Ah I wasn't paying attention when you started. Welcome!
Good to see more similar lines of thinking for crypto. I still have been largely watching the Bitcoin cash community but staying away from it. It just seems they won't have an answer to other crypto striving to do their job better. Bitcoin has such a lead in integration, network effect, etc that even if it is moving slowly it will not be that easy to topple. E.g. I still need BTC to get to steem (needing to trust an exchange with good liquidity) and other stranger crypto that I might have interest in.
And I think steem does better technically for those other purposes. I understand there's concerns about centralization but it doesn't seem like they have an answer for that either.
Thanks for your help with everything!
That is true as an established network, Bitcoin is definitely light years ahead of any other crypto in terms of adoption hence why it'll be around for a long time. Conversely, with such a big network, I don't really foresee it becoming an everyday currency due to coordination problems. It will probably still be great for large sum settlements but newer coins will have the advantage of a lighter and more flexible architecture. With that being said, it need not necessarily be based on the original btc chain as there are very interesting unproven architectures coming up which might scale better as an everyday currency (DACs, hashgraphs, etc)
I think Steem is an amazing POC of what can be built on top of blockchain technologies but has major difficulties with scaling outside the platform which is something BAT does quite well. As you mentioned, there are no answers for that at the moment but the new projects coming out are definitely exciting to follow