RE: My thoughts on HF20, RCs, SMTs, and the future of Steem <contest enclosed>
You're painting a future in which there is no point to use the main Steem blockchain as the back-end. If a "walled garden" is the only way to scale, what benefit does that garden get for competing with all the other DApps on Steem, compared with its own blockchain? (Heck, that could even be the same code.) Even in the walled garden model, if Steem can't afford the activity level it has today, how will it support these future applications with greater numbers of virtual users, no matter how few on-blockchain accounts they are funnelled through?
I find the argument that the Steem user base is a valuable resource unconvincing, if most of the scaling must take place outside the Steem user base.
Right now I can get a hosted Wordpress site for about $8/month, with introductory prices as low as $1/month. $8/month = $96/year = 109.5 STEEM. So if you can't provide at least a year of good experience for people with about 100 SP, which is where I am now, the platform isn't scaling. Dreamwidth accounts are even cheaper. (We can argue about the difference between rent and equity, but it does take 13 months to fully cash out so it's not exactly a liquid holding either.)
If the lesson of RCs is that blockchain is too expensive (as a content distribution technology) to run at the scale of hundreds of thousands of users, a user layer on top of that will not change the economics.
You cannot compare your investment in SP with something you pay elsewhere. After one year the money you paid for the blog is gone, your SP paid interest in your wallet.
I agree it is not as simple a comparison as I laid out, though I still feel that is a useful rule of thumb for "what do I get for my up-front investment."
We can compare the discounted future value of the SP I have at the end of the year, with the cost of paying for a service instead. Even if I believe STEEM is going to hold its value (the trend line isn't so good), $100 next year is not worth as much as $100 today.
How much SP do I need to buy? More than 100 STEEM in the initial RC rollout (though maybe better in 20.4). 200? 1000? At 1000 we're talking about a nontrivial investment risk, that may well come out worse in NPV terms than just paying $8/month.
(Also, I made an error in my comment; it takes 13 weeks, not months, to power down--- but too RC-poor to edit.)
It maybe useful for you, but only because you compare this platform to something it isn't set out to be.
The point is not that the walled gardens are the only way to scale. Walled gardens are the ultimate benefit of a decentralized SMT block chain. The point is that RC's are essential to reaching the scale that will support the walled gardens.
And you're right, if you don't stand to benefit from running on a decentralized platform, then block chain isn't the right choice. But that is a problem bigger than steem. Decentralized protocols are inherently more expensive than centralised tech stacks. Every project that does not gain more benefit from being decentralized than it spends in extra cost will ultimately, eventually, fail.
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