questions were answered as I started to read through the comments. There was this gem:

https://steemit.com/steem/@steemitblog/hf20-update-operations-stable#@ned/re-steemmatt-re-jga-re-netuoso-re-steemitblog-hf20-update-operations-stable-20181002t043239294z

That is an interesting twist. I bet you didn't see that one coming.

So we are going to see a new corporate structure (read: company) that produces new interfaces, including a mobile one, that appeals to people new to the crypto world. This explains why the message from Steemit is that they are focusing solely on the blockchain. The entity that works on this project is separate from Steemit.

This is not uncommon in the blockchain world. I am watching it happen with Bitshares and a number of different teams working independently yet having some overlap in what they are creating. Whether @ned pulls it off or not remains to be seen.

Personally, I hope his vision, whatever it truly might be, does come to fruition. It could only help this blockchain. One thing that came to mind as I pondered some of what this meant is that @ned has one advantage over everyone else: he has an idea of what the Hivemind/communities software is going to look like. It is possible that is seeks to develop something that meshes well with that.

Or maybe he just fancies himself as another...

Source

...by running multiple companies.

Whatever @ned's motivation is, I am not that concerned. I don't share some of the venom others on here do. My view of this situation is simple: anything that moves the Steem blockchain forward is a good thing and I do not give a hoot who is responsible for it. If @ned has a grand vision that he can pull off which will benefit the entire Steem ecosystem, then he has my full support.

Of course, I say this knowing that this blockchain has a lot of very smart programmers who, given enough time, will figure a lot of things out. From what I saw out of both the Busy.org and @steempeak teams, we are in good hands no matter what the vision is. Each day, there are a lot of coders working on building a "better mousetrap".

And because of this, Steemians will benefit.

There is another tidbit that was brought to my attention that I will mention. Bear in mind this is second hand so take it for what it is worth.

A few days after the Dlive withdrawal, @heimindanger put up a post under the @dtube account. It dealt with the elimination of the extra curation rewards that @dtube was paying. There are multiple reasons that went into the thinking but there is one section that is very important.

Finally, but probably the most important reason for this drop, is that Ned has announced publicly, and has personally told me he is confident on the release date of March 2019 for the SMTs. This date represents a certain date where DTube would finally be able to create its own token and start giving value to the token, and monetize from it. (emphasis original)

https://busy.org/@dtube/hf20-activated-dtube-lowers-beneficiary-rewards-to-10

The way it was explained to me is that since this public statement of personal assurance from @ned, the developer I was interacting with stated that there are now a ton of ideas and DApps floating around. When I questioned what that meant, it was stated that many of them are ETH based and looking to switch because of the transaction fees.

I can only presume that public (and private) confidence in SMTs being live by March has put in motion the developers who were waiting for something to provide clarity.

As I stated, this is all second hand information. One thing I can say is this developer mentioned on a number of occasions having "5 months" to get things completed. Thus, the prevailing mindset, at least for this individual, is March.

You can make up your own mind about this.

It does fit into my thinking for the last few months. Over that time, I came across a ton of articles discussing new projects, ones that sounded really good, only to find out they were going Ethereum. I kept wondering how these people thought they were going to grow knowing some of the issues ETH is dealing with between scaling and transaction fees.

I guess I have my answer. If what I was told is true, ETH was a temporary stop until SMTs became live. Many of these developers might have never intended to remain on ETH or use it for any other reason than to get the token live.

So my question for everyone today is:

What if @ned does have a vision for an interface that is kick ass and will woo the non-crypto masses in AND a large number of the Ethereum developers are getting busy in anticipation of jumping ship to join STEEM?

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None of this is to be considered financial advice or used in making financial designs. This article is for informational purposes only.