So--

1. This is a quality post. Nice writing, and I couldn't agree with you more:
   https://steemit.com/beyondbitcoin/@faddat/why-the-steem-market-cap-is-inevitably-headed-greater-than-1b

2. Charging to join the chain might not be a bad idea at all. On the other hand, I don't know if I'd have joined if it'd cost money. But I am joined now, and one thing that we can say for sure about this community is that we've got brains. Personally, I'm fine, 100% fine eschewing things like sports gambling on our platform in favor of anything that helps us to keep reaching our current demographic. We're already outside of the current "cryptocurrency" crowd, and well, this is elitist of me, but I don't care.

3. Some platform tweaks are needed:
   a) Comments are undervalued. I'm going to paste this one into a post, because of that, but shouldn't really need to. Should go with a medium.com "content is content is content, even if it's in reply to content" policy for comments vs. articles: They should all be articles.
   b) Guidelines for using the blockchain as internet infrastructure need to be published and publicized.
   c) Witness pool should probably be expanded, and witness system specs should be enforced to ensure high performance of the chain generally. I'm not only talking hardware, either-- we depend on low-latency witnesses for our very survival as a community.

• The future clearly belongs to folks in tech with brainpower. We have that, let's use what we've got more effectively (we're not doing enough to empower developers, developers, developers!)
  • Freaking Modern API
  • Salaries from the chain itself and reviews on those working for the chain by those who actually know code themselves.
  • A software roadmap that is coherent, and constantly updated. It doesn't even need to be 100% strictly adhered to-- we all know how that can go with software-- instead, it NEEDS to be up to date.