The marching witness of the best blockchain

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With every passing month we grow more convinced that steem and its ecosystem of dApps are the best all-around implementation of the revolutionary blockchain pattern.

That is not reflected in the price of STEEM which suffered a continuous erosion against BTC lately. We see this as the consequence of a steady migration of people who joined Steemit early, mostly with a "crypto" background, toward EOS. Early adopters of Steemit are powering down and selling STEEM to buy EOS. And if we lose proportionally more "crypto-anarchists", who's to complain? After all, "social interaction" and "anarchy" were bound to be uneasy fellows, for anarchy is structurally anti-social.

This STEEM to EOS conversion had the effect of massively increasing the number of trades on bitShares. The platform pulverized the previous transaction record held by steem (2.5 million tx/day) and hit 6+ Million Tx/day.

This is excellent news for steem, which is built on the same engine as bitShares - basically, we can now be reasonably sure that, were the activity to increase, steem too would be able to sustain such a level of activity.

Coming back to the "EOS migration", there are different aspects to consider. The steem ecosystem is slowly losing (the focus of) very capable and knowledgeable developers such as @jesta - who went from witness number 1 to number 4 in the ranking of witnesses - and @anyx. On the other hand the visible effect of the migration shows that all these crypto systems have failed lately at attracting new people, non-geeks, normal people. It certainly looks like the same guys who first made bitShares and then moved to steem now "hop around" to the newest kid on the block, EOS.

When @dan will get bored of EOS (or will be pushed aside by less scrupulous people attracted by the $4Bln, as Steve Jobs was pushed aside from Apple) and will launch a new project (Dan's "NeXT"), the EOS baloon risks deflating too. If we think of this, the most resilient of the three "offspring" should remain steem, thanks to the its design goal: marrying blockchain-backed cryptoeconomics with functionalities that half the planet craves, "social media" functionalities!

The "marriage" - or "interdisciplinarity"

When looking for a picture to illustrate this post I found the one above under a Leiden (NL) University title: "The unstoppable urbanisation of Indonesia requires an interdisciplinary approach". I thought this highly relevant: blockchain systems require interdisciplinarity too in order to get broad adoption. By that I mean that they should bring something more than crypto transactions to the table or else all the platforms will fight for the same, limited pool of people interested in crypto transactions.

I think crypto transactions are cool but I'm not obsessed with them. And most people on the planet are like me. The success of blockchain-based platforms ultimately depends on offering to link crypto transactions to something which is of interest to most people, not just to cryptonerds. This is the power of steem, an "interdisciplinary", content-and-crypto platform.

And while the first generation of witnesses were heavily influenced by their crypto background and mainly focused on the crypto aspects (while implicitly neglecting the content part), we believe the second generation of witnesses, such as @lux-witness, should level the balance a little bit and care not only about getting the blocks in a row, but also about what's in the blocks, the content.

And also, incidentally about other aspects which are essential to steem's broad adoption by people who might not care about the underlying blockchain - such as the user onboarding and experience and the integration between the "fiat-based" economy and steem's crypto economy.

How did it go?

Well the most important events of the last month were the blockchain freeze due to the "negative vesting withdrawal" bug provoked intentionally by @nijeah, and the release of AppBase which took the blockchain to version 0.19.10

Had I written this update after the first event but before the second, I would have had reason to brag: unlike most other witnesses, @lux-witness had not missed any block due to the freeze!

We were among the "fantastic six", the only 6 steem witnesses never to have missed a block

However the migration to 0.19.10 proved tricky and we missed a block, the only one until now.

But more important than this or that missed block, milestones were passed in the outside world, where the future of steem is going to be decided. First of all, few days after I had published my previous update, Steemit featured in the press prominently. In its issue from June 30, "The Economist", by far the best magazine in the world and certainly one of the most influential global media, published a piece called "Raiders of the killer dapp"

In this article, this momentous passage:

"The most elaborate working crypto-economic model, however, is Steemit, an online forum which rewards its 1m or so registered users for posting contributions or rating content with real money in the form of steem, another sort of token. One type is liquid and can be cashed out using an exchange, which is meant to provide near-instant gratification and attract users. The other, called “steem power”, is less easily convertible and supposed to keep members engaged: the more they own, the more weight their votes have."

The impact and importance of being recognized as the most elaborate crypto-economic model (of the blockchain world) by The Economist, the magazine of the bright, of the rich and of the powerful of this world, cannot be overemphasized.

What about us?

Not that @lux-witness had any merit in that open recognition ... but that doesn't mean that we were idle! As you have seen if you followed this feed, we scored some nice victories ourselves:

• there is now a bar in Luxembourg where patrons can pay with STEEM or SBD ! Its name is "De Gudde Wellen" ("The Good Vibes") and it's situated in a narrow street in the old city.

If you order a 5€ pint of Diekirch (a local draft), you can pay by simply transferring 5 SBD to @gudde-wellen .

Again, the significance of this can hardly be overstressed.

Only geeks can earn BTC and ETH (by mining); normal people have to buy it with euro which kinda' makes "paying with BTC or ETH" an exercise in futility. If I don't mine, in order to "pay with BTC" I have first to "pay with euro" in order to acquire BTC before using BTC to pay for something. Why would a normal person in the euro area see any advantage in that ?

On the other hand, SBD can be earned by most anyone in the course of artistic, creative or leisure activities: writing, photographing, shooting a movie or recording some music!

Sing -> Earn SBD -> Buy beer -> Get inspiration -> Repeat!

This is what crypto-economics is about: people who had a ton of talent but had to go to work in a factory in order to put bread on the table will have the chance to earn a living by doing what they are good at, what they love.

"Yasmine a une belle voix, elle sait qu'elle est douée
Dans la tempête de sa vie, la musique est sa bouée
Face à sa mélodie, le monde est à ses pieds
Mais son père lui répétait "trouve-toi un vrai métier"
Parfois elle s'imagine sous la lumière des projecteurs
Sur la scène à recevoir les compliments et les jets de fleurs
Mais Yasmine est rouillée, coincée dans la routine
Ça lui arrive de chanter quand elle travaille à l'usine

Ah elle aurait du y aller, elle aurait du le faire, crois-moi
On a tous dit "ah c'est dommage, ah c'est dommage, c'est p't'être la dernière fois"
Elle aurait du y aller, elle aurait du le faire, crois-moi
On a tous dit "ah c'est dommage, ah c'est dommage, c'est p't'être la dernière fois"

• we have also launched, with the help of Utopian, the very first institutional project based on the code of the steem blockchain!.

Indeed, as explained in another post, the corporate world is begging to deploy blockchain architectures but the dearth of expertise limits it to only two technologies, Hyperledger Fabric (a sorry excuse for a blockchain) and Ethereum (a glorified toy-blockchain). There is a huge need for good, robust, battle-hardened blockchain technologies ... such as steem.

And there's more cooking, so stay hungry!

Conclusion

If you think we are doing a good job and are worthy of this world-improving system, please approve our witness! A big "thank you!" to those who support us and our work.