Steemit and post-scarcity society
What I find interesting about steem and steemit is that it is the only cryptocurrency that is viable for star trek society, or as they are known "post-scarcity society".
That is the revelation that hit me. There are many cryptos out there and some of them are great for our current society, but steem is the only one which is useful to a society that replaced labor with automation. When the ASIC that is mining bitcoin is only worth as much as the materials that are needed to produce it (or maybe just the amount of energy needed to create it from energy), mining it becomes a little bit silly. Not to mention, that the labor needed to take care of the server farms can be automated as well. While the waste of resources will not matter that much in such a society, it will still be wasteful.
Steem, on the other hand, is creating the currency by rewarding people who will be the only ones that cannot be replaced by automation - the content creators.
So to post-scarcity society which only really cares about creative labor steem would be the perfect currency.
The federation uses steem? Do you? :D
Unfortunately – that's not actually true.
Steem is very much a commodity which is accrued by scarcity. That scarcity is not just the ultimate potential number of blocks on the blockchain but also the amount of "magical fiscal inflation" that is injected into the blockchain on a daily basis (also known as "the reward pool") and is allocated by percentage based on the most valuable votes placed that day on content.
Note that critical part, that the allocated daily inflationary rate is weighted by the SP of those who have placed of the votes. That means that those who already have an enormous stake of big numbers and the blockchain are the ones who decide, ultimately, where those rewards go. Follow the money and you will see that most of it goes right back into their pockets.
Scarcity is built into the system. What is scarce is actual influence of allocation of resources outside of something less than 100 the stakeholders (and some people will tell you that outside of the top 39, the big whales, very little if anything actually matters in terms of votes when it comes to allocating the reward pool).
Steem is proving that automated trading bots are far more effective and efficient at mining and manipulating the flow of currency through the system than any human.
So, yes – perhaps the Federation uses steem. Given my choice, I would generally prefer gold pressed latinum, a sturdy ship, and a star to sail her by.
Not to destroy your naïve enthusiasm with facts but…
I fully understand that as it is right now, there are a lot of problems. Yet I see the potential.
Part of the problem is that the Federation is definitely not a post-scarcity civilization. Sure, they have matter synthesizers that can take arbitrarily large energy inputs and create anything that they theoretically could conceive of, but the Federation artificially limits the supply of one of the most important resources that they have access to:
Minds.
They obviously have computers which are capable of accidentally emulating full sentience and sapience. Even before the TOS era, they had the genetic wherewithal to create superior minds and bodies. The advent of the replicator means that, at a technical level, it's trivial to duplicate any given mind forever.
The one thing that the Federation limits beyond all others is the one thing that drives their entire economy – attention.
They could have a hundred thousand times the amount of attention and consciousness that the Federation currently possesses. They could achieve 100,000 times what they currently do. They have antimatter reactors and the technology to turn energy into matter.
And yet, they send singular copies of individuals who, in theory, are valuable in and of themselves, out in tiny metal skins by the hundreds or thousands, without the benefit of backups, into harsh environments which they are poorly suited to survive, and then they look surprised when there are splinter groups who think that's a terrible idea like the Maquis.
Clearly, the Federation is not post-scarcity and just as clearly they aren't pro-sapience. The powers that be in the organization are freely throwing away the least valuable thing that they possess – other people. Aggressively. While simultaneously retaining and maintaining the fruits of this advanced technology and all of the strange alien wonders which can be acquired, for a very small and select group of people at the very top.
Which, in a roundabout way, is exactly like the architecture of the steem blockchain. The scarcity is attention, is the human mind. It's for sale, everywhere you look. Those who have accrued lots of it allow others to partake of it at their leisure, and only at their leisure.
I'm the worst kind of cynic, an old cynic.
Okay, I just needed a picture with sort of post-scarcity theme and there was no Culture tv series. :D Which is a shame now that I think.
Even the Culture isn't completely post-scarcity, though they do a whole lot better with their resources than the Federation. For the Culture, resources are scarce at a very broad scale – but they have Minds which operate at that broad a scale and who engage in something like trade at that scale.
(The real problem that I have with "post-scarcity civilizations" is that no civilization will ever reach a point which can be called post-scarcity. The more stuff you have, the more, bigger, more complicated, more interesting stuff you want, and in particular that's where the stories are. Somebody is always short of something, usually time, and that's where you see your trade economy blossom.)
What you think I mean by post-scarcity and what I mean are slightly different.
What I mean is just any civilization in which any needs that you might have to continue living are so insignificant that everything is provided. I don't think we will ever have a society in which there is no money, but the things we pay for will be vastly different.
The problem with that is that "things that you might need to continue living" is a very flexible scale. Once upon a time, the idea of an abstract connection to a network of computers which talk to each other and allow you to talk to other people wasn't something that anyone would ever think of as "a human need," or even "a human right," but that's what the UN is going for.
Observationally, I think it's safe to say that there will never be a time in which people are going to be satisfied with the life experience that they can possess without engaging with and making use of currency and an economy. Sort of like there will never be a time in which computers have "enough" RAM and CPU – all problems expand to fill all available space.
Human experience expands to fill all available resources – and then some.
To go back to your original post, and making reference of things you've actually said, every crypto token is useful to a society that has replaced physical labor with automation. That's because the value of a token has nothing to do with the amount of physical work that you put in. That's true of the bitcoin, the steem, the litecoin, the cannabiscoin – all of them. It's also true of the US dollar, the euro, the baht, the ruble, and every other fiat currency.
That's what quanta of trade are for, and what they've always been for.
Steem is not "creating the currency by rewarding people who will be the only ones that cannot be replaced by automation" because the majority of the inflationary reward pool is, in fact, going to automated systems, many of which post in order to increase their share of the reward pool. Quite a lot of that money is going to the pockets of those who already have vast piles of that money (see "proof of stake"), who then lease out the power that their pile provides to bots who then lease their votes out to people willing to trade steem for those upvotes and a slightly larger chance of getting some of the reward pool – whose steem goes back into the pockets of the people who are leasing out the SP in the first place to buy more SP.
Rather than being the epitome of society which is run entirely off the sweat of a man's brow, to lift an ironic phrase, the biggest engine in the steem blockchain is, itself, automation.
If you were to drop content creators out of the blockchain altogether, there would still be a good chunk of activity of bots talking to one another trading votes and accruing SP while external investors who are more interested in the cryptocurrency for its lack of fees and rapid transactions Pumping money into it as a value store.
Congratulations, you and I are pretty much completely irrelevant in the grander scheme of things.
I remember when I was young and thought that my existence made a difference. That was many years ago. I've moved past that now.
i agree with u....✌
The possibility for wealth re-distribution on a global scale is insane with cryptocurrency. Very exciting stuff and the star trek society example fits this very well.
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