Commentary: The Future of Steem — What About Commerce?

I remember back in the early days of the Internet, there were many people who were truly horrified it the idea that the newly minted online environment be "sullied" by commercial interests.

Many believed that "it" should just be about free information and exchanges of ideas and information.

Of course, then came the realization that things like servers and bandwidth actually cost a lot of money, so somehow that all needed to be funded, somehow.

And inevitably people wanted to sell things.

Washed up on the beach?

Fast Forward 20 Years

So now we have these so-called "cryptocurrencies."

And so far, they do very little that an actual currency actually does... and there's a whole new set of people wrinkling their noses at the idea that any of this actually has utility.

It's almost as if people love the idea of utility a lot more than the reality and implementation of it.

Makes me want to ask a simple question like "Why isn't someone busy building eBay-on-the-Blockchain?"

There's actually something slightly ironic about that. While a bunch of blockchain developers are gleefully publishing the White Papers for their new projects, hoping they will become the next crypto millionaires everybody seems to be studiously avoiding the mention of any sort of "for profit" business plan.

In a strange sort of sense, it's the same kind of naive idealism that originally fueled the idea of the Internet as an eternal "source of free information," blithely ignoring that most experts on anything are unlikely to freely share 20 years of work, study and research simply because there's this new shiny thing called "The Internet."

Fiery winter sunset

Isn't it Ironic...

...that so many blockchainiacs are widely critical of conventional governments and money systems, and indict the creators of fiat currencies for "just printing money out of thin air," when — in fact — their very own projects are created with pretty much zero financial accountability?

Sure, it's a joke to say that some fiat currency is "backed by the full faith and credit of the government that issued it;" just tell that to the people of Zimbabwe and they'll have a really good laugh.

On the other hand... just how different is that from someone saying "Let's set up a blockchain and issue some tokens and call it a currency!" with absolutely NO "for profit" plan as to how that's supposed to work. And — as we have recently seen, and continue to witness — it doesn't work so well in a down crypto market.

So... what about some good old fashioned for-profit commerce, folks? Tip of the hat, here, so @dstors for at least trying to work with that idea... and somehow, I can't help but think that maybe the very thing we need to bring some life to Steem is some actually functioning commerce.

Too many ideas and no street level execution of anything... pretty much means all you have is an idea.

Thanks for reading!

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Created at 181231 01:05 PST