Question: Who Owns the Steem Blockchain and Steemit Service and API’s? The Steemit/Steem Business Opportunity!

Ownership?

For anybody to invest substantially in time, energy and funds; businesses risks needs to be thoroughly understood and managed. To start with, ownership needs to be assessed and understood; Ownership of software, of API’s, of roadmap and so on.

I kindly ask you, the reader, if you can help me, and us the community, to better understand who owns what? 

• Who is the owner of the Steem blockchain technology?
• Who is the owner of API’s to the Steem blockchain technology?
• Who is the owner of the Steemit front-/backend software?
• Who is the party to create agreements wrt available features, roadmaps and API’s?
• Who is the party to create agreements wrt service availability and support levels?

The Remainder of this Post discusses briefly  

• Crypto-world: an Island
• Islands require Bridges to Prosper
• Commercial Businesses to fuel Steemit/Steem Growth
• The Business Opportunity

Crypto-world: an Island

Since I started to use Steemit, I see the tremendous potential in the service, platform and community. Steemit triggered me to dive deeper into Crypto-world, to discover the meaning of:  

• Crypto currencies, how they get their value, what problem they solve
• Transparency of data and databases through public blockchains
• De-centralised operations of networks and services
• Ownerships of blockchains, services and technology
• …and more…

A lot learned in the last months and still know only a very little I’m afraid.

What I do realise: Crypto-world is very different to what we know from our ’normal’ world.

Island requires Bridges to Prosper

With a helicopter view, I learned:  

• Crypto-world is a revolution;
• It is more or less an island;
• It is an island with unpaved and complex roads to the ’normal’ world;
• It is an island with enormous potential!

I also know: to unleash the Crypto-world potential, to grow the island, to become the new mainland, it needs bridges with the world of today!

Commercial Businesses to fuel Growth of Steemit/Steem

To bring Steem and Steemit to the next level, the bridge between Steemit and commercial businesses needs to be created, and with that the bridge between Steem and fiat currencies. It’ll be an enormous efforts to grow Steemit from the community size it is now, to a community of several hundreds of thousands to millions of users, and from the very few businesses having a Steemit account today without bringing any revenues, to a community powering hundreds to thousands of businesses with a revenue model to allow for payments of all the costs associated to make this growth happen.  The investments required to create an environment for commercial businesses to include Steemit as their newest channel will not be small. Technology developments are required, Technical integrations are required, Sales efforts are required, Marketing efforts are required, Support needs to be provided and so on.

The Business Opportunity

I see the huge potential to bring commercial businesses to the Steemit community; These business will bring new Steemit users; More Steemit users will create a larger potential for more businesses to come to Steemit; These will result in even more new Steemit users. I know, it is a chicken and egg problem: businesses are not interested in a new channel to communicate with their audience, when not sufficient users are using that channel.

Now we can wait until Steemit has sufficient users for businesses to be interested, or we can bring some businesses onboard who can help Steem/Steemit to grow. I’m confident I can find some business innovators in several market segments in which I have extensive networks and persuade these innovators to break the chicken and egg problem. With good plans and co-execution of everything that is required, we can bring Steemit to the next level, jointly with the business innovators. I’m also convinced that when things done right, income can be generate from these businesses, not only in them investing in Steem, but also them paying eg fees in fiat currencies. 

I’m looking forward to understand better the ownership structure so I can further explore the viability of setting up a business around Steem/Steemit that will benefit the community and Steem/Steemit. 

Does this align with the plans of Steemit Inc? @ned @jamesc @zurvanic @andrarchy @sneak

---

follow me @edje