Learning on Steem for tomorrow

I have said often enough that I don't think Steem is a place for everybody. Yet.

It is going to be though I believe as more and more people start to understand that their data really is valuable and they can have access to some of the revenue. Imagine if all of the companies that collected data and sold it were forced by law to pay some percentage of it to the data provider, Us. A trillion micro transactions for every little piece of information we provide them.

I wonder, would they collect more or, be more selective with what they collected?

It is going to be interesting when loyalty points are tokenized further and points can be earned on various quests. Eat at a restaurant, write a review, get paid a little, get a discount, get a free beer at the next visit. @actifit already tokenizes fitness activity in order to mine Steem, imagine how many calories would be burned if Bitcoin was mined in the same way. What if your local gym hooked up their treadmills and bikes to actifit and gave a discounted membership to those who rode them far enough - split the profits - earn while you burn.

When it comes to tokenization, the possibilities are near endless as much of the activities we perform are already tokenized in some way or could be. Just think that when you are running on that treadmill, you are counting those numbers and trying to reach this distance or this time. You have gamified your run and will push a little more, even if you may not feel like it. Take away those numbers and perhaps you would have stopped a little earlier.

Of course, this is going to raise a whole lot of new concerns as what happens when certain activities are rewarded en masse, does our behavior change? Sure, for somethings it might be a benefit like those steppers that help people be a little more active however, what about when the advertisers reward some activities over others, and the governments?

When people have said, Facebook could just have their own currency on a blockchain... My answer is YES, they could. But... as soon as they introduce paying users for doing what they have been doing previously for free, it is going to fundamentally change the way the platform operates and the way people behave and while they are centralized and can do something more directly about scam and spam, many users are not going to enjoy what it will become.

As we all know too well on Steem, having a currency attached to content production faces its challenges. Yet, we are slowly working things out, slowly getting to understand what we are facing and what we are dealing with and, more are slowly learning about how the platform operates. more, not all though.

Many people here expect to earn without understanding how the ecosystem works and while the argument gets made that, this is a social media, we shouldn't have to learn, this is also a technical industry in its early stages of formation trying to find its way. If you expect to turn up to a complex job without understanding the job and still get paid, you have likely never worked a complex job before.

This is why I say that Steem isn't for everybody as while many people like the idea of Steem, much less are willing to do the learning to understand how everything fits together and, continue to learn as how it fits together changes on a near daily basis. It is a complex system, and those who are taking the time to learn and be part of how it develops are essentially getting a head start on what is destined to come in this world, what is already arriving piece by piece or rather, block by block.

The global mainstream vocabulary is slowly shifting away from Bitcoin is a scam and for criminals, to blockchain offers a lot of potential in the future. Approaching from the blockchain level rather than the currency view is an easier sell as while it is complicated, it doesn't incite the same fears. Blockchain can be sold as a new technology, not something that is going to disrupt their investments. Yes, they are inextricably tied together but, most people don't really know that as they confuse blockchain and Bitcoin still.

Once the technology starts to be adopted, just like what is happening to Steem now will happen at a mass scale where companies create products and services that monetize the Blockchain capabilities in more and more diversified ways that can cater for mass appeal or, niche markets. Just think about what the internet has been able to create markets for as no matter your kink, it is available and, lo and behold - there are other freaks out there and you can have a community. This obviously works in the positive and the negative.

Imagine being able to go back to 1980 and choose what skills you were going to develop to utilize in the future. Would it be the same as you have now? The thing is that in 1980, not many people were lining up to become computer programmers or system administrators because most did not see how large of an impact the personal computing revolution would have on the future.

That is kind of where we are now, and in the future history of the blockchain, people will look back at this decade and say I should have studied, I should have built the understanding of what was to come.

Instead of being a user, I could have been a creator.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]