Recap: My Steem Presentation at Oracle (yes the database company :P) for the Dutch Telecom Society group

One of the duties of a witness (imho) is to promote Steem, so when the TSOC reached out to me about 1.5 months ago whether I wanted to talk about Steemit and Steem at their networking event I definitely said yes.

Yesterday the event was due, it was in the new Oracle HQ in Utrecht about 24 kilometers away from Amsterdam. I drove off 1.5 hours before the kickoff but thanks to mega traffic jams I almost was too late :) When arriving at the venue the pre-drinks were already over and people were ushered into the presentation auditorium. Nico, who arranged all the speakers for this Blockchain themed evening explained me quickly how we were going to do the evening.

Out of the 75 registrations about 50-60 people were actually attending. Almost everyone was wearing a suit and I think I saw only one lady. Quite bizarre :)

After Nico's intro, Dimitri from TNO talked about Blockchains and the projects they setup. Then Lucas from Oracle went on stage and he did not really focus on Blockchain that much, but more on Access Level Control & Identity Management software they are building together with KPN. Then it was my turn, the final speaker, such an honour :P

In the following video you see my slides:

As the texts on the slides are in dutch, this is a brief summary of what I talked about:

1. I'm roeland - this my history: hotelschool bachelor then websites coding, followed by social apps followed by mobile apps until now, the blockchain.
2. I have always fascinated by the 10.000 BTC 2 Pizza's story
3. I ran a mini mining rig in our pantry
4. Until I discovered Steemit last summer
5. I Posted a make up video
6. Steem is more than a blockchain for storing monetary transactions
7. It's a a blockchain based network returning the value creation to it’s creators & curators & maintainers
8. It's 1 Blockchain but has many applications: talking about Steemit.com, Busy.org, eSteem and the (working title) Steemstagram app.
9. Talking about benefits of a decentralized blogging / social network: No censorship, no great firewall of china, no centralized place of power.
10. Talking about potential disadvantages of a decentralized blockchain based network: Spam is included, copyrighted material is posted and illegal content can potentially be posted.
11. Then I continued to compare Steem Blockchain Tech (DPOS) versus Bitcoin Tech (POW). I first showed an excerpt of this video
12. Followed by some pictures of a Chinese Bitcoin Mining farm and a Electricity factory.
13. I compared Steem to Bitcoin in a table:
    

    Steem	Bitcoin
    10000 tx/s	7 tx/s
    40 sec. 100% confirmation time	20 - 120 min 100% confirmation time
    6 kWatt for DPOS minimum	300.000 kWatt - current power consumption of BTC network
    0 ct. tx cost	0.30 ct. tx cost

14. Continued my talk and told about the Witnesses and their tasks:
    Primary Tasks:
    • Maintaining their servers
    • Keeping up the network parameters
    • Regularly publish updated price feeds
    • Install software updates (hardforks) when due
    
    Secondary Tasks:
    • promoting Steem
    • supporting of Steem related projects

15. Then I talked a bit about the software release cycle, transparency in development of the platform and introduction of new features.

16. After that about how a DPOS network could go bad, with the recent Golos example where one guy bought half of all the available ICO-tokens (300 BTC) at once just before the market closed. He displayed it's influence by gaining a Top 19 position within a couple of hours by voting with many bot accounts. Things settled down now, in case you are wondering.

17. At the end of my presentation I envisioned things which I could see happening / hoping to happen with Steem in the near future:

    • Side chains with smart contract-esque apps.
    • Private messaging on the blockchain
    • A simplification of the datastructure allowing for a unifrom Key/Value datastore.

After the presentation we went for a bite in their lunchroom, were Indonesian food was served and I shared the table with some people who talked about the dot-com 00' bubble and burst and their experiences and answered some Q's by several attendees about Steemit.

All in all it was a nice evening and this morning after having had a cup of coffee in my new oracle coffee mug, I really woke up on the North Sea during a very cold 4°C (39 °F) water kitesurf session.

Have a nice weekend!!