A Chance Encounter with a Great Idea, or, Ask not what Steemit can do for you, but what you can do for Steemit!

Hello everyone

My name is Christopher, and I haven't slept properly in three days. While I'd like to say this is due to my excitement at having discovered Steemit during that period, that's not entirely true - although my excitement is very real! I expect it's mainly due to the fact that I've been through several countries and many states of mind in the past few days, with little opportunity to consolidate my thoughts. But what better place to do so than a forum such as this?

Let me back up a bit and attempt to explain. I'm the 25-year-old son of an American mother and a South African father, born in England and living in Cape Town. As you might imagine, this identity (or lack thereof) can be confusing, made more so by the fact that my mixed accent and vocabulary are such that I sound like an outsider wherever I go. However, it's a citizen-of-the-world type of thing I've come to enjoy.

I went to school mostly in Cape Town, studied Psychology and Philosophy at university (which I like to say qualifies me both to think and to think about thinking), and currently work as a professional musician in various ways; as a composer and producer (please feel free to check out some of my work at http://www.echodepartment.com), a session musician on multiple instruments, and playing in various groups (my main project at the moment being a space rock outfit called Mind Pool: https://soundcloud.com/mind-pool). I also do a bit of work on the side as a freelance writer. So, while I detest the use of the word 'creative' as a noun, it's as good a description of what I do with my time as any.

So much for introductions. I'm writing this from my desk back home in Cape Town, having just returned after two buses and two intercontinental flights over the past three days. For the past month I've been travelling around the USA reconnecting with some family and old friends. It was a strange trip, during which I felt equal parts excited to be there and oddly disconnected, as though part of me were somewhere else entirely, or wanted to be. It's a feeling that seems to have come home with me as well (although this may just be the jetlag talking, I feel it may run deeper than that). No doubt this feeling was partly brought about by world events that transpired during that time, including the ever-increasing governmental corruption, social unrest, and economic instability in my home country of South Africa, the endless gun violence and political madness in America, the tumultuous and emotional decision that was Brexit, and others besides. All of this has got me thinking quite deeply about where the world as a global community is going, and how small things can have far-reaching impacts in this highly connected age - for better and for worse.

It was on a bus in the middle of the night somewhere between Delaware and New York City a few days ago, sitting next to a snoring, smelly man who said he was from Minneapolis but may as well have been from the fifth circle of hell, that I discovered Steemit. Since getting into cryptocurrency last year and tentatively buying and trading my first Bitcoins, I have become increasingly more aware of the potential for such a decentralized and community-driven system to reshape the way the world thinks about and deals with finances. I, for one, have never been much of a fan of money, and would likely never have developed much of an interest in trading any type of asset or currency. But new concepts interest and excite me, and I'd like to think I know a good idea when I see one. Just by engaging with various forums (initially for some trading advice, but now more to be a part of the community), the prevailing attitude of mutual optimism and cooperation, as opposed to cutthroat competition and the 'doom and gloom' attitudes inherent in the current global economy, surprised and intrigued me - especially considering that these people were not talking about knitting sweaters for teapots or how to make the best gluten-free pizza dough, but about a new and truly modern way to make and utilize money independently of the entrenched, heavily manipulated, and all too often outdated systems we have become used to (I’m looking at you, gold standard).

A lot of my interest also naturally stemmed from the fact that most of my money is in Rands, a currency that, thanks mainly to the inept South African government (a nicer descriptor than most people would use), has steadily lost its value over the past decade to the point where being able to travel to other parts of the world has become very expensive - I spent most of my time in the States living off of $1 pizza slices as a result and now never want to see a pizza again in my life (okay, maybe not until next week). Bitcoin offered me a financial system that could by its very nature be useful all over the world, and guaranteed to be free from most of the problems caused by governmental influence - what free-thinking, right-minded individual, after all, would truly trust a politician with their money? - and with which the community of users would be responsible for its success or failure, not some outside force. It's clear that this resonates with people around the world, who are also fed up with the value of their hard-earned money being influenced by factors so far outside of their control.

When I discovered Steemit on the aforementioned bus, I knew I had found the beginnings of the next logical step in this new conceptual network. Within such a forum, people like you and me can be incentivized to share not only a groundbreaking new form of currency, but also a community of thought where the sharing of ideas is not only encouraged (as in a forum like Reddit) but incentivized, and where the people sharing these ideas are themselves responsible for granting this incentive through the unique Steem system. As a millenial and aspiring global citizen, I long ago recognized the potential for the internet to connect and shape the world in new and previously unimaginable ways, and its power as a driving force and seedbed for the groundbreaking and unconventional. Needless to say, I was immediately taken with Steemit, and spent the rest of the night reading through stories about travel, art, business, finance, the Steem network itself, and a variety of other topics, with amazement at the level of engagement I was seeing from such a relatively small community, and the quality of the ideas being shared. By the time I arrived in New York just after sunrise, I was convinced that I had seen the beginning of something great, something I wanted to being a part of - so here I am.

I still have a lot to learn about the way the Steem system works and will continue to evolve in the future, but I think I understand its core philosophy. In my opinion, the best thing we can all do for this network is to treat it as a self-sustaining mechanism, remembering always that we as contributors are the essential parts that keep the machine functioning. This, in a way, means trying not to treat it primarily as a money-making exercise. We can see the negative repercussions of doing so in Facebook pages, where the majority of people who have clearly indicated that they wish to receive updates from a particular page by liking it are prevented from doing so unless the page’s owner pays to ‘promote’ the post, which defeats almost every purpose of having such a page except that of making Facebook more money. We also have to do our best to remember that although the Steemit system, if it works correctly, will be a self-regulating system (essentially voting up good content and burying poor content), the system and its users will all benefit most if each individual also regulates themselves, paying attention to what they post and ensuring that it adds value to the whole community of content. In this way, we can aim to curate a vast, independent, interconnected network of ideas that will be truly beneficial, instead of just an endless web of what is mostly noise pollution (i.e. Twitter). Learning from these conceptual problems with other networks, what will drive Steemit to great success is staying pure of intention in creating a new type of online community, and those of us who are a part of it now, in its relative infancy, can play an important role in laying the foundation for that.

It’s early days yet. Let’s strive to make Steemit something that can grow to become truly unique and valuable and go down in internet history with the Wikipedias of the world as an open-source hotbed of connected and original thought.

I'm going to sleep now. Full Steem ahead!