So, this report came out not that long ago. China put out a ranking of blockchains. Under the basic tech category EOS was 1, Tron was 2, and Steem was 3.
No, of course we're not the 3rd best cryptocurrency out there. We're getting our asses kicked at 70-80. We do however have some amazing blockchain technology, and it's battle tested. Find me another chain that's this big with 22 hardforks under it's belt and it's still 1 main chain.
The witnesses here are some extremely educated, talented, and devoted mofos, and when it's crunch time they work really well together and get things done.
Steemit, the lead developer of the chain, has a handful of incredible people on it that are now allowed to do their job and are executing on SMTs. They have a shit reputation, but I don't actually think it's deserved.1
I also don't think the ranking understand enough of what's been developed here for Steem. MIRA is a beast. You don't have to be a rocket science historian to figure out that ram is expensive and disk space is cheap. EOS is literally the cost of adding ram. The whole basis of the platform is ram. The network that's not even 1 year old requires 7TB of ram per full node. That's INSANE!!! Wonder what that will look like in year 2 or 3.
Steemit coded up MIRA, a pretty awesome bandwidth system, and has SMTs rolling on the testnet. We're set to grow. Mainly because our growth goes into hard disk space rather than Ram. A one terabyte hard drive costs $45 at retail prices. I'm going to be friendly and say 16gb of ram costs $50. That means 1TB of ram costs $3200. It's not going to be pretty to scale 7TB of ram servers up to 14TB ram servers and have to have hundreds of redundant nodes doing the work.
Trustless and Decentralized
The main problems that people are trying to solve with blockchain are the following?
"How can I have full control over my own finances in a system that's global?"
"How can I know that when I make agreements they get executed?"
The top concern about controlling finances is why blockchain is such a killer technology. You don't have to ask a bank for permission to send funds where you want them. You just execute the trade you're looking for. Blockchain puts normal people back in control instead of the governments and banks (are they really two things?).
The second question has a couple different answers within blockchain. How do I make sure agreements get executed. The EOS/ETH answer is to build smart contracts. These are programmed if/then statements that the entire network has to compute. It's a neat solution, but to me it's like a Rube Goldberg device for trust. Upgrading is hard with this system, and it doesn't really solve the trust issue. Crypto Kitties could come out with another series they could call Generation 0 as well and say they are abandoning the first round of kitties they did in favor of this brand new edition. The blockchain can't prevent that with smart contracts so this seems like an expensive approach that still doesn't get you the guarentees a partner might look for.
The Steem method is more like "let's help everyone verify results" rather than "let's have the network execute every transaction in every contract for every app." The beauty is that the blockchain can still store the data, and you can follow everything you need to with the trust that the opensource chain is adding data and transactions on the blockchain which are true and accurate.
Once we can all agree the data is consistent you don't actually need to run the whole contract. You just publish code that allows people to verify it was run correctly. You get the same effect, which is the trust that you're looking for, but the cost to the network is drastically reduced. This is why Steem is set to scale better than any other blockchain out there.
Our currency sucks, but will that be true forever?
Steem as a cryptocurrency sucks right now. We're in this bear market, and we've been taking a beating. Our hype is non-existant. Things look a little grim, but bear markets don't last forever. Things will turn around. They are in that process already. The leader of china pointing to blockchain and saying it's going to take a bigger role is a big deal. And as one of the largest nations with one of the highest numbers of millionaires tries to figure out where they will invest I think they'll be looking at that chart. Combine this with seeing how things scale in reality as the next bull market pulls excitement and people into the blockchain space, and I think Steem will prove out the decisions.
It's easier for price to catch tech
Last point. I think Steem has some great tech here. And it already has a core group of people, tools, and competency to level up. I think we're looking at the lowest price of steem we're going to see for a while. I'm looking forward to mocking the people selling huge chunks at these prices.
disclaimer: not a financial advisor. Just a dude on the internet who doesn't know your financial details.