Time To Look Ahead: HF21 In Our Rear View Mirror (Kind Of)

Well that wasn't too painful.

I congratulate the team of developers and other individuals who were involved in getting things up and running. While some of the applications are still funky (I am told some of the nodes are still not updated with the patch), things are getting back to normal in terms of blockchain operation.

We will see how things go over the next 24 hours but the hope, by all of us, is the one patch that was created is all that is needed to keep things going.

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So after months of debate, postings, and discussions, the Hard Fork known as "21" is gone. This leads us to ask "what is next"?

Why Hard Fork 22 of course. And that one is going to be a real humdinger.

Before getting to that, I think it best to mention why these Hard Forks have to be so cumbersome. Some mentioned that "21" should have been broken up into two separate forks. While there is a logic to this, the challenge comes in having too many HFs. They are not easy and a lot of external parties (i.e. exchanges) have to align themselves with the new code. Once in a while, they are game; do it monthly and you have a mess on your hands.

So what is Hard Fork 22? In a word it is growth.

This update will enable Steem to grow by leaps and bounds. There are two majors pieces that are going to be a part of it. One is the long-awaited Smart Media Token protocol (SMTs). The second is the Resource Credit pools.

In my opinion, the latter deals with the biggest problem on Steem: on-boarding. Right now Steemit Inc is signing on the most new people per day, somewhere in the neighborhood of a few hundred. For this platform to grow, that is not going to cut it. We need to see the ability to have tens of thousands signed up each day. With the Resource Credit pool, this is possible since it spreads the process out to the applications.

SMTs should be a tool that helps to bring a lot of users since it appeals to those sites which are already successful. Being a base layer solution, this will offer the ability to create "mini-Steems" where all the features of STEEM are provided to these tokens. Using the reward pool system that was proven over the past few years, we are seeing a turnkey operation being handed to these entities.

This is a lot easier than setting up their own blockchain or forking Steem (can't get away from problems with forks-just as the VIBE team).

The original vision was to "tokenize the Internet". As things evolve, we are seeing this become a lot more than that. The next phase of the crypto world is upon us and Steem is already taking advantage of it. In many ways, it is amazing how far ahead of the curve this place actually is.

Anyway, it was a successful Hard Fork day. We moved through it with only a few hour downtime. Again, credit to all those who were working behind the scenes to pull this off. Your efforts will go largely unnoticed but they are appreciated.

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