Why Are We Here?

Ever wonder why you are you here, on Steemit? What’s it all about?

Isn’t it a bit strange that all of us are suddenly gathered here, together? We all feel like individuals making our own choices, but is that really true?

You may think to yourself that it’s just an accident, that you are here right now. But as we will see, this is no accident. There is something happening on a global scale, and both you and Steemit are a part of it.

To understand what is happening, we need to look at the big picture.

The Big Picture

“The press, the machine, the railway, the telegraph are premises whose thousand-year conclusion no one has yet dared to draw.” - Nietzsche

Our earth is interconnecting at an accelerating pace. The growth of the internet alone has made information of all kinds flow freely throughout all areas of the globe.

A certain kind of communication has not been flowing freely however. The flow and communication of value has been taken hostage by big banks and financial institutions.

This is obviously a problem, but what has this got to do with Steemit? Let me explain.

The Birth of Bitcoin

In 2008 the situation became unbearable. We were living in an interconnected, peer to peer, global world, while big banks and financial institutions grew ever more centralized.

Satoshi Nakamoto in particular was fed up with the system and released Bitcoin into the world. While Satoshi has remained anonymous, he left a message to the world in the unalterable core of Bitcoin. The message contained the headline to the following article:

The message from Satoshi was clear. As it stands, Banks are parasites that extract value from everyday taxpayers. A new approach was needed, and Bitcoin was the ideal first step to remove the parasites.

The Dawn of a New Era

With Bitcoin we finally had a technological solution for how to disintermediate big banks and financial institutions. The next step was to make a solution that was fast, cheap and scalable to the whole earth.

Enter Daniel Larimer, co-founder of Steemit, who was among the first to discuss scalability with Satoshi. It was after this point that Daniel Larimer decided to create BitShares, a platform that pioneered many of the inventions used by Steem such as 3 second transaction times and Smartcoins like Steem Dollar that can track any value.

BitShares also gave rise to a new way of viewing digital tokens, thinking of them as “shares” instead of a “coins,” giving birth to the idea of a Decentralized Autonomous Company (DAC). A DAC is a company that functions by itself, i.e autonomous, and does not have any central authority in charge, i.e. decentralized.

Fast-Forward to Steem

Steem is among the first Decentralized Autonomous Companies, and perhaps the only one that has a high chance of going viral in the near future. To see why, we need to understand Steem in the context of history and what is happening in the world.

Think of it this way, if information is the “water” of the internet, cryptocurrencies are the “blood.” While water is flowing quite freely on the internet, financial institutions are choked arteries that cripple the flow of value. With Steem we can unclog the arteries of the world.

Steemit is part of a bigger movement of decentralization and disintermediation of big banks and institutions. The goal is a world with global, frictionless value transfers from person to person without any middlemen. Viewed from that perspective, Steemit is a kind of trojan horse. It brings all the great ideas in cryptocurrencies to the masses in a way everyone can appreciate and participate in.

It is not without reason that banks are afraid of Facebook or other social platforms moving into financial technology. Social platforms already have in place infrastructure for the new hyper-connected world, and the missing piece of financial technology can be filled it at any moment, leaving everyone else in the dust.

Fortunately, Steemit is getting there first. It’s global, free, fast, and not least fair for participants, in contrast to Facebook. Thus, the stage is now set for a massive shift.

The Greatest Wealth Transfer in the History of the World

The banking system has a choke-hold in all industries, crippling the evolution of life on a massive scale. Fortunately we now have the technology to completely bypass the great octopus and diminish its strength. The same is true in other industries like social media where Facebook has a choke-hold that centralizes control and authority. Decentralized alternatives like Steemit are the solution in both cases.

Where Are We Going?

We have come a long way. And still we're only getting started. On an evolutionary timescale we have just woken up and started to reflect on our place in the universe. Meanwhile we're already seeing the role of technology as a force for interconnecting the globe, interlinking all human beings.

The technology powering Steemit, blockchain technology, bring a new level of value to the existing connections, allowing everyone all over the world to freely communicate value without any external authority or middlemen. This makes everyone free to contribute and get value from all sorts of activities.

The creation of a frictionless global exchange of value is a pre-condition for all higher development, whether it is the Internet of Things, Global Cooperatives or the rise of Artificial General Intelligence as a force in the world. As such it is a vital step towards a so-called Noosphere and ultimately the Omega Point, where a higher level of conscious complexity can spontaneously emerge from all the interconnections and technological progress.

As such it is a vital step towards a so-called Noosphere and ultimately the Omega Point, where a higher level of conscious complexity can spontaneously emerge from all the interconnections and technological progress.

Are You Using Steem or is Steem Using You?

With this evolutionary trend, it seems inevitable that millions of people will be drawn into projects like Steem. That makes you wonder, are we using Steem or is Steem using us?

Steem appreciates in value whenever you post content. As people search for relevant terms on google, they are drawn into the seductive world of Steem and are trapped in a cycle of posting ever more and ever better content. On the other hand, you get value for posting, so in that way you are using Steem for your own good.

We use Steem as much as it uses us, but in the end we're all better for it. The magic of Steem is that everyone has an incentive to participate. At the same time the consequences of all this participation is a form of life, a healthy vibrant community where value is created that go beyond Steem and its users.

Ultimately Steem is a force for good that makes the world more efficient!

And That's Why We Are Here!

#philosophy #steem #bitcoin #bitshares