When some hear that a blockchain is forked, they immediately jump to the idea that it is "competition". Of course, there are different reasons to fork a blockchain so it is important to find out why.
The most notable fork in the last year or so was the forking of Bitcoin by BCash. This was supposedly for technical reasons yet it does not appear to be that way. To me, this is an example of a fork that was just a money grab. There was no technical reason for forking it since big blocks have been known not to solve the scaling issue. That dates back to before the fork.
Hence, here we are a year later and there is no scaling completed on the entire Bitcoin network.
The forking of STEEM was the more traditional way that is commonly done with open source software. Ultimately, the fork does not provide competition but, rather, an upgrade. The STEEM fork was because there was an opportunity to improve upon what is presently being used.
That is the advantage to open source software. Whatever is created is also open. That means, whatever improvements are made to the new fork, it can be incorporated right back into STEEM. There is nothing preventing the witnesses from incorporating whatever they like.
The Bench team is creating a lot on their dWeb platform. It is important to know this is a mesh network protocol that "competes" with http. It does not compete with STEEM or anything else on the STEEM blockchain. In fact, any application is free to utilize this new protocol.
One of the interesting developments is the upgrade to Steemit that the team is working upon. Jared Rice dropped this tidbit yesterday.
Here is what he had to wrote about working with the STEEM code and Steemit.
In other words, there is more development and documentation being created to assist the entire ecosystem along with the developers who are looking to program on here.
Also bear in mind that dPay (formerly called dBank but changed because of legal reasons) is going to house the native token, BEX, along with STEEM, Bitshares, EOS, and Quint. This is a situation that will create, at a minimum, interoperability between the tokens. If the developers embrace some of the updates that Jared and the rest of the team is working upon, we will see interoperability take place between the blockchains.
This is huge.
Here we see another way that STEEM, along with Bitshares and EOS, are going to be more valuable. Each of the @dan trifecta is going to be incorporated, to some degree, into a broader ecosystem. This will provide developers alternatives. Most notably, is having applications that are multi-chain.
Ultimately, users will be focused upon the application. They will not even be aware of what network they are on. It is similar to carrying using an app on your mobile phone. You are not aware of when you switch from WiFi to cellular or vice versa. The only thing you see is the application that you are using.
To the user, it is all the same.
If some of this seems confusing to you, or you are unaware what the Bench team is, here is a post that might help to clarify it.
We now have two development teams to monitor. Both are going to come up with stuff that enhances the functionality of the STEEM blockchain and should, over time, increase the value of STEEM.
The next 9 months are going to be a lot of fun.
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