While markets are on hold
This is the time for DPOS power to shine through. Let's grab the momentum.
The future is decentralized
Could it be the Zuckerberg effect that is doing its thing here? Centralized Crypto markets can not deal with the recent exponential growth. Registrations are on hold, markets have been paused, while more and more people want to get in on the action. A lot of Cryptos from the early days are all of a sudden booming. To my pleasent surprise Slothcoin (yes that is a real one) went to 800% in a short while. Unfortunately it is on a paused market, due to extreme demand. Well, maybe I have to add that it is on a centralized market. And I am glad that the TULIP asset is on the Waves DEX {Decentralize EXchange}. Soon more to be handed out for free. Then I checked the Bitshares DEX, no sweat there either. It fits the image that Blocktivity already was showing. DPOS {Delegated Proof Of Stake} blockchains are performing at a fraction of their capacity. That'll be Steem too yes, if you are a member on that blockchain you are in the right place at the right time...
Sure you could POW {Proof Of Work} mine to get some Cryptos, but that will take quite some expertise. And I have been doing that in the past, but quit the second I got my registration on the Steem blockchain. True, there is something that is known as POS {Proof Of Stake} but to be able to Stake well you need a lot of Cryptos to be able to do so. The bigger the better for staking. Maybe you did not know this, but you get a reward for holding Steem in the form of Steem Power too. One might consider it a kind of dividend that is added with every block. It only gets visible in your wallet though if it accumulated to at least 0.001 SP. It is one of those less mentioned gemstones that is part of the Steem blockchain. And yes, the interest on Steem Back Dollar {SBD} is zero percent. But have you seen the price of that one lately? The witnesses are trying to get the price down by moving more Steem into SBD, yet demand is going bunkers. People want that SBD, it is still very scarse compared to Bitcoin and all its clones, so the market wants it and so the price goes up.
Fruit Of Work {FOW}
The greatest way to get into Cryptos only came into action in 2016. It is the one you are reading this post on. Some think it is SteemIt dot Com, but that is the first user interface to the Steem Blockchain. As there have come many more the last couple of months. Applications build on a blockchain that can handle over 1.3 million transactions in one day, only using 0.12% of its capacity. That is Steem, the number one when it comes to blockchain activity. And yes the price is still way too low, although this has already been moving into a better direction lately. Three second blocks and also very important are the ZERO fee transactions, no matter if Steem becomes $1997 worth, or more. No extra costs, ever, for a cup of coffee. And you know what is so great about Steem? You can actually earn them as a registered blockchain member. Get a share of the reward pool. Earn a kind of 3 second dividend just by holding Steem Power {SP}. Curate the work of others and make a nice extra on your investment. Create applications that make you earn Steem. Or become an active witness that keeps the blockchain going.
Yet, the most fun part for me is the new concept of mining Steem brought to the masses. It is what I called Fruit Of Work {FOW} mining. Meaning that you can earn Steem by putting time and effort in publishing on the blockchain. At the beginning of Steem in 2016 that ment mostly blogging. As that was the main interface to the Steem blockchain as provided by SteemIt dot Com. Lately though all kinds of applications have been build on top of the Steem blockchain. Also using decentralized file storage systems like IPFS {Inter Planetary File System}, like D.tube does. For many kinds of centralized social media platforms, that only pay their stockholders, Steem has an equivalent that could pay you, the producer. There are Steem blockchain members that only use SteepShot, a kind of Insta, for instance, sharing photos, earning SBD and SP. Plucking your own FOW while having fun. How awesome is that!?
Decentralized family
With the Steem earned it is easy to go to its family member Bitshares. Exchange some Steem for Bitshares {BTS} using Blocktrades and send them to your account on the Decentralized {DEX} market. And the other way around works just as easy. The blocktrades exchange service does not need a registration and using it is pretty straight forward. It is well intregrated with Steem and Bitshares, works fast and is easy to use. The exchange is almost instantly, as the Bitshares 2.0 blockchain and Steem are relatives, both doing blocks like 3-2-1-DONE! But remember, only to invest in Cryptos what you are willing and able to lose. For trading on the Bitshares decentralized platform it is no different than on any other. One thing that makes the Bitshares platform fairly unique is their pegged assets like bitUSD and bitEURO. Some will use this to store some of their value in as they consider it more or less stable.
One thing that has become clear over the last couple of weeks is that technologies like Bitshares, Steem and Golos are future ready. They are only using a fraction of their capacity meaning they can scale a lot, before even breaking one drop of sweat. And EOS, another DPOS family member, that is currently on a testnet, is going to be used for things like an evolution of Wikipedia, called Everipedia. Contributers can FOW mine there, in a way we are used to at Steem. These kind of developements are putting the power back into the hands of the people. Now maybe that is why Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook Incorporated is diving into the matter of Cryptos, Blockchains and Decentralisation. Yet, he might be a bit too late, as platforms like Steem are taking the Social Media realm by storm. And it seems this is going to accelerate very fast, due to extreme demand for Cryptos that the centralized markets simply cannot handle. DPOS based blockchains can handle it, just look at the numbers and figures shown at the Blocktivity website.
Smart Media Tokens {SMT}
Now this one could not arrive too soon. Did you know by the way that mister John McAfee {McAfee Internet Securiy Software} endorsed Steem? Okay indirectly by supporting a company that is going to build its service on... The Steem blockchain! It is called Bob's Repair and he just made it ICO of the week using his Twitter account. Yes, I know, the ICO is on Ethereum, never mind that, if there had been SMTs on Steem they would have used that, for sure. They even might be creating a Smart Media Token when those are live. Moving the ICO to a SMT Bob's Repair could create themselves. Hopefully any time soon, because with SMTs Steem would really leap far ahead of any competition. It can be used for a lot of applications, not only companies, SteepShot or Zappl might create their own too. And by using their App you could pluck your own FOW in many new ways.
One thing that makes Steem Smart Media Tokens really great is that they can be traded on the internal decentralized exchange {DEX}. Currently used for trading Steem and SBD only. Where many Steem blockchain members are still unaware that it even excists, this wil surely change once SMTs are going live. This will also be another test for the Steem DPOS blockchain, as I do expect this to become a huge hit, meaning demand will exponentialy grow. And this is not only connected to the price developement for Steem and SBD, but also to scaling and the capacity to handle it all in realtime. Maybe we, as the Steem community, could invest into hardware developement companies that are working on 3D Crystal Atom Memory units. That can handle movement of Exabytes of data within nanoseconds. Do not know if it excists yet, but at some point in the future we might need it.
Get them in here
There are still Crypto fundamentalist factions that claim POW mining is the only way. While others think they need to buy into it, being such a large group that demand outweights offer, it is time to tell the world. There is a solution that can handle scaling, that is fast and still cheap, or even with ZERO fee like Steem, and it is known as DPOS. Delegated Proof Of Stake, that what Steem its blockchain is build upon. Never mind POW mining, or POS, when ones own FOW can be plucked by posting, using all kinds of apps build and running on the Steem blockchain. Nothing on hold here, it is all green and ready to go!
And now is the next best time to get on Steem, just before the Smart Media Tokens are going to go live.
May the Cryptos be with us!
DPOS is the future!
Image cc-by-sa @oaldamster.