The blockchain network effect of familiarity and a prediction of future value

I haven't logged into Bittrex, Binance for about a month I think as I decided that instead of trading or concerning myself with the current price, I would spend more time thinking about what leads to the future price I am looking for. What price am I looking for Steem?

In the immortal words of Monty Python from the Life of Brian,

A lot.

The reason is that the higher the price, the more people Steem can support as at some point, regardless of the Steem each post generates, the value of Steem as well as the tokens that ride upon the blockchain can be enormous. If people remember the "great pump of 2017" which brought in thousands of people and hundreds of thousands of alts - we can see what price can do.

What most did and many do not realize is that while the dollar equivalent value was high, the Steem being earned was low. At 8 dollar Steem, an 80 dollar post draws 10 Steem from the pool. Currently, that would be a 2.10 post to do the same as the feed price is at 21 cents.

So eventually, the equivalent value of Steem and the tokens needs to rise in order to be able to support many people and their activities. There is no way this is going to happen through the Steem pool alone though as we all know, but through the tokenization of owned communities and applications, it is very possible.

However, what I see as the way to get there is building an ecosystem that is able to support a great many people and not only that, provide much more than the chance to earn. The beauty of Steem is that it is a content delivery blockchain that can not only replicate, but value add to the products, services and consumer behaviors that we are already accustomed to on the internet.

Familiarity is an important factor in mass uptake, and I will give two examples.

Microsoft.

Firstly, for the older among us, some might remember the shift from the traditional office to the computerized office which really started to sweep through in the late 80s at a general level. The barriers of entry for the end user were high because the generations involved had never used a computer before but had to now do their job digitally. One of the reasons that Microsoft has been so successful in its integration into the business world is, familiarity.

What they did was replicate what people already did in the office with a very simple framework by creating filing cabinets digitally - They added folders (3.1?). All that people then needed to do is to do what they have always done with their filing of papers except do it on the computer. This simple visual step lowered the barrier f entry massively.

Apple.

Apple did something similar with a little bit of a twist. In 2001 they introduced a brilliant and simple product that people loved and desired, the iPod. It was a work of art and with the marketing campaign that built the sense of individualism, personality and status by owning one, it dominated the MP3 player market. They upgraded, they added touch screens, they refined and then - they added a phone. Boom. Bye, bye to Nokia's 65% market share of the mobile phone market.

Familiar.

When we are talking about building a community on Steem, what we are actually doing is developing the relationships that make Steem feel familiar, to feel like home. It is because of this that the people who are the most engaged here are also the ones who feel the sense of responsibility in developing and maintaining the platform because, this is their house.

This literal ownership of the digital landscape that is Steem compels users to do more than they would if on a centralized platform and, due to the potential increase in value, this can be quite a strong pull. This has positive and negative impacts as we can see though as due to the potential, greed can become a problem if it is let to fester and that slows down, halts or reverses the process toward adding value and therefore, use case and a growing community.

At the moment though, Steem is not very familiar for most users of the internet as there is a great deal of complication involved when it comes to everyday usage, if starting from zero. Essentially and eventually, what needs to happen is that the barriers to entry need to be lowered to be able to include more users and hopefully to the point that people naturally invite users onto Steem en masse.

Back to those folders.

Since that move from paper to digital documents, what actually happened was the cost of document creation became very, very cheap and as the internet started to develop, it exploded. What most people might not think much about is that almost the entire internet is stored in folders, in the same way that those filing cabinets stored paper.

Now, imagine browsing the entire internet through your C-drive.

Search engines have of course made this irrelevant to do because they create a filter between us the user and the internet of folders so that we can query and get answers fed, rather than click through a billion folders looking for a single document. This has further been removed from the folders because most new internet users will never see a folder at all, they will browse on their phones and the only "folders" they have are application shelves to house the apps they frequent.

For those who only use a phone, how often do you directly access the folders on it?

But, blockchain brings in a different kind of sorting system again as rather than having folders, each individual document is maintained and linked through the blockchain that works like a stream of time that can track every interaction. While just a ledger, this is an incredible breakthrough when applied to what we do digitally on the internet and offers all kinds of advantages. At the moment though, viewing in this way is unfamiliar.

What Steem is doing though is lowering the barriers of entry to blockchain technology by removing the direct views of the blockchain itself. This happened firstly through the blogging platform of Steemit.com and then has increased through new applications and games that further remove users from the blockchain, but keep them connected to all the benefits of the immutable stream and traceable network of data.

At some point in the future there will be a host of applications that provide a range of solutions and views of the blockchain that not only connect users to the benefits, but provide a seamless connection to all the interactions that they currently do on the internet. Whether it be watching videos, sharing photos or doing their banking, it is all about content delivery and transaction and Steem is able to actualy do all of these things now to some degree.

That degree will increase as the development of the blockchain continues and more and more people feel comfortable in the usage of it. Once there is a large number of blockchain savvy users with the vocabulary to simplify for onboarding, friends and family start getting pulled in and a trickle turns to a river.

When the river flows on Steem, the price and therefore the ability to maintain a larger and larger group of users by offering them a space to own and the chance to earn snowballs rapidly. This not only affects the price of Steem, but each token on the platform will benefit and the more they solve for familiartity and use case of end users, the more valuable they will become.

What I envisage happening is that at some point and just like the move from a paper to digital office, the internet as it now stands becomes obsolete as the data is migrated over to blockchains. And, once this starts becoming commonplace in the global community, the drive of demand will start pushing corporate and government enterprise to do the same and that opens up a whole new can of worms.

Blockchains aren't in competition with the internet, they are going to slowly replace it by becoming the organisational structure the internet is built upon and once it begins, it is unstoppable without shutting down the internet in its entirety.

It has already begun.

So to answer my question about at what price is high enough, there really is no price as the end goal is to build an ecosystem that no longer requires comparing the price to fiat, as it is the value of the ecosystem itself that is important. Buying ad selling is part of the building of the network, but the end goal is to spread and encourage ownership at a personal level that generates economic mass of potential use that benefits all.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]