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RE: Steem Stats Animated Video Infographic
Thank you for your feedback. If I have to be perfectly honest, there is no way I would ever be able to strike the balance you are talking about without the way @sndbox directed the contest. It's more of a point of view of someone that's been involved in cryptocurrencies before, while for me, STEEM has been the first direct encounter with that. This point of view does not come naturally to me at all.
Well, me, too.
Steemit is my introduction to both STEEM and crypto. I understand creating, being paid for your efforts, and a desire to have your stuff actually reach an interested party. I also understand a desire for a better world, and identify with as much decentralization of everything as is possible.
The underlying technology and how you can create currency out of thin air still alludes, and maybe it always will. But then, fiat, or at least USD, has been doing the same thing for decades, if not longer, so why not a thing called a blockchain cranking blocks and fostering blogging and the building of apps?!
The underlying technology is fascinating, but the fact that it "creates" currency is one of the more mundane aspects of it. It creates currency just by incrementing numbers associated with an account - just like the banks do it when giving out loans. The fascinating part is that our aggregated agreement that it indeed has some value is what really gives it value. Value always works that way as it is an "artificial" concept - things only have value if enough people agree and accept that they have value and this is true for all kinds of things including fiat money, virtual currency, political power, gold, silver, diamonds, art or advertising space on a website. There are reasons people agree that certain things have value, but still, value is never an a truly intrinsic property of anything.
So blockchain technologies just allow us to deal in value in brand new ways, but what gives both bitcoin and steem value is not the underlying blockchain, but the people who are willing to trade fiat or other cryptocurrencies on order for the value parameter associate with their blockchain account to be incremented.
What's really fascinating about this technology I think is the crypto blockchain part that allows it to be secure while still being open, transparent and decentralized.