Forward

For those who don't know me, I have been around in the BitShares ecosystem for a long time. I am @officialfuzzy and @fuzzyvest on Steemit.com. On bitsharestalk.org I am fuzzy. In those many months leading to the birth of the Steem Decentralized Autonomous Corporation (DAC), I held hangouts like I do today where I would talk about the similarities between Guilds in gaming and cryptocommunities as we see them today, and others would talk about topics based in their own unique experiences. Our hangouts were, in fact, much like having "raid night" on a specific day of the week, only instead of slaying virtual monsters with Epic Swords of Doombringing we would talk about how we can use blockchain technology to slay the inefficiencies and opaqueness of the current financial system while at the same time helping empower others. I only work for STEEMPOWER because I am here for BitShares and Steem for a long time to come, so please consider helping me oversee this project's growth and evolution by upvoting @officialfuzzy content with 100% voting power and consider creating and curating beyondbitcoin content to help ensure the site is covering quality content.

Two Faces of "The Whale Problem"

In Steemit there is something many newbies call "the Whale Problem". While they see this problem through a tinted lens of little experience--which is the experience people most often have, they only see one side of the problem. Minnows (aka newbies) see it as nearly impossible to get noticed and so spend a large majority of their time asking for upvotes via pms to whales everywhere they can find them. To these minnows the whale problem is getting the attention of whales in a space where it is difficult to get noticed while competing against hundreds and even thousands of other newbies along with an entrenched "evil" cabal of whales who does nothing but "circle jerk" votes in eachother's direction.

Though this is a somewhat valid perspective, there is another face to this problem--one that only whales and those who watch them from up close can fully appreciate. While minnows are searching for whales to notice and upvote them, whales are receiving numerous url links asking for upvotes on a daily, hourly and sometimes even by-the-minute basis. Many of whom are from complete strangers who may be writing in a topic about which the whale has no idea! If the whale doesnt' upvote at all, they risk perpetuating the negative stigma of "bad whales", but if they upvote content that is not high quality they risk perpetuating the belief that whales do not care about quality when they upvote.

Looking for a Common Denominator

Though we just looked at the two faces of the whale problem, to find a solution to both of them it is a good idea to try to find the common denominator between both. In this way we can find a solution that kills two birds with one stone so-to-speak. So what is the shared problem between these two faces?
A Lack of infrastructure that lends itself to building a community of individuals who will do the following:
A) Invest money and/or sweat equity into steempower
B) Have similar interests/expertise
C) Leverage one-another's expertise and steempower to reward and incentivize quality content creation in their sphere of influence/expertise

Proposed Solution--OPEN SOURCE Content Creation/Curation Guild websites!

As stated in the forward, for quite some time before Steem even existed, the concept of guilds was long a part of the cryptocommunity without which steem would have never existed. So suffice it to say, we at beyondbitcoin have been thinking intensely about how we can enable groups of people with similar interests to form guilds that help create and upvote content in their own specific niches of expertise. After many weeks of conversing, designing and building this solution with @faddat and @baabeetaa. After paying nearly 14k SBD earned from my @officialfuzzy account's posts from the past 6 months. After numerous set backs and oddities that had to be worked around, we finally think the 1st phase of the solution is nearing completion. The Beyond Bitcoin Guild Website is LIVE and Features content the community upvotes highest!
The first stage of this website will be to test it and help build a following of individuals who will be part of the guild for later phases (some of which that will have interesting rewards in the form of beyondbitcoin tokens if @officialfuzzy gets what he wants in future phases).

How does this fix anything?

This alone will not fix everything, but future plans I have (if I receive enough funding through my posts) will add additional features to this site that will enable many new and cool things that will further help.
However, what it does do at present is enable a community of individuals to be able to send content consumers to a site that is owned, run and curated by that very community.

What are some initial benefits of such sites?

1. People who frequently create content or curate it for a specific tag will be more incentivized to do so if the top quality content under that tag is displayed in an easy way to find.
2. Sending people links to steem-based community websites no longer will automatically flag steem users in other channels. Don't be called a spammer anymore for linking to steem-based content! The URL can now be from the site of your choosing!
3. Sites will be able to earn advertising revenue for Communities of content creators/curators. This ad revenue can be used for many things--including paying out to community participants or building more tools to help add to the steemit space.
4. Whales and minnows align based on shared passions on specific subject matter.
5. Minnows with large followings outside of steem can redo their current pages to have a steembased backend---can then open up a new revenue stream through upvotes of their content by fans!
6. Communities decide the rules for listing/delisting content----not steemit.

How can I help Fuzzy?

In this stage I need people who are veterans to blockchain technology and are interested in joining the BeyondBitcoin Guild to upvote, write and/or create quality content about cryptocurrency and blockchain technology under the #beyondbitcoin tag. In a perfect world, these people would be individuals representing various cryptocommunities/projects.
Other than this, we want to get high quality content creators, editors and publishers in cryptocurrency and blockchain tech to begin posting their content with the BeyondBitcoin tag. We also want to get people who wish to find people who are interested in Helping promote the content on this site and help curate the #beyondbitcoin tag to ensure the highest quality articles make it to the top of the site's content.

Conclusion

If you look at the BeyondBitcoin site screenshot I took below, you will see that it is currently working as expected---we need only to start tightening up the content curation at this juncture and begin upvoting @officialfuzzy to keep the funding for this project to evolve and grow further).

This site can be seen as an Open Source template for the benefit of the entire steem community. In fact, while you look at this picture of beyondbitcoin.io, I would like you to imagine it could be cloned and reused for sites like wikileaks or the electronic frontier foundation. Or better yet, maybe it is made for SnoopDog who wants to create a content creation/curation guild around his label. Maybe a group of avid sports fans will make a fanpage for their favorite team and provide updates and payments for updating the content.

Final Thoughts

If one looks at the beyondbitcoin.io site and considers the multiple possibilities, it becomes clear that @officialfuzzy is a whale in the ecosystem who cares about developers and community members of all walks of life coming together to build important foundational technologies to amplify the value of steem. Please consider upvoting my content with 100% voting power if you want to see this important project go into stages 2 and 3 (which is kind of top secret for now unless you join our beyondbitcoin hangouts.

Interested in your Own Site? Contact "fuzzy" on steemit.chat or bitsharestalk.org!