Steem: Balancing opportunities and empowering many

Lately, I have been talking a fair bit about learning on Steem and it being a soft start into crypto, blockchain, trading as well as decentralization, governance and tokenization of interactions. One area that should be talked about more though is that when it comes to opportunity, Steem is largely non-discriminatory. This post is going to have some generalizations involved.

I was talking with a colleague the other day about how many women seem to be working in my company and she said, "It changes up in R&D". This is probably largely true on Steem also as when it comes to coding, there are likely many more men than women although, I know several who have written programs here and a few who are learning to script right now.

However, if we consider that this is a highly technical, generally male dominated area in an industry that is just beginning its journey, Steem has a lot of women who not only use the system, but do well on it. It is likely impossible to get numbers, but considering Bitcoin is just ten years old, how many of the early miners were female? I would suspect not very many.

Yet, here we are on Steem using Proof-of-Brain in various ways to mine Steem from the inflation pool and the women are holding their own and in many areas, outperforming their male counterparts as in general, women are better socially and are more media savvy than men. This means that through combination of talent areas rather than a narrow technical focus, people are able to leverage more of their skills to interact, learn and earn.

Not only is there more balance between men and women, considering that it is acceptable to be unseen and anonymous here, a lot of the regional discrimination is avoided and those who play the game well, can earn regardless of where they were born, the colour of their skin or their economic situation.

As I see it, the ability to offer a soft start into a complex world of technical and financial components is going to play a large role in helping Steem to mainstream. Combine these aspects with a widening range of social and entertainment based applications and the market potential increases exponentially outward to include a larger and more diverse audience to not only use, but consume what is on steem.

Consumption of content is obviously a vital component for a content delivery blockchain and as Steem is increasingly able to cater for a wider audience, it has a good chance of getting traction in markets through the application facings. In time, there are going to be an increasing range of niche applications that offer products and services to much narrower group than present.

What is also a beautiful part of the system is that the blockchain can be leveraged and localized applications built that cater directly to the needs of people where they need it. Steem doesn't have to break into a market, it needs that market to break onto Steem. This makes uptake more likely as applications will be designed specifically for a market by people within and who care about the particular market itself.

Niche applications are going to be the thing that really drives Steem and SMTs of course when they arrive into mainstream adoption mode. In time, there are going to be more and more tools that lower the barrier of entry to develop on Steem while at the same time, there will be an increasing number of developers in blockchain and interest from a growing number of groups, from corporations to private users.

While we aren't there yet, it is going to be innovations like Steem and the diverse range of people who interact on it that will have the balancing effect that reduces discrimination in many areas. There is a long way to go of course but what we pretty incredible to see at Steemfest was just how integral the women are to the future success of the platform. Again a generalization but in many ways, they are the bridge that connects the technology to the people and makes the various communities more welcoming.

I wonder if we were able to know for sure the percentages, what would the ratio of male to female across crypto projects be? What about economic or ethnic variation? I have absolutely no data to back this due to the nature of the industry, but my intuition tells me that when it comes to equality of the sexes, Steem would be at the very pointy end of the cryptosphere.

This is a massive opportunity for all of us, no matter our background or current position and in the future, it could play a large role in closing various social gaps in many places as well as becoming a healthy and diverse community that provides opportunity and benefit to many.

Steem is what we make it and it can be many different things to many different people.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]

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