RE: HF21: What Makes Steem Valuable?
Thanks Matt. That's a really helpful bit of optimism and encouragement. :)
If we had more successful examples like Steemmonsters, I'd fully share your enthusiasm about the great potential here. I've championed it for three years now (as of today, my accounts is three years old) and unfortunately feel like I was selling an idea which never materialized. Yours is one of the few examples. Appics was stuck waiting for SMTs and hasn't been able to move forward much (prior to Steem Engine), VIT has it's own troubles and forked the code anyway, so that won't help the STEEM token. (I didn't realize they had pivoted their whole company away from adult content). I'm not a big fan of sports anymore (even though I was a college athlete), but I do see a lot of potential there for sure. I just don't see how that will necessarily help the STEEM price if it becomes easier for people to just spin up their own chain as DTube just announced.
That is true, when the cost outweighs the convenience of building on a blockchain, whether that is Ethereum or Steem, building a sovereign blockchain becomes the natural choice.
A lot of blockchains are indirectly gunning for Steem's job. Ethereum is soon getting Akasha, but right now it already has Loom which created DelegateCall as a sample site to display the capability to build Steem on Loom. Then Cosmos is another way to do it effectively, and some social sites are already being built on it.
Ethereum keeps getting abandoned for sovereign blockchain roadmaps and if Steem was expensive for businesses to build on, why not fork?
There is a clear issue here, which is that blockchains and their participants have conflicting interests. Coins/tokens need to have a utility, but at the same time it seems in crypto that coins and tokens can become more expensive than the value they provide to the user, so the user starts fresh.