Most people visiting steemit.com view this as a platform where you can get paid to post, but this is just the tip of the preverbal iceberg.
The real money isn’t in blogging, content generation, or voting. The real money is found in bootstrapping a digital currency. A currency owned and operated in a decentralized way by ordinary people.
The key to bootstrapping a currency is having a community which is able and willing to use it. A blogging platform that makes it possible for everyone to earn their way in is just a trojan horse. It is a means of hiding the vegetables (honest money) in the food (fun content).
Phase 1 - Bootstrap a Stable Currency
The first phase of Steemit’s manancial plan involves establishing a price stable currency. This is a currency denominated in values that everyone knows and trusts. This is the Steem Dollar.
A Steem Dollar is different from other digital currencies because you are not trusting anyone else to hold real dollars in the bank. It is backed 20 to 1 by Steem, a growing community of bloggers. It also pays people interest far beyond what the banks pay!
To bootstrap this currency we need people to have a way to earn it. This is what posting rewards are for. We also need a highly liquid market in which people could trade their Steem Dollar for Steem. Market liquidity is the key to building trader confidence and minimize conversion costs.
As you can see from this chart there is a (relatively) massive amount of liquidity with just 0.002% spread. At any moment someone could trade in and out of STEEM / STEEM Dollars in quantities of over $1000. This is in a market that is just two days old.
Phase 2 - Bootstrap a Marketplace
The next phase of Steemit’s profoundly wicked plan is to bootstrap a marketplace. A market place is where people can buy and sell goods and services. You may have heard of systems like OpenBazaar, Craigslist, Angie's List, or eBay.
A successful marketplace needs two things:
- People
- Money
Steemit is attracting hundreds of new users every day and filling their pockets with fresh steem dollars. This is an environment that is ripe for a rich market place where people can exchange real goods and services along with their ideas.
If ever there were a website / marketplace that would bring cryptocurrency to the masses, steemit.com is it.
Phase 3 - Sidechains, Smart Contracts and SmartCoins, Oh My!
Once you have a highly functional currency, a robust community and market place, and lots of content to bring in new users, you are ready to start building robust smart contracts and side chains around these assets.
Think of a side-chain as a Facebook app. It will allow developers to build new games. It will allow people to issue their own currencies. All kinds of robust financial instruments can be built on the back of the Steem Dollar and the Steem network.
Unlike other smart contract platforms, Steem will have no fees! This means app developers can build things that just aren’t viable elsewhere.
Long Road
The road is long, but the Steem community will eventually follow the yellow-brick-blockchain to the Emerald City and in the process overcome the wicked witch of the west. The Steemit community just needs to over come its fears, stop being cowardly, and find it in their heart to love one another.
Maybe the plan isn’t so evil after all.
How do we get a marketplace on Steemit?
Once we have private messaging we will have a classified tag. Posts made in the classified section will have payouts disabled.
Private messages are necessary for exchanging personal information to close the deal (shipping addresses).
We will add escrow support at the blockchain level.
I'm already working on recruiting some sellers and was planning to just have them ask for buyers to include shipping addresses as the memo on their payment. Any estimate on the timeline for these new features?
Hi Dan,
Do you have a roadmap for the next two years?
I've been involved with Open Bazaar for a long time and 2017 roadmap for them is pretty solid IF they can deliver. What I don't like is I can't earn currency in-platform unless I'm a vendor/seller... Enter Steem. Really looking forward to all you have to offer for this new platform and potential marketplace.
Will steem's marketplace be OpenBazaar? If not, wouldn't it be better if it were?
This will be LEGEN.....wait... for..... it....... DARY!!!
Ha! Ha! Oh boy! It looks like I'm building my factory!
We are. You are funding it with your content.
You should probably name it "classifieds" with an "s". If it is not plural then it implies that is a top-secret section or something.
HELL YES!! Very exciting!! How "anon" will this be?
I thought this was coming! I see it is pure genius!
what would be some comparable sites that you're envisioning the marketplace being similar to?
if it could be built up to the level of something like Craigslist... daaaaang...
This is Awesome!!! Can't believe it's actually happening.
Don't make the massive mistake eBay did, USE penny-start AUCTIONS for EVERYTHING, either that, or use Amazon's system of REVERSE DUTCH AUCTION. Wanna kill a marketplace and have a competitor beat you? Make all the listings fixed price. It creates clutter for buyers, it creates extra work for sellers (instead of just marking the GRADE of a common iPhone model which is a commodity, you have to repost ALL the information about the phone as if re-inventing the wheel), and it makes for a non-liquid marketplace. We've studied the history of eBay and Amazon's marketplace, as well as craigslist and Facebook market. The key is to create liquidity, and liquidity happens from prices being forced to a settling price. you should maybe do two or three versions, a local like craigs and FB market, an auction like ebay (but NOT fixed price offerings), and a reverse dutch auction for commodities (like Amazon's "used").
I think this is a great idea. Why wait...I'm offering to sell a Starbucks Gift Card now. See my post.
oh please, no more Starbucks !! terrible company really, expensive and certainly not respectful of the growers of their coffee !! i hope to see more interesting things than this nhere !! this is just more of the same of what we definitely don't need here !! tired of Starbucks rulers of coffee !!
Will the marketplace be built from the ground up or will it leverage an existing platform? Also, will a mechanism for digital good distribution be offered in the marketplace?
We can support a paypal-like checkout process that any website can integrate.
We have no plans for doing digital good distribution on our own at this time, but it would be trivial to add.
Ok, thx. When can we expect to see the marketplace?
In Canada we have "Canadian Tires", a hardware supply store. They had their own cash "Canadian Tires Dollars" that you could only redeem in their own store. It's the same concept with air miles points too. You create an easy way for people to accumulate value, give them a way to spend it...et voila! You've got a parallel economy.
But steemit brings it to a level they didn't think about: being able to trade those dollars Peer to Peer, exchange services to each other for that currency and provide a platform that leverage it's community. I raise my hat to that vision.
You're like the Wizard and I the Scarecrow getting some knowledge. Much appreciated Dan, Cheers.
This concept reminds me on netpond.com, an old webmaster forum where i used to be a moderator and where you did get paid 5 cents per every post. Bad thing about it is a lot of spam posts without any value.
Bump
Wow, Dan's vision is still spot on, someone should repost it with Steem replaced with Hive to not confuse people 😄
LoL... ingenious bump!
I actually didn't know about this post. So, very amusing to read.
Neither did I. Good thing to read now.
For real
We are just now getting over the kneecappening ned put on us.
I'd forgotten that dan predicted aggie's rise.
Now if we could just get everybody to price things in hbd rather than steem, we could get hbd back on track as a 'safe' currency for merchants.
Thanks, Dan for that optimistic post!
What i personally like about you is that you are dealing OK with failures. You are really strong man. I believe in you and wish Steem become next Reddit/Medium.
Dan, it is nice to see that the Team has plans to evolve the project,but my suggestion is not to rush. Reinforce the original core of the project and then make your additions to get it further on the crypto race. Keep it up!
@dimimp Thanks for the love and support God will keep blessing you.
For me I will love to catch out because I have a lot of bills to pay and am final year student, i haven't pay my school and I will be start writing my project next month as well,all this will make me go for the Steem pay out.
Thanks a lot @dimimp,you are one in a million.
This information is important for all people steemit, success for everyone here, cheers
There is a lot of truth to what Dan says here. Many don't really understand cryptocurrency and what it takes for it to really work and become usable and mainstream. Previously I wrote "Steem is genius for focusing on real world value that is virtual: information". Plus controlling information is important and useful. I'm just glad that someone has chosen to be honest about what Steem is doing. (And I hope it is for good.) To private message me, for now: j@k0in.com.
It is the year 2020 and Justin Sun has destroyed the vehicle, Steem, but fortunately the dream lives on on the Hive Blockchain.
But before the dream kicks off, you have to answer a pertinent question... Do you want to fuck Justin Sun?
#hiveislive
An ispiring vision to be executed. Waiting for plans.
I was somewhat sad, reading this post. I thought Bitshares will be all these things: marketplace, the Queen of side-chains with powerful smart contracts.
I hope Bitshares will play a role in the future of Steem. Maybe it will be side-chain of Steem. Maybe it will be developed separately. Anyway, it will be sad to see how Bitshares just decay and die.
I agree. If BitShares seemed like it was drifting in the middle of the ocean, now even more. Sure it's decentralized but in the beginning there needs to be a path, an objective and then build complementary stuff around that to make the ecosystem grow.
I am with Bishares from the very beginning and bad end would hurt me much.
It was and is not an altcoin but clever technology with broad possibilities.
It is that technology behind Steem.
2018 is gonna be a big year for steemit.
This post is very informative on what to expect down the line from the steem blockchain. I am very excited and feel privileged to be a part of this journey
Thanks for the great laugh provided by the Great Witch of the West! Namaste :)
I agree with the overall message but I think it could have been expressed with more respect and humility.
It's good to have a long-term vision but it's even better to manage expectations wisely.
Please consider avoiding phrases like world domination or being cowardly.
And please remember the lessons learned from BitShares.
Got the first vote! Lol this is going to be very hard to achieve in the future!
On another note this is an awesome post and my excitement for this platform grows by the second. I haven't been on Twitter or Facebook since yesterday! HA!
Is first vote just bragging rights? Or is it actually something to try to achieve?
First upvote on a popular post like this will get you a big piece of the pie of steem that is produces. So yes, very much worth the achievement. AND bragging rights
You should really read up on how the reverse auction works. There is a reason most votes come in approximately 30 minutes after the post was created.
so steem is bitshares done right?
IMO steem and BTS are completely different things ...
it's no so different after they added UIA/smartcoins and smart contracts see 3
@Dan - Are you inferring creating UIA/Smartcoins within steem or driving people to BitShares?
Dan made Bitshares, left it to the wayside (momentarily?) and applied all the best ideas to Steem.
So different they're not even in the same ball park.
bitshares made easy imo
seems like it, I never could comprehend bitshares
Steem has been relatively shoddy in many respects. The incentives gamed, the experience dumbed down. You can't short EUR or GBP on Steem.
nice read
"The Steemit community just needs to over come its fears, stop being cowardly, and find it in their heart to love one another." Oh boy! YOU ARE THE WIZARD!
This is like a dream! Very well-written and you pretty much explained what I've had a hunch about since day 1! Very exciting times, sure thing! Great job! It looks like I'll be building my factory afterall!
There are so many layers to this currency. It is a little hard to wrap my mind around as of yet. I think I am at least getting the basics under control now.
Great article! With Steemit being the new revenue maker for social media and Dash giving out dividends every week, the crypto space is definitely going to take the world by surprise:)
Awesome! It can't get here soon enough. The world needs a decentralized economy and needs it now. I don't see the genie getting put back in the bottle, race to empower the network!!!!
Fun with a twist but got me excited of what is to come!
Beautiful words.
Thank a lot for this trustworthy explanation,people are usually contracted or gamblers,they get into something by intuition and not reflexion.Giving them a piece of cheese is the only way to maintain the curious and greedy.well done congrats I whish you a long prosperity.
@dan - You mention that steem will have no fees for the smart contracts of phase 3. Does this imply we're unlikely to see turing completeness like we have in Ethereum?
I would like to know if a Twitter replica site on Steem could be built by third party developers and if yes, how would it make money itself? Do you think it would charge revenue creators a subscription fee? Or will content rewards get siphoned of by the platform itself to fund development?
I would like to know if developers can build apps on Steem for content creators and curators and be paid a part of the steem rewards for the content. This would make building social networks profitable without the need for advertising.
I can't find answers anywhere!
Also, an upvote on a Twitter replica site can mean much less than an upvote on a Yelp or Couchsurfing replica site... Can app builders manage the distribution of Steem rewards differently on their platforms?
In Steem, is an upvote is an upvote is an upvote? Are all upvotes equal no matter what the context? I mean sometimes a small number of upvotes can be of much higher value. Can the upvote system be more sophisticated without creating more cognitive overhead?
Is this type of app a side chain? Or a more straight forward integration with Steem?
Fantastic! This is the (yellow brick) road map I was looking for. Since I first learned of Steemit, I have tried to envision where it would lead. Steembook, Steembay and Steemazon to name a few. But I never imagined, until now, all the real possibilities such as Steemescrow or Steemie's List. Imagine, paying a plumber, who came recomended on Steemie's List with Steem.
Steemit should focus on continuously improving its social media function. Requirements creep often kills projects.
That's right!
Focus on the special features of Steemit, develop quickly.
@dantheman @dan You can't forget this:
The development of BitShares should be a warning, I mean a lot of ideas at the beginning , such as bitSharesDNS, bitSharesX, bitSharesME, bitSharesLOTTO, bitSharesMUSIC, bitSharesVOTE and so on, later, the merger plan, almost all of them have been killed.
Now the consolidation project BitShares 2.0 is only to achieve the original version of the whitepaper.
说得对！
专注于 Steemit 的独特之处，快速发展。
BM （Steemit 上的马甲是：dantheman 和 dan）你不能忘了这一点：比特股的开发应该引以为戒，我的意思是当初的很多点子，比如 bitSharesDNS, bitSharesX, bitSharesME, bitSharesLOTTO, bitSharesMUSIC, bitSharesVOTE 等项目，后来的合并计划几乎把它们全干掉了。
现在合并后的主项目 BitShares 2.0 仅仅实现了原始版白皮书的功能。
The bottom-up approach and the way steemit is gathering people and value first is awesome.
Is there an identification and reputation function planned within steemit as well?
@dan I could not be more jazzed about the long-term prospects for Steemit. Having said that, I'm a little concerned about a lack of focus in the short-term. While execution of the social media aspect has gone remarkably well so far, there are still many traps to be avoided and much improvement to be made before Steemit can expect to become a true contender in the social media space, thus "bootstrapping" the value you reference in your post above. I hope everyone keeps their eye on the social media prize in the short term, and works to perfect it, before taking on some of the more ambitious things that you discuss here. Just my two cents.
The idea is very ambitious, if it will be able to translate that STEEM has a great future.
The cool thing is that Steem.
Develop project. cool
it isn't :)
Good analysis!
A very intriguing concept, not a move I anticipated. The implementation still seems theoretical in my head at the moment, I'll have to think this over.
What I think you're saying is that you almost want to build some new form of an economic system.
I can't wait, that will be so great!
the great information.. I had much learning
Downvoted because, well yes it is a great plan, but the plan is undermined by Steem-related posts and team updates sucking in a big portion of the reward pool.
Very good Dan.
Perhaps "distribute" would be a better word than one of the "bootstrap"s.
Very nice!
Very nice post! I have become increasingly interested in the Steem project since I discovered it. Seems to be off to a great start.
I finally got around to reading the whitepaper. Zero trx fees blew my mind... and incentives for liquidity providers! Your ideas and technology have come a long way since BitSharesX, Dan. Great work Cryptonomex team. I'm looking forward to watching this community grow.
Great plan
Going to Emerald City? wait wut, all I hear is:
Steemit lost my comment, but it was about Emerald City. If you get the reference :P
nice roadmap, and i think it's realistic