RE: Part 2 of Our Plan to Onboard the Masses
I am very supportive of SOC (SMTs, Oracles, and Communities), the vision I heard @ned describe a while back when he was in Korea. Since then some network issues have revealed that censorship is a larger problem than a platform can solve.
"...people will be able to create communities, on the internet, that they own."
No, they won't. As long as ISPs, Domain registrars, and other entities can sever their connections, delete or edit their communications, or otherwise control their access to those communities, they will not own those communities. Possession is necessary for ownership, and possession will be a privilege granted by those controlling the network.
More will be necessary to enable ownership, and that is possession of the network itself. Don't get me wrong. Implementing communities will be a good thing. But, those communities will be vulnerable to censors, just like Alex Jones, Mike Adams, and Julian Assange have proved to be. One lesson you seem to have not grasped from the Steem beta is that censorship is far more than just complete eradication of all forms of some particular information. Ask @skeptic, or @kawaiicrush, or @fulltimegeek, if you can be censored on Steem.
A lot of people have been censored by a couple of bullets to the back of the head. Steem can't do anything to prevent that kind of censorship, so it's correct to note that Steem is but censorship resistant, but it's also obvious that taking out the nodes is all it takes to censor everyone on Steem. Anonymous has been fighting to keep it's community as multiple vectors of censorship have cut their lines of communication. The Daily Stormer can't even get a domain. No New Zealand citizen can (legally) access the chans today because the government ordered ISPs to not resolve their domain names. No community is possible when censors prevent their communications, and you've not presented a mechanism that potentially enables secure communications despite the internet demonstrably being censored to destroy communities.
There's even more to it than that, such as editing it, misrepresenting it, and of course just shooting people to shut them up, but you'll note that nowhere does any authoritative definition of censorship limit it to complete eradication. Even though Andrew Breitbart is dead, statements he made regarding John Podesta are still available. I actually don't think information can be completely eradicated, so such a definition is unreasonable. The point is that communities will be dependent on censorship resistance, and not possessions, but privileges just like Steem.
Until those problems are resolved, actual ownership of communities will not be possible. It will be like title to acreage on the Moon: without value unless you can get there and use it.
I'm not even saying you have to solve those problems. I'm pointing out that you're overpromising, again. I'll also note that Goodwill is your only real asset. Everything else Steemit, Inc. possesses is without value if no community uses it, and they'll only use what you can provide if you have Goodwill. HF21 is going to cost you a lot of Goodwill, and particularly the downvote pool that increases the VP of whales by 25% to flag rewards back to the pool where they can use the weight of their stakes to have a second try at extracting it to their wallets.
EIP is extremely unfriendly to new users, and I reckon you're jumping the shark talking about communities before that disaster is initiated. Let's see what @berniesanders does with 25% of his VP in free flags before you offer people things that cannot be delivered. After we have a gander at the aftermath of HF21, I'll be interested in your plans to create a mechanism that enables folks to build communities, but if downvoters can devalue the communications between members of those communities, extracting the rewards they'd otherwise allocate each other, there's not much point.
No matter what you can do, you can't offer people ownership of anything you can't grant them possession of. This is why I have been very encouraged by Mira, as it made many more nodes potential, and greatly reduces the risk of censoring Steem by taking down nodes. Communities will be a great advance, and so will SMTs, but they won't be possessions. They'll be privileges allowed by those than control the networks they reside on, just like @fulltimegeek's account is on Steem. Dial it down a bit, and stick to facts, please.
True, we are not there yet, but it is a step in the right direction. However, at the same time, there are projects out there seeking to find ways around ISPs, DNSes, government servers, GoDaddy, Comcast, maybe even some of the data centers, the backbone of the Internet, the Internet mega highways where most web traffic flows through assuming they are too centralized, etc. Steem is only part of the bigger puzzle of creating a decentralized blockchain Internet 3.0 which will be rising in the 2020's like never ever before.
I've been looking about a bit, and note things like zeronet, blockchan, IPFS and other outfits that limit dependency on centralized services. However, as long as we are dependent on ISPs we are surfing at privilege, and New Zealand has directed ISPs there to not resolve the chans, censoring all it's population at once. We need mesh networks in order to become uncensorable, or some mechanism that routes around ISPs.
What do you think about Substratum?