For the reasons you mention here, I think my STEEM is not Steemit post may have been one of the more important contributions I've made here. It seems the community (and investors/speculators trying to evaluate STEEM) are still stuck in this discussion without a resolution. The utility of STEEM (unlike most other cryptocurrency projects) is no longer based on wild speculative dreams. It's being demonstrated right now, and some don't like that.
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Utility of steem is a joke at this point because most users used centralized bullshit. Developers have to build real technology first.
Without smart contract technology, building truely decentralized applications is difficult (though not impossible).
Curious, do you run your own front end to the Steem chain locally? If so, what do you use?
We run our own front ends. We ran into many problems following the herd per say , from centralized front end development. (i've gotten more people to deploy front ends, but it isn't a solution to have them only on the VPS servers) Web apps seem to be an extremely locked down ecosystem that isn't very p2p friendly.
Next logical step is running the chain locally with a front end/webui talking to localhost , and that is what myself, powerpoint45, techcoderx, and vaultec have been working together with.
Only times I use the full stack locally (more people should have this access and would run steem blockchain on their hardware) is when i'm logged into the witness node on smoke and need to broadcast a transaction per CLI. This is why we need Witness GUI for DPOS as well as front ends for posting data into the chain.
https://github.com/dtubenetwork
https://github.com/techcoderx/ipfsVideoUploader
https://gitlab.com/vaultec/dtubepermanente
https://github.com/powerpoint45/dtube-mobile-unofficial
At no point is this Steem blockchain's fault. It's front end and backend developers who missed the point/access of what BTC core wallet (full nodes) achieved, as bitcoin has over 10,000 live copies online. Steem only has 125.
This comes from lazy development , not pushing hard enough , (even to the brink of failure) innovation.
I often wonder what it would look like if people built integrated hardware solutions. Something like a raspberry pi complete with the full blockchain ready to go, you just plug it in and you have a full node available to you locally. Maybe @anyx's api could be used as well.
I don't think Steem has really demonstrated much clear utility. It has properties which can be useful as you described quite clearly in your "STEEM is not Steemit" post, but its user base has stagnated so it isn't really demonstrating that such utility has much appeal.
I think a better narrative than speculators "fearing" utility is something like earnings reports on stocks. Sometimes the demonstrated utility falls short of expectations and this causes the story to adjust downward and the price falls, but sometimes it exceeds expectations (or points to even greater possibilities), and the price increases. Unfortunately Steem has not really demonstrated the latter.
Obviously, when there is a excess of hype and expectations are 'to the moon', it is more likely that 'earnings' (or demonstrations of utility in the case of blockchains/tokens) will fail to meet them, but the opposite does sometimes happen too.
I was more thinking along the lines of "We're going to build project X that will do Y!" where X doesn't exist in reality yet and Y is just a set of features (not a promise of future economic returns). If X does get built and it does functionally accomplish Y, then it's no longer speculation. Then it's more along the lines of what you describe in terms of evaluating it as a real project with expectations of profitability and utility value.
I'd say Steem is built, and it does functionally exist as a social media application on the blockchain which rewards people with tokens of value. Many other blockchain projects still haven't been built out to do the thing they claim they are going to do. Many more are today than in 2017, but I still think there's a disconnect between pure speculation in the space and evaluating a cryptocurrency project against other competitors in that market vertical.
Ultimately, I agree, the value hasn't yet been demonstrated, or we'd see more people buying Steem and powering up.
In practice, it's still speculation for a very long time. The speculation is over how much it will grow. Building a blockchain to do Y may demonstrate it can do Y, but from a value perspective, that is little more than a proof of concept until it demonstrates that it can grow large and attract a large amount users and economic value. It's barely one step forward from pure hype, and if the proof of concept demonstrates some problems with the concept or growth potential, that's a negative not a positive. It's not a given that such a proof-of-concept will be a negative in this way, but in practice many are, for various reasons, some totally legitimate (like most high risk experimental ventures fail, but that doesn't mean trying them was a bad idea) and some not (naked hype and fraud).