RE: Total market cap broke through the 120 billion ceiling.
I find it a great space because there is so little reference to determine value. How valuable is a post? How valuable is a user? Do bot user accounts damage that?
I still find Steemit a great experiment but I am reading some critisisms that don't seem to be addressed in a particularly constructive manner. Have you seen @elfspice ( now known as @calibrae ) he is claiming that the growth rate of the blockchain is unsustainable and predicts that the witnessess can't keep up the hardware requirements and in a few months there is no way it will still work... he is forking steemit which will also be interesting to see how that goes. It will help to see what makes this thing valuable... is it the Steemit.com name (top 3000 site now I believe) is it the concept? Is it the community? Is it the value of Steem ? Is it because it is on a blockchain?
To me it seems that the whole earning aspect is a bit of a distraction... your article on competition was very good. What happens if the tokens don't have monetary value? Post fork I assume that is what would happen. Would be great to see what kind of trending posts there will be on a forked steem without whales. (I believe that is the plan to take away the socalled premine SP but otherwise clone the userbase ) interesting times...
To determine the value of something is quite difficult. It is the value though, I think, that people will give to it. That does only mean in many situations that a group of people agree on something. Still writing of interest to a few can still be very valuable, without there being a money label attached to it.
It is relative, in that manner Steem is interesting too. What are bots having for an influence or automated voting. Steem can only move on, I think if it holds monetary value, as it is build to function that way.
This leads me to the concerns that some have casted recently.
One thing for me in relation to blockchain developement is an unsolved part, that I see from my point of view. That is that I think that nothing can ever grow for ever. This is the case for any blockchain. Not Steem specific, but that one has quite some data growth over a short amount of time to deal with.
As long as there are witnesses that can put in 256 GigaByte of RAM, when only 128GB is needed, Steem will move on smoothly. Part of the challenge is the website and that is getting more relief by putting more server power behind it. Also the Steem Developement Team is working on multithreading, which is a very big step forward. (Moving towards what #EOS is going to be.)
But, a blockchain system like Steem does need a lot of resources and the pace at which it needs that should be less than technology inovations. By that I mean that as long as Steem needs 128 GigaByte RAM and technology can deliver 1 TeraByte RAM, then it will be just fine.
In that way Steem has a bigger technology challenge than Bitcoin or Litecoin. But with sidechains on those blockchains that might change in the near future. At some point blockchain technology try to solve scaling, by the need for purging, when technology demands it. Then most of the time, a solution will be found.
So I am a bit sceptical to the clame that witnesses can not keep up with the blockchain growth speed of Steem. As far as I see it, the current challenge lies in the website interface, being able to keep up with the pace. And that is being worked on.
Calibrae can be a forked version of Steem that has a different approach. That project might even some things that get backported into Steem. It can be very refreshing to have a different point of view, there are often many solutions thinkable to the same challenge.
So, exciting times ahead, that is for sure.
Yes I think so, it will be great to see a different variation. I agree as well that from a user perspective, the interface is a huge hurdle, as it currently is becoming hard work to find the relevant stuff to you. The growth in users and diversity of topics is great but needs to be tamed into something manageable for users. I actually was wondering about the filterbubble problem. Facebook shows you stuff that they think you should see, which has its issues. I would love a handy way to define my own filterbubble: a few levers that allow sophisticated filters on topics, keywords, authors, communities.
It would be great if the platform could have a standard filter built in that allows me to see when several of people I follow voted for the same post for instance. That might be an interesting trigger to serve that post for my viewing, it would be a variation on curation, allowing you to build your feed based on not all the upvotes of everyone which is what the current trending and hot pages are and which are pretty useless. I would like a feed of top posts voted by people I follow, whose taste I trust (maybe that needs to be a sub list).
Basically it's a sophisticated filter but I don't know how difficult that would be to make or how heavy it would be if it would need to constantly query the blockchain .
That would be a welcome addition I think, a filter, maybe one that works on the user side. Your browser getting the same data and there it gets filtered.
Would like a seperate tab for ReSteems too, the homefeed gets so filled up with those. And then the browser side filter, or something like that.
The build in Google search sometimes helps, but it is far from idealistic.