Steem Up!
Steam - As in Engine - Powered The First Industrial Revolution -
Will Steem - spelt S T E E M - power the next?
I’ve been on Steemit for 18 months. I wondered what the thinking was behind the name?. There didn’t appear to be any logic, or indication of a light bulb moment of inspiration, as in - leaping out of the bath - ‘I’ve got it ! I've got it - we’ll call it Steem'
At first glance its not exciting, or sexy as everything has to be to succeed these days. Not like Bitcoin, which was not just the first, but the only one out of thousands launched that the uninitiated could have an inkling of what it was about.
‘Well it’s a coin, innit? Says so on the tin’. But Monero ? Ripple ? Ice cream, perhaps ?
But the penny, err, coin, dropped for me when I read about SMTs. Smart Media Tokens. And how Steem with it’s advanced Blockchain technology is in pole position to sell and run SMT services for a wide variety of applications.
Apps! Steem ! It’s the beginning of a second Industrial cum Financial Revolution, the first powered by Steam and the second by Steem. What goes around comes around!
The Blockchain is the steam/steem engine of my day. The one on the farm where my father worked could run a threshing machine and a cattle feed mixer at the same time. Driven by separate pulley wheels and belts.
SMTs on The Blockchain is a variation on a theme!- A ‘One-man Band’ - A Juggler - Able to multitask with thousands of balls in the air at once.
Replace passports, land registries, voting systems
Replace contracts
Get rid of fees on financial transactions
Replace all keys: for homes, cars, hotel rooms and so on
Eliminate spam
End digital piracy of music, films and TV
Lead to self-owning self-driving cars
Lead to thousands and thousands of job losses at banks and other bureaucracies
The blockchain is a computer code. It uses cryptography to create a trusted public ledger that anyone can inspect, but no single person controls.
Why do we need “a trusted public ledger that anyone can inspect, but no single person controls”?
It comes down to trust. The blockchain is a big deal because it uses clever computer code to create something that everybody can trust is accurate and legitimate.
We take trust for granted. In the UK we trust complete strangers all the time. Examples: buying food with a credit card, selling a few shares over the phone, buying a house.
We can do that — take people on trust — because we’ve built up a whole big system to make sure strangers can trust each other. A government land registry proves you own your house. A credit card company “vouches for you” when you want groceries. And your broker is one of about six layers of middle men who make sure your shares get transferred to their new owner when you sell them.
In the UK at least, a lack of trust isn’t exactly a big problem, because we’ve got a huge complicated system of governments and banks and insurance companies and so on which act as a middle man so we can trust each other.
Everyone trusts the middle man, so strangers who don’t trust each other can do business.
Because it costs less. Those trust-creating bureaucracies we’ve invented, banks and governments and the like, don’t come cheap.
An example you may be familiar with: buying a share. Most brokers will charge you around £14, all in, to buy a share.
And they’re not ripping you off. The market for brokers is pretty competitive these days. Prices have come way down over the last decade or two. But someone has to pay for all those middlemen at the brokers, the clearing houses, and so on.
Money transfer from one country to another is costly because it has to be done through a middeleman – your bank.
Land registries are pretty boring, at least in the UK. But in many parts of the world they don’t exist or they don’t work.Trustworthy government institutions are relatively rare on this planet. And where they do exist, they cost a lot of money to run.
Adam Ludwin of Chain, a small Blockchain company, makes the analogy between the blockchain and voice over IP (VOIP).
VOIP became the new standard in telephony back in the 2000s. Before VOIP phone calls were still transmitted using the old analogue cables and switches and routers. When VOIP came along, everything went digital “under the hood”.
The user experience for ordinary people didn’t change much, at first. Maybe a slightly better call quality. But the new system made it way cheaper to send a person’s voice from point A to point B.
According to Ludwin, the penny has dropped in the last six months. Big banks and companies are rushing to prepare their blockchain strategies. NASDAQ is “disrupting itself” by creating a bitcoin share register. This thing has started to move.
The first Blockchain companies are starting to appear on AIM already – for example, Coinsilium is planning to float this year. And the big boys like Facebook are rushing to make sure they don’t get disrupted.
It’s one of these things: blockchain might not replace the entire financial system, the way its boosters expect. But if it does — if it does — the change will be huge. Multi-multi-billion-pound companies will rise and fall.
Government...the stock market...telecommunications companies...pharmaceutical companies...real estate agents...insurers – they all face an uncertain future thanks to blockchain technology.
In a nutshell - The Blockchain connects people to people DIRECTLY!
The best,most clearest explanation of SMTs I've seen is here - https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@littlescribe/smart-media-tokens-smt-explained by @littlescribe
The potential of Steem is recognised by its 2nd position in a table of Cryptocurrency usefulness.
Steam Engine Image credit - British History and The Industrial Revolution | Ammon Shepherd
One man band cartoon credit Cartoonstock.com
My Post contains extracts from Sean Keyes article about the blockchain for Edge of The Markets.com
Great post with analysis on Steem and the coming SMTs!
I believe they named it steem as a contraction of esteem, because you can show respect and admiration on here with an up vote worth actual money. Also it sounds the same as steam, which rises, and powers engines, as you insightfully mentioned.
Ah,thank you Kenny,so the Steem name suits two parts of the platform.To build and encourage a spirit of community among its diverse membership.
Also, to provide the means to bring much needed reform to our financial instituitions ,and open doors for new inventions with SMTs .Brilliant !
Thanks for the shoutout! Great job explaining things here dude.
Thank you. Ditto your clear and incisive analysis of SMTs. I'm referring to it a lot, because SMTs sound so right for Steem, and could be the means for it to be a successful crypto when most others have failed.
Coins mentioned in post:
Thank you for providing that information. The table in my post is of the usefulness of the coins and the technology associated with them.
This post has received a 0.64 % upvote from @booster thanks to: @ijavee.
Thank you.