People Ask Me What’s Happening with Bitcoin. Here’s Why I’m Dreaming Bigger.

in #bitcoin7 years ago

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Recently, my family and I went to an IMAX theater and my older daughter got to select the movie. She chose Dream Big, which turned out to be an amazing choice. If you are a parent and have not seen the movie yet, it is one of the best documentary films you will ever see. Civil engineers are the heroes and heroines who will give your kids fresh inspiration as they think ahead to future careers.

The movie profiles several engineers as they dream and design structures that save lives and solve real human problems. These include earthquake-safe buildings, bridges that span rivers, and underwater robots. The movie encourages children to think big and aim high, all the while appreciating the basic building blocks that education provides.

Here is the trailer (narrated by The Dude - can't beat that):

And it works. My kids left the movie realizing why they study so much math and science. For several days afterwards, they were building more patiently with LEGOs than I’d seen them do before. Without any help from me, they also made a functioning model car from a kit. And the two of them were working on these projects together as a team for hours at a time, which is far better than the fighting that often occurs. Given the timing, I attribute a lot of this to the movie.

I had a different reaction to Dream Big. I went home and sold all my Bitcoin.

Now you’re wondering two things. (1) What do I know about Bitcoin that you don’t? And (2) What did I put that money in, if not Bitcoin? But if you’re looking for technical analysis or inside information for short term gain, then you can close this post right now, because that isn’t me. I have much deeper reasons and I tend to think longer term than many people who invest in cryptocurrencies. I don’t care about next week; I’m thinking about next year.

I have been inspired to think bigger than Bitcoin. The bottom line is that Bitcoin is stuck in 2013 and the recent updates do nothing to improve its long term outlook. With all due respect to Satoshi and the great innovation that he created, it was a first generation prototype technology. Bitcoin was never designed for large-scale use.

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If you need a good primer on why Bitcoin’s recent changes/updates/forks/bandages/whocaresanymore do nothing to make it any better, then look no further than this great post from @modprobe , who understands the technology better than I ever will. https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@modprobe/i-looked-into-segwit-and-here-s-what-i-saw

@modprobe ’s conclusions from that post include:

  1. Segwit, the main set of changes, addresses the malleability issue, which isn’t the main problem with Bitcoin.

  2. Slow confirmation times and transaction fees are the bigger problems. Bitcoin does not seem to have a fix for these looming obstacles.

  3. It remains to be seen how the changes in the fee structure will affect the Bitcoin economy.

  4. Witness data with rules and spending instructions are moved out of the main block, leaving an “anyone can spend me, there are no rules and no proofs” instruction.

  5. Therefore, the burden of honesty lies with miners to apply the rules from the witness data. As @modprobe explains, “miners could collude to steal everyone's segwit balances, but more likely, a government could force mining organizations to allow their transactions to steal bitcoins, reverse transactions, or whatever else…” With Bitcoin’s latest changes, “theft by miner collusion is a first class feature.”

Basically, my interpretation is that Bitcoin’s proponents (you could think of them the system’s “owners” or “controllers” at this point) are re-arranging deck chairs on its ship to nowhere. They are giving themselves handouts, jumping through hoops and creating crazy schemes to try and fix a prototype currency when those same problems have already been solved by later generation cryptocurrencies. And now they are splitting Bitcoin into multiple directions, diluting its strength and undermining any remaining confidence I would have in the power of its scale or dominance as a market leader.

Thinking Bigger

After seeing Dream Big, I don’t feel like settling for less, so I’m not going to hold and promote Bitcoin any longer. I wouldn’t settle for a job flipping burgers at McDonald’s either, so why should I bother to own a coin that often takes 40 minutes to confirm a transaction, which gets lost in perpetuity for two weeks if I forget to pay the miners’ fee? Is that the coin that’s going to achieve mass adoption? I think not; it’s ripe for disruption. The faster people recognize this instead of clinging on to yesterday’s news, the faster we’ll be able to build mass adoption for something better.

Speaking of miners, does anyone who cares about freedom and liberty still believe that Bitcoin is any less centralized than a central bank-controlled currency? Bitcoin has become controlled by a handful of huge miners, exchanges, and big money gateways. Segwit may buy the blockchain a little more time (mainly because that notion has been sold to us), but ultimately it makes the centralization problem worse and does nothing to prevent Bitcoin from hitting two big walls in the very near future: transaction fees and confirmation times. In contrast, Steem offers instant transactions and is free for most people to use, which it has accomplished with superior technology, not with smoke and mirrors.

Other crypto projects still rely on Bitcoin because we all need it as a layer to get in and out of an economy like Steem, which lacks its own gateways and ramps. But those will come along with mass adoption. I’m no longer going to hold and promote and help to prop up Bitcoin in an effort to receive some short-term gain. I’m squarely focused on building something better.

STEEM provides instant transactions, security, the ability to process tens of thousands of transactions per second and an ability to scale up much more. It is completely free for most people to use.

Steem is on track to have millions of users in the coming months. It is backed by a growing community centered around Steemit.com, a hub site that allows people to mine digital currency simply through their posting and social activity on this Reddit-style site. With all of those people building a growing use case for STEEM and Steem Dollars (SBD), the world will start to take notice of this cryptocurrency that is far better built than Bitcoin. We have already seen Steem’s growth begin to spiral virally in places like Korea, Indonesia, Nigeria, and in some urban and rural pockets of the United States and Europe. With some merchants in each of these places beginning to accept Steem or SBD, we will see the beginnings of a real economy in the coming months.

Let’s dream big and put our best foot forward. With all due respect to Bitcoin, it was a first generation prototype and I no longer feel the need to explain it to new people. I’ll be explaining only Steem along with some of the great sites and apps that use its blockchain, including Steemit, eSteem, Busy, and ChainBB, which are the first among many. Steem is the disruptive technology that will not only replace Bitcoin, but will help millions of new people realize the benefits of the blockchain. Every one of them makes us stronger and that’s why I’m investing in the people. Let’s build this.

Note: As an ode to Satoshi and his brilliant creation, I have an original physical Bitcoin from Casascius Mint, which I will keep as a historical relic. So technically, I still hold one Bitcoin. But I have sold my other BTC and won’t look back. Where have I put my money instead? I’ll give you one guess and I’m all in. Of course, none of the above should be construed as investment advice. I don’t trade; I believe.

Image credits
Top: McGillivray Freeman Films.
Steem video, courtesy of @the-alien
Other images not subject to copyright.

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That's right, Steemit is the short / mid-term future. Don't want to be a killjoy, but Steemit's mid-/longterm future may be not so bright as we all wish it would be. What do I mean?

First, let's have a look at Bitshares: BitShares is built to be fast, efficient and scalable to handle the tens of thousands of transactions per second that go with being a decentralized exchange: Openledger.io.

Now, Dan Larimer, the visionary programmer of BitShares AND Steemit is now developing EOS.

And he has announced in interviews, that he sees his work with Bitshares and Steemit finished. So he is currently putting all his "steam" into EOS :). He has also stated, that with EOS, everybody (meaning developers) will be able to create platforms like STEEM/Steemit and Bitshares/Openledger.io easily and even much more. And let's be honest, Steemit is still in Beta and needs a ton of improvement. So what speaks against another platform overtaking Steemit? Especially with a really good marketing (Steemit still has no marketing).

This post won't get much likes as usual, as we won't smear honey around people's mouth and tell them what they want to hear, we'll continue to tell you the truth, no matter what, that's our mission.

I've been a loyal follower of Dan for more than three years and through BitShares, Steem, and EOS. I think EOS is great and I hope it will have some great synergies with other projects.

I'm still all in on Steem.

Hope for the best for Steemit, but could you at least take a position on our arguments? Why should people go all in on Steem, but not in EOS? Just because they "believe" in it?

Anybody can fork it now if they want to. I don't see many doing that. When you have a community of millions of users, that doesn't get replicated overnight by someone's code.

The current userbase of Steemit is 500k, golos.io is a fork of Steemit that has been done in cooperation with steem ink (the company behind steemit) and has already tens of thousands of users. It has been created solely for the Russian community, and since then you don't see much Russians on Steemit anymore. Wait for the Korean/Japanese/Chinese/German/French fork and several others. That's just proving how easily it can be forked. And when you take the story of myspace and FB into consideration, it is much much more possible for some company to overtake steemit with a more user-friendly interface. That's not a hating or trolling, but just looking straight into the facts, without emotions.

I actually think forks are better for some communities, but sidechains will enable more synergy.

I also believe in Steem but .. yes, there's a but - the reality that bites is that most cryptos are dependent on BTC's performance.

However, you are so right - we should focus more on promoting Steem! More noise on it could pump the market - some whale in the chat told me before and I've seen it happen so - it was during the whale wars when the Steem price went up. I don't like that 3 letter word but I guess making more noise about Steem would indeed make it more famous so guess what - the past few days I've been spreading the word to almost all of my social media and fingers crossed we're going to get more user influx than before - the next question is - would we be able to sustain it?

great to follow this post and your comments @donkeypong and @cryptocentral. I wish I would have been here earlier. Thanks for all the infos.

I see EOS as complimentary to STEEM, not a replacement for it.

Good frank analysis. Dan moving on to EOS may mean STEEM has a top end limit. Where would Amazon be if Bezos had left after 2 years? Where would Apple be if Jobs left after a couple of years? OK, that was a trick question wit a complex answer, but it still proves my point of concern

STEEM On!!
DaveB

I'm mostly out of Bitcoin too. I'm betting on Dan's projects - Bitshares, Steem, and now EOS. I'm dreaming big about all three! The underlying tech is very similar for each of these, and each has a great use case - distributed exchange, social network, smart contract platform. All stand a good chance for major dream fulfillment!

Dan is one of the smartest people, not only as a coder, but in the way he is constantly a few steps ahead of others (certainly ahead of me) in seeing how everything fits in the bigger picture.

Graphene is revolutionary. We finally have something that scales.

I love reading your posts and that includes this one.

We are in a MAJOR transition right now and after reading @modprobes post (of which is one of the most valuable posts I have EVER read) I feel on a similar path to you and him. I Like that you based this post in a way on his truly magnificent post but also put your steemit twist on it.

I have LOVED steemit since I first heard about it and never even knew who Dan was nor do I still know to much about eos or bitshares.

There is of course always plenty of possibilities for Steemit to NOT succeed like we hope but out of all the projects I feel most confident and secure with Steem.

I have invested SO much to this community and feel I am ready to invest EVEN more now!

I am with you!

SteemON∞§∞

Right on. I could not have said it better than you just did.

I am super grateful to be here on Steemit and a lot of that is because of people like you.
I haven't had to many exchanges with you really but I have read so many of your posts and seen how you are as a real life being. It is because of the very intelligent, high integrity and PROGRESSIVE people like you that make this community so valuable.

I feel like there are many here including your self who are ahead of the game and constantly sharing cutting edge potential with the community.

Gratitude and Respect!

SteemON∞§∞

I have learnt through the hard way that our reality is shaped by what goes on in the mind. I was ignorant of this fact until i learnt it the hard way confining me to crutches today.

Weeks before my accident, for some unknown reasons, i was entertaining the thought of being involved in a fatal accident. I complained to my brother who advised me against entertaining such thoughts...i however continued be i couldn't control the thought.

I was in his state of mind until i had a fatal accident, and i had to gibfir total hip replacement surgery. Today, i depend on crutches for mobility. This opened my eyes to powers of our minds

I have since learnt how to control what goes on in my thought.

So i believe in your theory of dream big for what you continuously thought about most of the time is what you will become.

@eurogee

Amazing story and I believe you are right about that.

I disagree as I think Bitcoin can still serve as the 'gold' of cryptocurrencies. Rather than transact in Bitcoin, it can serve as a long term store of value.

Thats a nice view of the future. And it sounds good :-). Who know my friends.
That's why life is beautiful... we can't know what will happen. Hope it remains that way.

I would love to see steem being a powerful trading coin. Hope that will not be overtaken by big companies. As Microsoft said (or is already... i don't remember) that will invest in ethereum. It can be a good thing but also bad.

Not a Microsoft hater but if there is company that has figured out how to turn sugar to sh*t it's Microsoft, if that is true I'd be running from Eth. And again, I am a noob but the way Dan went about EOS, he has successfully placed a trojan horse inside Eth with the ICO. Vitalik cannot be happy about this as he realizes that after a year EOS will be able to dump millions on Eth with one fell swoop.

I'm not a hater also, neither a fanboy!
Don't think Microsoft is the only one to do that, hehe. EA with Origin do same thing with s**t :-).

When i saw what means to own a console, how much you must pay to have free PC content :-)), how much you must wait to see if you can use modding on your game (lot of times impossible), how many times can't play because network down or not available... etc i said no to that choice.
But who loves it loves it, that's good for them.

The problem is that all over the road we walk these days, everybody try to squeeze money from you and keep you blocked in sh**y connections with their interface, or whateva and in fact not let you live life.

So, they can do that if we all pay and accept them.
And seeing how many sheeps comes around... huh. Please understand what i say and not come with arguing for sustaining corporations... Just see how many complains are all over the place about what happens now.

It is a transition world and it will pass long time till things will chill down a bit with some reasonable platforms and solutions for all.

That's why i hoped here will find a new way. And still do.

Here i found an article about steem blockchain power which is showing its weakeness. Maybe you can read that posts from:

@elfspice

He has a good point of what is going on here and with steem.

And regarding ETH and Microsoft, i'm sure i read it in my first days of crypto news, almost 2 weeks ago.

I will make a simple article with links to details, to just point that out if you are interested and we can speak there.

Let me know when you're done. I'd like to see that, it wouldn't surprise me at all if Microsoft got involved in another failing project.

True. As we don't transact in gold on a day to day basis the way we do with fiat. So Bitcoin will have a place as a store of value but it's hard to see it being a fiat replacement or as a coin to be used for fast and everyday transactions. Bitcoin can be seen as digital gold even though there will be other currencies that are much faster with fewer transaction fees to come along and do what bitcoin can't do. Steem is one of those much faster and highly scalable currencies.

The trailer got me interested looks good not that I would go into engineering now but I can see already why it would inspire children, interesting move with the selling of bitcoin @donkeypong and thanks for sharing @modprobe notes they were definitely interesting.

*Where have I put my money instead? I’ll give you one guess and I’m all in. *

Soooooo ... you put it all in Dash then? LOL


I am of course kidding. Still, no matter how awesome Steem is (and it is!), the egg to basket ratio should never be 1:1 in my opinion.

To an outside user BTC has the recognition and ma y merchants now accept it for payment, but other currencies do seem to make more sense. As you pointed out, why would people stick with BTC when these newer currencies offer faster transaction times and zero (or minimal) fees? It's like Netscape Navigator saying why would anyone ever use a different browser? IDK. Sometimes markets act in irrational ways longer than you can stay solvent.

Netscape and Altavista. That's how I see it also.

Wait, you guys don't use Netscape Navigator anymore??? :)~

Great read Tom. Steemit was my intro to the crypto-world, and I've gone deep in the months since then into other projects and currencies, but I'm probably most excited about Steemit because there is an actual community of users here that are doing amazing things with it. There really is people power behind this technology, and that's what's going to drive it farther into the mainstream.

This comment has received a 3.75 % upvote from @lovejuice thanks to: @theabsolute. They have officially sprayed their dank amps all over your post rewards. GOOD TIMES! Vote for Aggroed!

Here here. Yep totally agree 👍🏻

you are right sir , bitcoin has become a big headache :) and nice intro ,i am also making one intro of steemit post in upcoming days
followed and upvoted!!
appreciate if you a have a view on my recent post

https://steemit.com/photography/@mady27/the-magnificent-view-of-taj-mahal-in-the-moonlight

What an awesome community this is! Steemit Rocks, great article! I just got approved here on Steemit and I'm going to do a Youtube video on it today @ Http://www.youtube.com/matthewtimothy

As far as the content of this article. I think Bitcoin was a great platform and it still is. However the transaction speed needs to go up ASAP!