Today is Wednesday, March 17th 2027, and I am writing this article and at the same time admiring Earth from Bigelow Space Station, which was bought recently by Steemit . I am among the first of many Steeemians, which thanks to Ned Scott, President of the U.S., will travel on a monthly basis to space in reward for service to the whole community.

This art, was made specifically for this post by @inber - an amazing artist on Steemit!

It is so exciting being here... and when I heard the news about Dan and his Warp Drive - all stars, so bright - looks like they are already much closer! A lot of Steemians used to say that Dan will help us reach the Moon - but I think in early days no one actually could predict that Dan will guide us even further - to the stars!

So how did this actually happen?

Today I would like to speak not only about Dan's newest invention, but about his life story. Many people consider him as an always-successful genius, ex-business partner of President Ned Scott, soulmate and best friend of Elon Musk, but not everyone knows that the whole greatness of his character was born of very difficult circumstances.

The early days

This unbelievable story started around 2010. Dan Larimer (then more known as bytemaster) was always a brilliant engineer. He always was tempted by cutting edge technology. He talked with Satoshi Nakamoto (creator of Bitcoin, which replaced the US Dollar in 2024 by decision of Donald Trump during his 2nd presidency), but he personally was not satisfied with the efficiency of this project. In the meantime after MtGox was hacked, and people lost millions of dollars, Dan spotted another problem - he came to the logical conclusion that decentralized currencies will never be successfully adopted by the masses while centralized exchanges are being compromised over and over again.

To solve that problem, he created BitShares (a decentralized exchange), and developed it's engine Graphene, which years later was adopted by projects like Peerplays, Steem and Ethereum Super Classic. But before that happened, things went really south. BitShares for many years didn't get proper traction until January 1st 2019 when all major centralized cryptocurrency exchanges were hacked at the same time because of Headshot - a more advanced and easier to exploit version of the Heartbleed - security bug in the OpenSSL library. BitShares became the most popular cryptocurrency exchange almost over night and in 2021 - because of it's efficiency - was adopted by many traditional exchanges, like the New York Stock Exchange. After BitShares merged with OpenBazar, whole ecosystem of decentralized e-commerce started growing like crazy. In 2023 worker proposal to purchase eBay for $25 billions was accepted.

But at that time, Dan wasn't working on BitShares anymore. In Februrary of 2016 he started thinking about his next big project. To be honest, almost no one noticed...

Dan gathering feedback about competition few weeks before Steemit came to existence

On April 1st 2016 the Steem Whitepaper was published. Many people, me included, thought that this was a joke. I said to myself - Dan would never do that to BitShares. But Dan already knew that for Bitshares to become mature and truly decentralized it had to have it's own "Satoshi Moment". Elon Musk used to say, that "having your own company is like having a child". Every parent knows that at some point your child needs to start being independent.

Betrayed

I was an active member of the BitShares community. I remember that feeling when he left. To be honest, I felt betrayed. I didn't understand his behavior back then, but I understand it now very clearly. The feeling was so strong in me that I didn't even read the Steem whitepaper, which was super ironic because a few months later I described an idea for a very similar project. I stepped down and lost intrest in Bitshares and cryptocurrencies projects for over 3 months. That was one of my biggest mistake.

Steemit

For many people, Steemit on early days was just another social platform with a difference, that Steemit paid for valuable activity in the network. Nowadays there is almost no business in the world, which is not connected to Steem network. I am a software developer, so for me important fact is, that Open Source projects thanks to Steem founded a way to not only gather funds for development, but they were also incentivized to focus on improving lives of own users - business value first!

Interesting fact is, that in 2022 Linux become the most rewarded software project of all time... and it is the most easy and best looking piece of software ever created (What is obvious, otherwise they would not be able to gather so much funds in rewards from own users. Duh!)

Healthy Marketing and Data Science

If I would try to summarize what was the greatest lesson which we learn thanks to Steemit, I would say... honest reporting. People finally understood how important it is for whole society to inform others what value you have produced and how they can quickly verify that. People also stopped lying to others because they understood that their reputation will inevitably suffers serious consequences when they will be caught.

Nowadays there is no single political or business decision made in modern world which is not backed by simulations on real data. Thanks to Steemit people understood how much valuable to others are arguments which are backed by calculations, which are publicly available to review of others. That would not be possible without Steemit being the biggest open database with built-in feedback system.

DanTheMan

But this article suppose to be about Dan Larimer, not about Steemit - my personal favorite project of Dan :) He was a CTO of Steemit, Inc. He designed big part of core principles in Steem network, he basically build a foundation of system which years later helped eliminate poverty. But many people were really surprised when one day Dan decided to step down from position of CTO. As he was asked what specifically caused him to leave, he said:

It wasn't obvious for people what Dan's next project would be. He spoke many times ([1], [2], [3]) that he dreams about creating a solution for Health Insurance problems by implementing Mutual Aid Society on the blockchain. For many people this topic didn't sound sexy, but the truth is that wasn't important to him. The problem was there: a lot of people really suffer because of a broken insurance and health care system. He spent over a year working on this project, which gradually grow to over 2 milion US citizens used his decentralized system by the end of 2019, with currently more than 100 milion. Did he become a billionaire thanks to that? No. Becoming rich was never his goal.

Beginning of a new era

His project was spotted by many politicians and entrepreneurs (Elon started following him on Steemit, just after Bitshares bought eBay and PayPal). Dan was offered dozens of positions, but he wasn't interested in just being a developer in a boring project.

Many people didn't believe it when Donald Trump announced that personal carbon tax will be introduced to rescue public finances and decrease the cost of public health care. But there was a problem with executing a the plan - implementing an efficient taxation system which would be capable of measuring and properly taxing in real time every smoker, driver with petrol car, etc.

Back then, Elon Musk was very deeply involved in a topic of carbon taxation. He knew that because of the collusion of all petrol car manufacturers and price dumping policy, Tesla and other electric car companies were not able to transition quickly enough to renewable energy for car power. Carbon tax could help, but the only reason why the presidential administration wanted to introduce it was for potential earnings which couldn't be provided with an inefficient taxation system.

Elon Musk decided to approach Dan Larimer and ask him for personal help - "please help us build this system, we have only one month before, it will be too late". That is how Elon and Dan met.

Within that month, CarbonTaxCoin become the most popular cryptocurrency in the world, which by the way had the best distribution of them all - the trick was that your stuff (car, house, etc) by default were creating certain amount of debt in deflationary CarbonTaxCoin, and every resident of USA needed to pay off own debt, paying carbon tax effectively.

Some people were not happy that the biggest cryptocurrency project was introduced to pay taxes, but the truth is that was how this concept was introduced to masses. CarbonTaxCoin become a great national success, and a year after that a decision was made to start a transition nation-wide transition to clean energy, and also transition from an old monetary system to a new one based on Bitcoin.

That would probably never have happened without CarbonTaxCoin and Graphene technology (Graphene, the material, is also from Carbon, is that a coincidence? :)).

Elon and Dan

You probably know that Elon was involved in OpenAI - a non-profit artificial intelligence research company. He invited Dan to cooperate, and thanks to that project, HAL9001 was born - the first blockchain-based AI and first one which is managed by planetary human & AI consensus.

I guess you remember exactly what happen thanks to HAL. World wide changes in economy caused total elimination of poverty and 99% of debt. Awarding the Nobel Prize from Economics to Dan was a matter of time, but the Nobel Prize for Medicine given to HAL was big news, but at the same time expected and deserved.

Dan just a moment before receiving Nobel Prize for Economics, in 2026

Past, Present, Future

Thanks to today's press release we know that Dan and HAL 9001 mastered something what was beyond imagination of most people. Traveling through space to other star systems just few decades ago was just a dream. But here we are! Who would guess it in early 2000s?

We do not know what will bring the future, but Today we need to realize and remember, that Dan is and always was a ship builder. He have built for us futuristic algorithms and machines, but this is up to us, whether we will achieve greatness thanks to them.

Best Regards from Steemit-Bigelow Space Station,
@noisy

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If you didn't realized yet, this is fiction story, but please, please not flag it for being a fake news :)

Past few days were really stressful for all of us. I decided to write this story as a way to calm down and remind myself what is our common goal here. I would like to apologize especially @ned and @sneak because I think that I added to much from myself to whole drama. I am with you guys!

I would like to also say big thank you to:

• @nikflossus - for inspiring me by this post
• @inber - for creating beautifully art, the first one in this post (33% of STEEM and SP rewards from this post goes to her!)
• @krnel - for helping me with this post and being a corrector of first draft of this post. He decided to not take his 33% of STEEM and SP from this post, therefore we agreed that @inber will receive 66% :)

and of course, the biggest Thank You to @Dan. Without you this great community would never be possible!

Best Regards from 2017,
@noisy