I've decided to wish all the Steemians Merry Christmas and cheer all of you up during this market bloodbath with the best cake, that STEEM could possible see. Well, with a photo of cake, plus, finally, I'd like to introduce myself and share some thoughts to sum this crazy 2017 up.

The cake part.

So you've been surfing to look for some fancy food photos, not reading, huh?

And yes, that Drake meme I made sums the things up in the upcoming 2018!

This state of food art is made of pistachio-raspberry frozen mousse. It's like tasting a pistachio cloud with a little sour hint of raspberry on top. Unbelievable, when served with a hot espresso - you're on heaven. The meme print made its way on top of the cake via specific sugar paper printer, which, yeah, was printed on paper made of sugar.

This molten chocolate lava is being put on the back side of the sugar print

After 10 mins in a fridge

This perfection exists only because of the Anna's talent, my friend's wife. They are running pastry and custom/wedding cakes business and they are doing it good. They will introduce themselves when their feel comfortable to, but:

We've cringed hard when it turned out that Steemit requires account confirmation for 1 week!

I mean, I keep promoting STEEMIT among everybody, but the most of first experiences starts and ends with this 1 week of whatever-they-do-for-1 week (some blockchain magic, I assume). Definitely, not good.

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Late introduction.

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Please allow me to introduce myself. I'm a man of STEEM and cake!✌🌏🍰

"When the market goes red - do a favor, make a cake". Some random quote.

Hey there, Steem!

Life is a weird whirlwind of chaotic coincidences and controversies,huh. Just a year ago I'd laugh so hard If someone told me that Bitcoin gonna cost 20 grand or Ethereum gonna make it to 830$.

Until recent times I was die-hard motorcyclist, traveler and "fixer" type of guy. I ran a small business with my friend buying old bikes and making top-notch bobbers out of it. Now I'm looking for a cheap Harley to do some magic.

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Cryptotrip

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My cryptotrip started in 2012, when I read about bitcoin for the first time. I've started to dig this out and it turned my life upside down!

I was like: "Wuuuuuut? Zero ownership cost? 20 min Moscow-to-LA value transaction? No bank papers needed? So it's p2p,huh? So the answer was: "Yes please, I want to buy some!!!"

I found myself completely revised and reworked after engaging in crypto. I was this kind of opportunistic to earn-a-lot only because I didn't fully understand the whole thing.

I remember bitcoin GPU-mining (yeah, true Bitcoin on GPU, not Bitcoin Gold!), first Bitcoin and Litecoin ASIC miners, good Lord I didn't buy it!

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Sold my bike. Buying STEEM in dips.

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One day in the summer I got back from my latest big travel from Norway and sat with a calc and counted how numerically bad is to be a car or bike owner in Moscow (or another megacities). For cars - there are endless traffic jams 24/7. Steel nerves are required. For bikes - 9 months of winter do no good.

I've never thought that cars and bikes are such a money drainers! Aaaand it's not gonna get you a profit just because it should be maintained, it is highly taxed, gas price is insane, insurance rates are growing - all this tears of "happiness" go with zero revenue. Such a weird investment,huh?

So I've sold my Triumph Tiger 800XCA and for now I don't want any vehicle to own (Exception: BMdubya G30) because, yeah, mathematically Uber is cheaper for my needs.

EXTRA CASH INTO STEEM

It is clear now that Internet Media (Content+Ads) is going to be reformed next years, and STEEM gonna take huge part in this reforms. Thats a tremendous market, hundred of billions.

STEEM + IPFS PERFECTION

STEEM and IPFS symbiosis has a gazillion dollar potential, but in some ways touches the legal aspect. If someone uploads a file into IPFS and posts the link into STEEM blockchain there is a chance to get the government ban on the site where this link is sighted. (or not?)

Steem is ought to get someday it's own dApp browser (or just being hosted on IPFS, it's possible) - then legal issue is unsolvable for content owners.

SMART MEDIA TOKENS. STEEM IS GONNA GET MARKET CAP SOLID THRUSTERS.

So much concepts and ideas visited my brainstorming desk after reading the SMT whitepaper. Will do a big beautiful post(lol)

But there is a thing I still do not understand - how to get reward for great content (documentary, for example) after this 7 days payout. Only via comments? So documentaries are not for STEEMIT?

GET SOME HARDWARE

I think, to invest a few bucks into STEEMIT hardware infrastructure is a good idea too.

So if we are planning a rising tide of new users in STEEMIT we should get some infrastructure for it.

Sometimes IPFS just doesn't work and it's cringy, but give it a chance.

PLANS FOR 2018:

1. Up to 10 IPFS nodes in all regions
2. Up to new 3 STEEMIT Full Nodes (Europe)
3. Up to 3 STEEMIT account mining specific nodes (someone has to create those accounts))

Utopian.io

What a great idea to reward those who contribute into open-source, indeed.

I certainly will invest some time into contributing and developing new services for STEEM when I finish my main projects for now!

But still I think STEEM blockchain should not be compared to the Ethereum blockchain, it's just wrong. It's like comparing Bimmer with Airbus. I will do several posts to explain the difference and it's deeper than you think.

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Ethereum's Solidity.

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I was this kind of "price checker passive reader" until the mid 2016, when Ethereum ran into my sight. I've carefully read everything about it that got on my sight. I've had no programming background to understand a thing of the "unseen before code" mayhem, but the more I learned - the more rabbit hole got deeper and darker. Well, Solidity is much more complex than crossfit or bikes...

I've realized - this is the time to get smart as you can, at all costs, with a little time. All educational stuff is already uploaded, but did you ever ask to learn some more? I recommend you to invest some time into Agile/Scrum principles

So I was fighting my personal dumbness and lowskill issues with fire because of this powerful breathtaking opportunities of this new blockchain tech.

My first project was a simple voting dApp, then simple ERC20 tokens. Voting smart contract is barely 100 lines of code, front-end is a real time consumer!And now I understand how kindergarten simple this stuff is.

Then was DAO hack. The only thing to say - ETC spiked to 43$.

But the ecosphere is evolving and a lot of people are getting involved into Ethereum developing. Now docs and guides are in abundance, you just need to sit and learn. So it's all about the persistence and effort you're putting in.

Almost a year I've spent diving into Solidity programming language after my usual day job. After half of a year of 4hrs sleep, and I was exhausted.

Now my Solidity craze went flat and I'm waiting for the first implementations of zk-SNARKS to interact with (Why ZEC would exist since then?) in ETH smart contracts. Not as a news but to reverse some app. That's gonna be so powerful and gonna get me a lot of developer's dollars xD

• My second obsession is TensorFlow. Jobkiller of the year!

A new era of philosophy and technology.

Blockchain-based tech is going to do some mess in Finance and can cause some mischief in taxation. Cause it's really hard to regulate decentralized system. They can only shutdown the internet.

There gonna be a lot of wonders in the upcoming years, but the individual tragedies are gonna occur more often as well. No cyberpunk antiutopias, but still there are some challenges to deal with.

ISSUE#1. Unemployment of new era.

How many truck drivers are working hard around the world to get some Nutella to your local store? Tesla is coming after their jobs. Tesla is either coming after Taxi drivers. First came Uber, then Tesla+Uber.

IBM's WATSON someday gonna diagnose cancer better than a 10000 professional oncologists, programming languages are getting so high-level that basically, you are explaining to the machine what to do with sentences in English, and that level trends to rise.

Those who manage to provide jobs to people gonna be the world's first trillionaires.

I think federalized machine learning gonna have it's spark, already have some concepts about that.

ISSUE#2. Big Data companies

I've always been sure that Facebook, Instagram, Youtube (recent time), Amazon and etc - all this Big Data companies, their being so large and powerful centralized (more kinda distributed, but still not decentralized) - starts to be toxic for all participants.

• The market gets less competitive, and it gets hard to earn on the market. Competitions are good as greed - they actually work.

• Too much centralization. Does no good in times of hack-anything.

• They collects petabytes of data. And of course your data is among. What do they do with your data? Are they using it as data-sets for their numerous deep learning models?

  If they do, why don't you get paid for this data-sets?

ISSUE#... I'll focus on that in another posts...

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Outro

Do you realize that, now, in almost 2018, we are living in a golden age, where tech levels are unseen before in human history? Stem cells, IOT, blockchain, reinforced deep learning, AR/VR and all the stuff is marching in our lives. You have an access to the knowledge base of the whole human existence right in your smartphone. 500 years ago it was magic, now it's just duh, Tinder swiping thing.
You don't remember that you don't have to fight for your life with a sword, nor to serve in Roman Legion for 20 years. Ask Amazon's Alexa for some extra info about that, and ask her to order a pepperoni pizza. And then you should thank the universe for a single day lived in this kind of abundance not to waste. I hope there gonna be a driver to take us all to sustainable world.

The world is changing, everyone noticed?

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There is so much more to do than to say! Stay in tune, Merry Christmas, and Happy 2018.

@equites

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