My Reaction to the Announcement of the Steem Hackathon

This and I sound like a good fit. As many of you know, I am "all in" on some combination of:

• Infrastructure Development
• Blockchain analytics
• "Content Chains" (then, aren't we all into that?) ;)
• IoT

What I'm sure some of you know is that I've been pondering where to put IoT data that needs to:

• Stay Public
• Stay Private
• Be private, and then become semi-public
• be disclosed to only X, Y, Z parties (who may have paid the generator for access, or not)
• And my second post on steemit was actually about this:

https://steemit.com/blockchains/@faddat/id-like-some-help-making-a-novel-blockchain

Basically, I see incredible potential in IoT where I don't think many others do: As a way to replace/augment our current cloud computing systems and push the actual computation back out to the edges of the network where it belongs. Today I can buy a quad-core, 512MB computer for $7 and a quad core 2GB computer (neither with storage, but that's okay-- this is why we were given PXE by techno-jesus!) for $15-20, and both get cheaper in lots of >1,000. With containers and the managemnt tools that come along with the docker/rkt container ecosystem, these small, efficient computers actually become formidable tools individually, and when addressed collectively, a mesh of these small nodes has earthshaking potential.

I'm sure you all know MaidSafe, and many of you know I'm a big fan of their work. I am, I always will be. That said I suspect that MaidSafe is going to have a user growth problem after launch. Some might say that's due to a lack of censorship, but I think differently: I think that SAFE will have a user growth probelm because it is not baked into anything. You even need to get a new browser to use SAFE, uh, SAFEly. So, I think their project overall will succeed bu tis likely to face serious difficulty digging out of its niche because it doesn't deliver plain HTTP to plan browsers.

Furthermore we're going to see an increase in demand for things like:

• exotic routing (think: gfw, and its family of variants)
• Personal servers
• On-prem servers for small and medium size businesses

Oh, and this addresses etherum and some of its issues as well: Now imagine that we have a network of 10,000 of these machines and a blockchain that tracks the state of the docker engines / drives the docker APIs on each node. You've now escaped the problem of "hey, I have an EVM, but you can't really do anything inside of an EVM."

That's a big portion of the stuff I am working with though I have not made moves towards programming a chain for that yet, or selecting one of the OSS "off the shelf" chains.

And the other chunk of what's keeping me busy these days is Steemit.city. While I know we are a global community, I have to say that I think we need a place to be. While instant messages and chats are great, and phone calls are great, more meaning is conveyed, faster in person.

Siam Reap, Cambodia is the first steemit.city that we're trying to set up. This is a project that myself, @menta, and @rampant are working on with the long-term goal of building a cyber-paradise in a peaceful, visa-friendly country. Anyone (almost anyone) can get an unlimited length visa in Cambodia for about $350 per year, and be undisturbed by the madness of the world. We're looking to recruit:

• Cryptocurrency developers
• Computer Scientists
• Marketing types
• geeks of all stripe
• ...and anyone else who thinks that this would be a good fit for them.

Our first project is renting an apartment block, which will get rolling as soon as @menta returns from the Cambodian coast. Our goal is to provide a physical community for people working to bring about a better future for humanity. We're going to start small with just this apartment block, and slowly scale out into an actual city. For more information, contact myself or @menta.

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• Proceeds from this post go to pay for a plane ticket from Siam Reap to Norway. Total anticipated cost for this trip is about $2000.
• As always it is worthy of mention that @officialfuzzy of #beyondbitcoin makes much of my work possible through cash donations
• My calendar is rapidly filling with steemy events. Interesting!
• Would it be correct to describe the weather in Norway right now as "cold as balls?"