Season Finale and why I am Optimistic about the Steem Blockchain

Despite being in the city of Athens, I am in vacation mode.

And it is the perfect time to make a review of my first year here on Steemit and express my opinion about the future of this awesome blockchain.

In Retrospect

I started blogging at September and first months were getting to know the whereabouts. From 2018 and on I made a goal to write a post every day. I achieved this goal and during these 8 months I must have missed less than 10 days of posting. I know that not all of my posts are great, but this is something I can live with. Most of the times you don’t know beforehand which one will perform or will be accepted. I wanted to see if I can add to my daily routine a time block where I will produce a piece of content. It seems that I can and at the next season I will have more time for better content. In total I have posted 230 posts ( without this one ) and made 4600 comments. Not bad, right?

I also met many wonderful people in the Greek Steemit community. I won’t name names , you know who you are, it was an honor to have met you in person. Hopefully, our meetups will be more frequent. And I also met a lot of wonderful people in the international Steemit community. I am amazed by the diversity of the people. We may not agree in many subjects, but we respect each other’s models of the world. And in the end, I don’t mind seeing other opinions or ways of life. It enriches my own map of the world.

The Steem Blockchain and it’s Projects

And there is the Steem Blockchain and Steemit. Many people just look at the price. We have been in highs now we are in the lows, but as I write in my tittle I am optimistic about the Steem Blockchain. Steemit is part of the Steem Blockchain, the first and most successful for the time being project and I prefer seeing the bigger picture and as a Steem hodler and investor I also prefer seeing Steem performing well, not just an individual project. Steemit is here to stay and there are and there will be many more projects that will take advantage of the features of Steem Blockchain and make us investors happy.

This is exactly why I am optimistic about Steem. It is the people , the community and the projects that are maturing or they make their first steps or they are about to came to fruition. Let’s see some of them from existing ones to new kids on the blockchain and to what we will see in the near future.

Utopian.io

The @utopian.io project maybe the most established and prolific project in the Steem Blockchain. It rewards contributions to Open Source projects by utilizing a vote-based reward system built on top of the STEEM Blockchain. This means that your contribution will be upvoted, but you have to follow strict guidelines. They also have supported many Steemit projects. There are one of the main reason that the community is thriving and will continue to do so. You can check their website for more details.

Media Hosting and Streaming

There is no doubt that YouTube is the king of media hosting, but his subjects are becoming more and more disappointed and frustrated. Steem Blockchain offers alternatives and I am talking about @dtube , @dlive and @dsound . @dsound is our decentralized SoundCloud, while @dtube and @dlive offer hosting for videos and live streaming. Many people choose these platforms for the lack of censorship and of course it is one good way to monetize their content through upvotes of the Steem community. You can read this very interesting post about the recent @dtube update and check their website

Games and Hunters

Although I am totally not into card games, I can realize the importance of the first successful Steem game @steemmonsters. It is a collectible cards game based on the Steem Blockchain. You basically buy and collect cards you do what you do with these cards, which I guess is fighting each and doing missions. Plus, you can sell them for a profit. Games are great for mass adoption and I see many people get involved with this one. Just follow @steemmonsters and check out their website.

Another project that gained a lot of traction is @steemhunt which is a product review site. You write a review of a product according to the guidelines and the community rewards the best or most useful reviews. This is another project that I am not interested that much, but many people have written reviews and got some fatty rewards, so who am I to argue. As long as there are ways to support people creating content I am on their side. Check out their website

Now let’s see some of the newer projects. And by newer I mean a month or less old. Don’t you love it when you are part of something revolutionary and possibly world changing?

More games…

I have already talked about the importance of games for mass adoption of a platform. Who doesn’t like playing games after all? So, instead of having one or two games , why don’t we build a platform to host as many games as we want? This is @steemgg . A game hosting and distribution platform, the first one, built on Steem Blockchain. Game developers can upload their games and gamers can play them and support their favorite ones with upvotes. This is their website

Move your butt and get rewards

Lack of physical activity is the plaque of the modern world. Everybody should be motivated to perform some kind of it and what better motivator than money. Enter @actifit, which is an app for Android ( and soon iOS ) which counts steps. You start the app, walk or do whatever else physical you want, you post your results on Steemit and you get rewards. You also get some of the Actifit tokens ( token is a form of digital money ).

I love this app. First of all, because of its cause and secondly because I get rewarded for something I normally do and that is walking. I would argue you to support this app, with delegations or any other means, but most of all use it and move your youknowwhat, cause this is what will keep us alive and healthy. This is their website

This is only a couple of the newer projects that are built on the Steem blockchain and caught my attention. There are more, that I am hardly aware of, it is difficult to catch up with everything. For example this is the @oracle-d project, which to my understanding is a freelancing platform based on Steemit.

And there are many communities. For example a foodie community, a beer tasting community, a photography one to name few that people can get involved, meet like-minded people and even produce quality content and get rewards for it. Steemit changes the paradigm of social media and monetization methods of content. The community directly rewards posts not only with vanity metrics like “likes” but with real money. The technology is complicated and at its very early stages, but this is how the future is gonna look like.

And there is more to come.

The Future of the Future

There are more projects being built as we speak right now. One that is nearing its debut and I anxiously anticipate it, is @appics. It will be an Instagram alternative with streaming features. I believe that it can be easily become much bigger than steemit.
And there was this post from @busy.org, which another app to interact with Steem Blockchain. Their vision is to create a WeChat based on Steem. ( WeChat is the app-that-does-it-all for Chinese people). Not sure if they will make but this show something very important.

All these projects that I shared and many more that I have forsaken, show that Steem Blockchain is maturing and has convinced a lot of people to write applications for it. And this will give the Blockchain and the currency tremendous value. The apps ( Dapps as we call them ) and the people that will use them. The more people use the apps the more valuable will become holding Steem and Steem Power.

And there is development on the Blockchain itself. On September 25th an update will take place that amongst other changes will enable fast and cheap account creation on the Blockchain. This is a major bottleneck of Steemit , the difficult and complex account creation process . If this is taken care for then more users can enter the platform and more users mean more value for the platform. And don’t get me started on SMTs , which are just around the corner.

That was a long one of a post and in the same time I’ve only touched the very tip of the iceberg. Personally, I am having a two week homecation ( vacation on home, which is not that bad if you ask me ). I will keep on posting of course some light stuff like my actifit cards or some music and from the next season I will return stronger and more determined.

Hopefully, in this time of bear market and low price, I was able to transfer you some of my optimism about the Steem Blockchain. Steem is one of the blockchains that is here to stay, because of its community and the apps that are being created. And all of these apps have one thing in common: Steem Power. The more you have and more you gather right now the more chances and abundance will have in the future.,

And until the next season …
Be Healthy, Smile and Steem on and Power Up !!!

PS : For those who read this and are not familiar with what a Steem upvote means, a Steem upvote is transalted into money. It’s the dollar sign you see down in the post. How this happens is for another post.

PS: You see this D letter a lot and maybe you wonder what it stands for. It is Decentralized. Why this is important is for another post.

DISCLAIMER : I am not a financial advisor. This is not a financial advice. This is not suggestion to invest. This article is for educational purposes only and everything covered is my personal opinion and bias. Always do your own due diligence and act upon it. Know that there is risk and money could potentially be lost. Last, bear in mind that my results may not be typical.