To some of you it may come as a surprise, to others you're already aware. With recent changes to scalability and our blockchain continuing to progress in that regard and becoming ready for mass adoption - something many others would not be ready for for many years to come - I wanted to take the time to try something out. In some recent conversations we were talking about something like Facebook on Steem. Many would say that it's impossible, doesn't make sense, the account creation is not ready without RC delegations, etc etc. On Steem though we're not one to focus too much on decentralization and many dapps are already quite hybrid as to leaving only the important part to trustless decentralization and our blockchains security such as transfer transactions.
Imagine a service which instead of creating steem accounts, it would create accounts on their own front-end. This account is yours, you registered it but the front-end still holds all power over it and could take it away at any time, something that would not be possible with a Steem account. With current limitations of 1 comment every 20 seconds and one post every 5 minutes it would mean that it could allow say 10 users using one account. The activity and transactions would of course be instant on the front-end but only be posted on the blockchain whenever the limit allows - as long as they're posted before post payouts (7 days) it would not matter much. So in theory you could have 10 users using this "Steem Book" without them even knowing everything is also being posted onto the blockchain. The Steem accounts would just add some metadata to know which comment of the one account belonged to which of the 10 centralized accounts. Same thing would go for votes, stake, counting and splitting rewards.
Now we'd have to think about encryption, some users would prefer if only some other users could see their content such as "friends". This is also something that could be easily handled, the Steem accounts would just post everything encrypted, on the blockchain of course this would be unreadable but for friends with access on the front-end it would be just like facebook. These users would not even know they're earning Steem, the displayed rewards could just be in $ and they'd earn $ for curation and post rewards. They'd still have to follow a lot of the same rules that our blockchain has today such as voting power, the size of the reward pool but at the same time you could add so much more to it such as ad revenue, etc to grow it within said front-end.
Users could also use the front-ends service to purchase stake through the usual methods of bank transfers and credit card purchases the same way they could sell their "book power" and receive fiat back onto their own bank accounts.
The point is that anything is possible on these open-source systems. Of course many may not even want "Steem book" cause why would you want to stay in fiat when cryptocurrencies are becoming more and more popular and don't generally only lose value over years.
So to try something in this post and I hope the community would want to engage and come up with some ideas on how to solve it. Let's mention a centralized project, platform, company, system, basically anything you know in this day and age and see if it is something that could work on Steem and if it could work even better with the things we can offer here such as immutability, reward pool and the security of math ensuring that your account is yours unless you share your keys with someone else.
I realize you'd need at least a good knowledge of the blockchain and how it operates to come up with how to Steemify certain examples, and I myself am not even up to speed with everything even after three years of obsessing about Steem, but it could be fun to give it some thought anyway. :)
