Still waters and in a rush

It has been a long, long year in the markets I think but, I have a sense that they are running a bit dry at the moment, like there is now a solid base of holders that aren't willing to go lower. It is not really my area but the daily volumes have been slowly decreasing and been around 10 Billion for a while now and I figure they are waiting for the bigger investment players to get their act together and their infrastructure.

My assumption is that investment firms and banks aren't really quick profiteers, they play long games and the games they need to play to make it worthwhile is going to require a lot of people to be involved. Yes, they could buy the entire market cap many times with their resources but again, that doesn't help them so much as they need transaction value from their customers. This means that they have to get their customers to buy in too so then they can do more of the same skimming activities they do with other commodities.

It is going to get interesting as there are going to be many dynamics at play all at the same time and each of them will have an array of pros and cons. When it comes to mainstreaming crypto, the institutional finance sectors are going to play an enormous role as it is they who have hold of most people's money currently and, they have access to most people's investment strategies.

Up until now, investing in crypto has been a game for the lone wolf but once the institutions have their tools in place, they are going to bring in large groups of investors and diversify customer and fund portfolios into various types of crypto, whether it be directly into tokens or into projects themselves. This push is going to familiarize the general public with a lot of things we who are already here might take for granted and, they will be looking for places to land.

Steem is obviously the one I am backing to be just the kind of place newly interested blockchain users will arrive but there is literally space for 7.5 Billion people to come in at some level. In fact, it is likely that 7.5 Billion people will come in as the banks themselves will want to unify their product range and use the technology to reduce their costs in various ways also. Most people look a few months down the track but the changeover could take a decade or more to really be ubiquitous.

In the short-term however, there is a great deal of competition for Steem coming and this will grow due to the potential of the industry however, if say 100 million people arrived over the next 2 years into content based platforms, What is the chance that Steem picks up 10-20 million of them spread directly on Steem or across the SMT network?

Rather than imagine them coming into Steem today like most people do, think about them coming into much more tailored and customized experiences that look to more directly attract them as users/ contributors to a niche designed for their type of interests. It really does change a great deal for the person being onboarded.

People are in a rush of course to get wherever they are going but things do take time to develop, and this is especially true in technologies that aren't yet established. At the moment, what the blockchain is, is relatively undefined in how it is going to be in the future as there is a great deal of versatility and innovation that can be built upon it. While the banks use it one way, a community can use the same tech in a very different way and will do. Same tool, different use case.

What makes me more positive on Steem is the versatility of it to house a wide range of activities without tying it to any niche. We who are here now only really look at it from what we know it can do know through what it has done so far but, there is going to be an increasing number of creative developers pushing it in various directions. I wrote a post about cropping life int more manageable parts and in some way, that is what Steem is doing.

If we think about something like developing a healthy economy as a challenge to solve for (it hasn't been solved so far in the world) Steem is able to distribute that problem across a wide range of potential solutions as each SMT for example can work as its own independent economy on its own rule set. Yes they are still bound to the overall blockchain rules but they will be able to approach a host of other issues as independent players. Some will succeed, some will fail and some will adapt.

Essentially though, they all have the same problem to face (healthy distribution) and can tackle it in a number of ways. Because the chain is the same for all, it is likely easier to evaluate what works and what doesn't across a wide variety of rules and diverse populations and, swap and trade learning across nodes. Not that it will always work for every population but, it means that one SMT could have a a success in one area that another SMT than copies into its own rule book.

Over time, this could produce robust economic practices but still with the incentive to compete and innovate for growth. However, every innovation becomes to some extent, group learning to build upon. This some decentralized problem solving will of course be used in many other ways too and can help teams develop globally with much more ease and of course, consensus driven decision making among potentially very large groups of people or, very specialized people as the case requires.

Sometimes I think that we tend to want to get ahead of ourselves, solve the large problems too quickly and that leads to poor decision making that tends to exclude a great deal of information to fit it within the box. The decentralized communities however could become much like research labs that even though each will exclude information to some degree, with enough labs the learning can be analyzed across multiple points with multiple views and in the case of Steem, using a core baseline to test against.

Although there is a great deal of economic value to be made in the volatile startup phase, in the long term view there will be increasing stability and that will be in part achieved by problems being solved on mass scales that allow for the removal of middlemen. For example, one that I think will be a large change one day is when we are able to insure ourselves globally as a community instead of paying enormous premiums to be covered. Another is the securing of loans for something like housing instead of having to go through any banking system that is going to add undue inflation to values through interest.

I think that while in the short-term there are going to be some massive peaks of value for a narrow set of users, in the long-run, there will be a flattening of the peaks and a raising of the troughs to a point where there is a much healthier distribution of resources at a global level. Still, I don't see this happening in my lifetime but I do think that we are on a path that could potentially lead there and that is something worth aiming toward now. Along that road there are going to be lots of challenges, failures and successes but if we are essentially beginning to think more globally and technically be more in it together, absorbing the failures and benefiting from the successes becomes a group process.

In the short-term, I am really excited at the potential to be able to ease some of my immediate financial struggles but in the long-term, I am hoping I am able to use what I have and what I have learned to be part of working in and supporting across some of the decentralized labs that are to come. Just think what happens to a world where the people are able to choose to fund scientific research into clean energy themselves rather than be forced to finance wars between governments at the expense of the people.

Slowly, the stagnant waters can start to move and make new currents of change.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]