EOS is positioned as a decentralised operating system. If rollout history is any indication, then such OS should come with built-in productivity tools. Could the Social Media Tokens rollout be the precursor on how such tools will be developed? And if so what would be the infrastructure supporting it?
In this article, we will speculate on the possibility by looking at precedents that took place in recent history, draw parallels and examine it within context of competing alt coins ecosystems.
Let’s start at the begging:
Bitcoin brought a brave New World to fruition, the world, where the power of a minting press was given back to the people along with the freedom to conduct transactions free of traditional intermediaries. If we are to draw parallels, that was akin to the introduction of the WWW standard.
That revolution spun the first generation of New World startups – platforms focused on serving latent demand ignored by traditional intermediaries. The markets covered ranged from charities to trade in illegal substances (Dread Pirate Roberts, anyone?). In those days, bitcoins were primarily used as the means of exchange. As an indirect evidence for this statement, the success of Litecoin can be attributed to solving low transaction speeds by introducing more “lightweight” hashing algorithm. Most of the other coins that failed to address this market pain point and tried to leapfrog the development, remained dormant (take Ripple’s as an example).
Then came Ethereum and by setting the language standard for dapp development started the new chapter in the New World. It is worthwhile to note how the Founder cleverly built on two de-facto standards:
- Bitcoin by introducing convertibility out of the box
- and JavaScript (Python devs pls forgive me) arguably the most widespread programming language, by developing syntax similar to it (and borrowing some key concepts along the way)
to ensure popularity and immediate uptake of the new cryptocurrency. The current ICO craze is just the reflection of the public warming up to the possibilities, similar to dot com period.
However, save for very few successful examples, nothing is qualitatively happening on the scene. We do not see next ethGoogles being created. Most of the current ICOs are actually trying to lift up perfectly fine working models out of the old world, give them a dapp makeup, and market as a new and improved. A flurry of “decentralised” exchanges, banks, payment processors, gambling, betting and other kinds of ICOs is a testament to that. All of those ICOs can actually do just fine without blockchains and often at a lower costs.
Now one can say that this is because there is so much hype and dumb money floating around that it is silly not to try your luck in repackaging. As the WallStreet saying goes:
When the ducks quack, feed them.
However, maybe it is because we lack the tools and community to build truly decentralised apps that we find ourselves in this situation. As an experiment open either Stack or Eth Overflow and you would see what I am talking about. Or go to Amazon and try to look for a decent development book on Ethereum. Last time I checked, there were five of them. In total. On Amazon.
I brought those examples not to rant on Ethereum community or dev team, but to rather highlight the scope of the issue, given the community intentional work in Ethereum popularisation and mass adoption. Does not it resemble a market pain point?
And that’s where I speculate that Steemit and SMTs are EOS grand experiment. Why?
Let’s take a step back and assess the situation. EOS development team does not exist in the vacuum. It competes alongside other alt coins for our attention and ultimately fiat money. Ethereum, spiritually is the closest competitor to EOS and has an early headstart in the race of building community and through that the dominant position in the cryptospace.
While EOS is being developed, Ethereum community grows, taking larger and larger share of the market. In one year time, EOS could simply be late to the market. Yes it potentially offers improvements over the Ethereum protocol, but such improvement need to be tested and for that you need a community of willing hands and heads that have high pain threshold levels to bug test it. But if all hands are busy growing Ethereum, what happens to you? Take a step back and ask yourself, when was the last time you heard of a brand new OS being launched or a new coca cola?
One way to mitigate such risk is to introduce a suite of standard tools (think MS Office style) that make it easy for the new developers to start. Imagine instead of combing thought the Stack Overflow forum on how best build your social media platform with crypto tokens all you do is pull a corresponding library and click install? Is not what we are witnessing now with SMTs?
This way, you might not be the first or with the largest community, but by having a standard set of protocols, covering the most common use cases you make it easier for existing developers to switch and for a new ones to try.
In this light SMT and Steemit is just a blueprint of things to come with the launch of EOS. Next to the obvious suite of standard protocols, for which there is already dYouTube, dSoundCloud and others mentioned in SMT whitepaper, I see built-in “app”/ protocol Store.
Such Store (or central depository if you wish) would enable average users to take advantage the collective effort and focus on building apps instead of reinventing the wheel. Driving the popularisation of the platform in the process. You do not need to go very far for examples – Nodejs popularity is arguably at least in part due to NPM manager.
EOS Store rendering
Which brings us to the second point – the potential for experienced EOS developers to earn income, while contributing to the community. Similar to the Google play store or Apple Store, the developers could earn money in multiple ways off the platform. Among the obvious are:
- Developing the apps voted and funded by the community (Sounds like Steemit, does not it?), doing
- Creating the apps with monthly subscriptions
- Funding the development projects (an obvious thought would be something like a WooCommerce project) by running an ICO
All the spectrum of funding options would also happened seamlessly on EOS (if of course Steemit is an example), which compares favourably to the alternatives.
This internal market would help to populate EOS with growing suite of apps, which would uniquely cater to specific use cases, something that is clearly lacking now in the whole ecosystem. And perhaps then we would witness the true power of decentralised applications being unfolded.
As Zuckerberg proved to us, you do not have to be first, you just need to be the very right.
