Changing values into the distance

On Thursday it'll be a week since I got my delegation returned, which means that soon I will start seeing what the 50/50 curation rewards will be like for me. I still have over 10% of my total stake delegated out to various people and projects, but that has always been the case and at some point I will likely run some delegation competitions again.

Besides the mountain of work I have been doing to earn money IRL to pay my bills, I have been keeping an eye on how things have been progressing and since I am pretty transparent in my thoughts on Steem, things seem to be going pretty well with the curation percentage, curve and downvotes mixing the platform up a little bit more.

Far from perfect, but a step in the right direction in my book.

What I find interesting on Steem is that with every change, people act as if the latest iteration is going to be the one that will never change again. Even though history and the entire premise of the blockchain is to change to better support a wide community with a robust economy.

This economy is quite different to the ones that we are all part of at a governmental level and hopefully it can sort out some of the issues the others cannot. What people seem to forget is that failure is inherent in the centralized economies and regardless how much they tinker with the tools they have, all fail and inevitably the cost of failure is paid by the many and the gains are made by the very minute few. Time and time again.

It is a funny system because a bank creates money out of thin air by giving loans with reserves they do not have, take interest on what is borrowed that they never had to lend in the first place as they do not actually have it and then, use those funds to invest into companies that provide the goods and services that their non-existent money is going to purchase for more profits. The debt cycle is very, very engineered and once the failure happens, the banks aren't holding any cash that they can lose as they have no reserves, what they hold are assets in the form of companies that then get bailed out by the governments and therefore taxpayers to keep people employed so that the cycle can reset and start again.

And people think the Steem economy is broken.

The Steem blockchain is and always should be a work in progress and it has to be this way because the ecosystem is going to keep changing and evolving to bring in various entities that are yet unconsidered, that are yet to be thought of.

One of the problems in the problems with economic theory applied at a government level is that it never envisaged companies like Facebook and Google who generate enormous ecosystems of wealth but are not bound by the same laws as a human is, they are not bound to where they are located and where they pay tax, even though they traverse the globe. This means that they can shop around for the best deals and due to the highly complex nature of the process, keep much of their transactional information masked from those who may want to lay claim to it.

A government however has tools to deal with other animals, us. All they can do is adjust the economics of the citizens within the border, while the largest corporations operating within those same borders can extract their earnings from those same citizens out to the Cayman's.

So as I see it, we do not know what the future is going to hold for the blockchain industry and we have no idea what happens when wealth starts to integrate and weigh upon the chains. What I could predict though is that business models are going to form that were not possible earlier, in the same way that Google and Facebook do not exist without the internet.

Having the capabilities to make changes to the code at the foundation level and have it apply equally across all users simultaneously allows for a much fairer governance, and the sensitivity is increased the more stake is decentralized. While agreements are harder to reach due to this, they are also more robust as there is buy-in from the users themselves.

AS I have said before, this latest hardfork incentivizes a couple of key points as it encourages users to power up to earn through curation as well as take responsibility for their own backyards. It has been quite effective in this so far, but as always, more can be done.

The next hardfork however leverages the efforts of this one by improving the ownership layers of community, tokenization and the ability to support through delegation without risk of resource abuse on the Steem pool. These steps are key in building the foundation for onboarding to really take place and give the freedom for applications and users to do more of what they like, without having to concern themselves with the full economic ecosystem of Steem.

One of the largest sticking point in the Steem community is always going to be where the resource pool is allocated and this should be the case because all Steem holders are owners and therefore invested in the outcomes of Steem. But those outcomes aren't just connected to the Steem pool, they are also going to be influenced by how well the tokens of other pools perform and how well those niche communities serve their end users, end users who may never see a Steem in their wallet ever.

Even with such a small community as we have on Steem now, the hurdles we face are similar to what the world already faces yet, we are looking to solve it in a way that was not possible pre-blockchain as there was just no way to organize information and track resources at this level with such granularity. This means that the solutions that could be developed may be outside our current realms of imagination, in the same way that entities like the internet mammoths were not visible to those who designed the economy 100 years ago.

Even for those of us who are here now, it is hard to imagine what could be because we are continually approaching it from our own experience and pasts where we never saw a working economy. All we have ever known is an economy that works for some period of time before it crashes and we think that this is the only way it can be and therefore we cannot see solutions that will improve it.

While it might not be an easy journey for many here as the hardest part of Steem is maintaining emotional control around FUD and FOMO, I do believe that what we are doing is valuable - and that includes our successes and failures as it is how we learn and adjust - how we evolve.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]