Everyone is waiting for crypto to actually do something that impresses the masses. If we want mainstream adoption, we have to provide services that Average Joe wants to use in the first place. People use the word killer app to describe this mythical function.
You know what I call killer apps? Apps. People love to throw around marketing trigger words all the time:
- Distrupt
- Innovation
- Revolutionary
- Killer app
- ETC
The truth is, despite all the hype, there is a severe lack of innovation in this space. How many bid-bots / vote-buying services does Steem have? How many programming hours have gone into these projects? Hundreds? Thousands? The number is absolutely unacceptable.
Instead of making the trending tab better these trolls are selling it out and corrupting it even further. Why? Because bid-bots make money, and fixing the trending tab doesn't. THIS IS WHY WE CAN'T HAVE NICE THINGS!
The crypto community has gotten ahead of itself. We want those killer applications to come around so we can all get rich, but no one wants to program them because they don't quote, "make money". LOL, the hypocrisy.
Therefore, the first killer app of the blockchain isn't going to be a product that the masses want to use. It's going to be governance for programmers. How can we organize a system where a very large group of programmers all work for the good of the platform, but still get paid to do it?
Utopian-IO
This fledgling project is attempting to do just that: pay programmers to develop open source software. However, I feel that the underdevelopment of the platform and organization problems are glaring. Utopian-IO is a sandbox. They aren't trying to organize decentralized leadership or tell programmers what needs to be done. They simply let anyone do what they want and submit an application if they want to be considered for rewards. Still, I think they are on the right track, for now.
What I'd really like to see here is a way for a single programmer with a big idea to start a large project. The project then gets broken up into manageable pieces and bounties get placed on each piece. Whoever completes the piece gets the bounty. On a platform like Steem, this would be great because literally anyone could upvote one of the bounties and encourage that module of the software to get completed. This would be a totally decentralized organizational strategy that could be used to create very large projects. This is how decentralization can compete with corporations. No single programmer is going to do anything great on their own. We all need support.
Ether
Ethereum's "solution" to this problem was ERC-20 tokens. Now there are hundreds of tokens on that market that don't actually need to exist... except to fund the project itself. Let's be honest: there's nothing these ERC-20 tokens can do that Ethereum can't do itself, therefore Ethereum would be a lot more valuable if the community could come together and program more applications for Ether directly instead of for an ERC-20 token.
And so Steem is trying to go the same route. I'm excited for SMTs, but I'm also annoyed because the same thing is going to happen. SMTs will increase the value of Steem, but they will also be holding back Steem's full potential. I suppose this is a two-steps-forward one-step-back situation.
Tron
Project Atlas is the first whiff I've gotten of a potential killer app hitting the market. The torrent community is huge, and if Tron delivers monetization of that space it will be a big win for everyone. I imagine that mining torrents would be a lot more profitable than mining cryptocurrency, and the barrier to entry is much lower. The bottleneck for this type of mining would be based on upload speed, instead of hardware based like POW coins.
Less is More
A good small idea is worth a lot more than a good big idea. Big ideas require massive investment and organization. There is huge risk involved no matter how good the idea is. A small idea can get done by one person. If it fails no big deal.
I have a ton of ideas, big and small. The small ideas are much more boring but I can also get them done a lot faster. I wish I could take a shortcut with a service like Utopian-IO. Being able to break up my projects into small parts and then place bounties on those parts would be amazing. For now, I guess this is just yet another one of my ideas. Unfortunately, I'm a much better brainstormer than I am a programmer :/
Only API coins can do it
Will Bitcoin ever develop a killer app? What about Litecoin, Monero, Ripple, Nano, Dash, Digibyte, ETC? Nope. Apps can only be developed with smart contracts. This is why I've always said Ethereum, EOS, Cardano, Tron, NEO, Byteball, and maybe Steem (depends on SMT functionality) are such fail-safe bets in the long run. You can be damn sure that if one of these platforms makes that killer app the rest will copy it and the entire space will gain value. This is the advantage of open source collaboration.
We have the power.
I believe that it honestly isn't going to take much work to clean up Steem and undercut the people trying to exploit it. The ability to put text on a blockchain doesn't seem like that big of a deal, but it's actually quite a powerful feature. We can already use it to create dumb-contracts (honor system based). SMTs will provide the implementation of smart-contracts. From a programmer's perspective, I'd say things are looking up for our little community.