RE: Where is Steem going? How will it get there?
this would imply that Steemit.com was never originally intended to be anything more than a fancy cryptocurrency faucet.
Seems consistent with other things written at the time for example: https://steemit.com/steem/@dan/steemit-s-evil-plan-for-cryptocurrency-world-domination
The original plan was sound, but somehow it got sidetracked by the focus shifting to getting paid to blog, and then curation, communities, etc. rather than that all being a means to an end. I must admit that despite paying more attention to Steem/it than most, I really had no idea until recently that cryptocurrency bootstrapping was still even part of Ned's plans or goals at all, although really it does make a lot of sense when you view steemit.com and the various other apps as being a lot more noob/user-friendly and broader-reaching than most other things going on in cryptoland.
This was a serious failure of leadership and communication, but failures are nothing if not an opportunity to learn to do better. Let's hope for improvement and do what we can to help make it happen.
That post of Dan's is one of my all-time favorite posts. It's a big part of what got me so excited about STEEM and SBD to begin with.
During the "fireside chat" at Steemfest2, Ned was asked about this, and he (from my perspective) basically said it's a waste of time and will not happen any time soon. He talked about how far reaching cryptocurrency has to be before you get mass adoption or can be a currency and cited bitcoin and others as examples that have been trying for years and have so far failed. He was all about "tokenizing the web" (no mention of that recently) and hasn't been a fan of SBD from the beginning (or putting in any development effort to fix the peg in both directions).
I agree, failure isn't final. It's a path towards learning and doing better. If we get back on track with this original vision of Dan's, I'd be really excited. I tried for many years to get people to accept BTC via our FoxyCart stores and it never worked out. I hoped STEEM and SBD would be different.
I still do.
Maybe SteemMonsters is an example we can look to of a real business which can help bootstrap this currency. I recently got my two oldest kids playing and they love it.
SteemMonsters is an example of one sure. It is built on the foundation of having a decent size community of users already bootstrapped, and can indeed as you say hopefully help bootstrap even more. But the idea should really be to build many of these, not rely on any one (I don't think you were implying that).
Maybe it isn't identical but I would say Ned's comments about the core mission being distributing cryptocurrency and the rest (social, blogging, content, even SMTs, etc.) being a means to an end are at least a variation on that theme. I for one am pleased with even this small degree of economic sense (as opposed to what I perceive as a lot of previous nonsense around here) reasserting itself. Let's take the small wins when and where we can get them.