My Steem Vision(s)

After reading this vision by @enjar, I realized a lots of people had been sharing their #steemvision in my feed, and after reading a few very interesting ones, I noticed how little overlap they all have with where I would personally hope STEEM and its DApps will go in the near and semi-distant future. It could be that I'm simply on the wrong platform, or it could be that I simply have some insights others may not have spent much time thinking about. In this post I would like to share my vision for STEEM.

It is all about the content

Given that STEEM is a blockchain with coins and monetary value, and given the great DApp infrastructure (with admittedly some growing pains), it is easy to get caught up in the usual crypto currency trading struggles and focus on the potential for growth of exchange rates of the STEEM and SBD currencies, or to get too tight up in the whole DApp side of things. Forgetting that the strength of the platform in the end lies in the content it allows to be published. STEEM first and foremost is a blockchain based content publishing platform. I feel strongly that the emphasis for any good vision for STEEM should lie in being a good content creation and publishing platform, with all that entails, and becoming an even better content creation and publishing platform in the future.

Becoming a universal content creation and publishing platform

As @enjar discussed in his vision Moving Beyond The Seven Day Cycle, we are currently stuck with a one size fits all model for publishing and profiting from content, centered around a seven-day cycle. While for some types of content, this is a great model, as a lot of content does go stale after a while, other types of content, such as multi-post works of fiction, don't truly fit the seven-day model all that well. The seven day one-size-fits all is just one of many aspects that hinder STEEM in becoming a universal content creation and publishing platform.

Becoming a cooperative content creation platform.

Creating good content can be a one person thing. Many great pieces of content though come together through cooperation. The STEEM blockchain already has some possibilities for cooperation. I've personally posted draft chapters of my novel and then ran beta reading competitions in order to crows source my editing on STEEM. I also ran a competition to find an illustrator and was able to pay her with STEEM for her services. So with some work cooperation on content creation is possible. There is a lot of room for improvement though on this point. Rather than contractor relationships, we could conceive more natural cooperation through smart contracts that deal with royalties. Create content together according to the contract, publish it together and reap the benefits together.

Pulling in top content providers

As I stated at the beginning of this post: it is all about content. And while we have quite some amazing content providers on board already, few of them have truly sizable following outside of the platform that could bring in the growth the platform could use. It should I feel be top priority to pull in top content providers.

One important aspect to consider there is that for new content providers, STEEM is a great platform that allows you to start making money from good content when first you made none. Established content providers though already tend to have a solid revenue stream coming in from advertising. They won't be too thrilled trading in the revenues from advertising generated by their existing audience, for new revenues from STEEM users not part of their following yet. Let's face it: The only way to bring in top content providers is to offer the possibility to earn advertising revenues.
Until not that long ago advertising on steemit seemed unthinkable. Now we have advertising on the primary STEEM WUI site, and I guess it is helping Steemit INC survive, but advertising could do so much more for the platform if it were used to incentify top content providers to start publishing on the STEEM platform.

Stability under Capricious Gods

Steemit INC and some of the larger whales, like the Gods of Mount Olympus will mostly act for the good of the platform and the good of us mere minnows, orcas, red fish and dolphins. Sometimes though, as the Gods of Mount Olympus, our Gods of STEEM will act capriciously in a way that does not serve the stability of the platform.

In my vision, a shield of brave and independent champions, Witnesses who hold their independence from Steemit INC and (potentially questionable) Whale driven business models should be there to protect us mere mortals from the wrath of our sometimes capricious Gods. That is, my vision for STEEM is a vision where independent witnesses hold more influence and Steemit INC and any of the STEEM gods that are just in it for the money, hold less influence.

Forking out bad history

One recurring theme in my discontent rants with some of STEEMs features has been the false reputation gathered by people using bid bots to up vote their own content. I would describe bid bot acquired reputation as false history. There are probably other examples of false history as well. It is my vision that in future HFs, sources of false history (excluding actual monetary value for obvious reasons) be addressed and the actual false part of the history so far be forked out of the chain with a hard fork.

Robustness and emphasizing decentralization

Second only to content, robustness of the platform is essential for STEEM. Given that STEEM is distributed blockchain technology, the concept of having a SPOF, either technically or in terms of legal entities should be deemed undesirable. We should always ask ourselves: What would happen if? If the answer is: We'dd be in deep shit if that happened, then we need to look at that event not as something we should avoid at all costs, but as something we need to change from deep shit to kinda inconvenient . This means focus on the distributed aspect of the platform and on reliable fail over. One is zero! This means robust contingency planning and getting to the point where even an event like Steemit INC going bankrupt or the people behind SteemConnect pulling off a massive exit scam with the active key many of us entrusted them with, for the platform would just end up being kinda inconvenient .

A big "NO" for Trusted Third Parties

We just touched on SteemConnect. Currently the DApp ecosystem, for a real big part, relies on this Trusted Third Party. As a DApp developer, or as someone who trades on an exchange and keeps his/her portfolio there, it can be easy to forget that the main raison d'être for blockchain technology, and basically its core feature is that it allows us to do away with any kind of trusted third party. I feel doing away with pre-blockchain TTP technology should be an important secondary point of focus.

Stake weighed influence beyond STEEM Power.

Given the importance of decentralization and decentralization driven robustness, the role of witnesses who contribute to this decentralization beyond the bare blockchain, for example by running a publicly accessible full-API node is of absolute essential importance to the long term stability of the platform. So much so, that I believe the act of running decentral API nodes or other decentralization nodes that improve robustness should translate to influence.

A STEEM Guild

In the previous section we established that robustness geared witnesses should get influence for their contribution to the robustness of the platform, but influence over what? It is part of my vision for the future of STEEM that independent developers, infrastructure specialists, security analysts, etc, who wish to contribute to the platform without turning themselves into unpaid or underpaid contractors for Steemit Inc, join a STEEM Guild of like-minded individuals. A lot of thinking would be needed to determine the exact structure of this guild, but the code concept would be that in times of need the guild forms a task force under the command of a combination of:

• Witnesses contributing to a robust and redundant DApp ecosystem, for example running a public full API node (*49%)
• A guild council made up of guild members (31% of voting)
• Steem Power stake holders (20% of voting)

The above percentages are just an initial idea. I feel the creation of a STEEM guild that shares a large part of the above vision could play a major role in making part of this vision happen.

Blockchain sponsored security bounties.

A huge part of the robustness of the platform isn't linked to redundancy and decentralization, but instead is linked to the security of the code base. STEEM has seen its share of smaller and larger security issues. STEEM currently truly has no incentive structure set up for looking for, finding and reporting security issues. To illustrate, the post I did on a double voting vulnerability I reported on github made me a smashing total of $0.12.

It seems a good way to address this issue would be with a HF that, after a verified vulnerability report, allocates a fixed percentage of the new RSHARES in order to retroactively fund a structural bounty on security vulnerabilities in the main stack.

A STEEM economy beyond votes.

We already discussed cooperative content production as a way for the platform to grow, but in the end cooperative content creation is just one of many patterns for people to interact in a TTP-free free market. We already touched shortly on smart contracts. A while back I made sugestions for a capability-based facet-contract implementation for the STEEM blockchain, that I feel could contribute to a richer DApp ecosystem. Next to smart contracts, and partially enabled by them, extending the facilities for doing business through DApps could prove a powerful enabler for pushing the economy beyond just votes and cooperation. One example is the concept of a personal web shop for premium content. Imagine posting premium content encrypted with a group key shared with multiple witnesses through their memo key. A group key that could then get disclosed through a smart contract run on witness nodes. This is just one example of things we could do to leverage the STEEM economay, and specifically the content related STEEM ecconomy beyond mere voting.