The Future That We Are Building With the Steem Blockchain | Book Club: Skin in the Game

“Alexander said that it was preferable to have an army of sheep led by a lion than an army of lions led by a sheep. Alexander (or whoever produced this probably apocryphal saying) understood the value of the active, intolerant, and courageous minority” - Nassim Taleb, "Skin in the Game"

The future of the Steem blockchain has never been more clear to myself and, I have noticed, from many others based on their actions and the posts they have been putting out recently.

We are already in the middle of this paradigm shift: where the power of Steem comes to fruition in the forms of all the amazing DApps being developed here on the blockchain.

I've been using the Steem Monsters DApp heavily.. It's the perfect example of what is possible on the Steem blockchain with the technology that is already available. Now just imagine how much better this use case looks in a world where SMT technology is available.

Also imagine that in the future we will have so many more users which will inherently drive value to each of these DApps which will again, drive value back to the Steem blockchain... Creating a virtuous cycle of growth.

The Strength of Complex Systems

“Human nature is not defined outside of transactions involving other humans. Remember that we do not live alone, but in packs, and almost nothing of relevance concerns a person in isolation—which is what is typically done in laboratory-style works." - Nassim Taleb "Skin in the Game"

Examing facts and fundamentals on an individual level can be very misleading. Especially as you try and extrapolate those facts to a greater degree of complexity.

“Groups are units on their own. There are qualitative differences between a group of ten and a group of, say, 395,435. Each is a different animal, in the literal sense, as different as a book is from an office building”

This is intensely profound to anyone who is trying to extrapolate the future of the Steem blockchain.

You see, when you try to think of Steem in its current state to Steem in the future, it's impossible to actually know how this is all going to turn out.

We can only extrapolate the future so far before it becomes impossible to predict the actual structure of this whole ecosystem.

To give you a more tangible example, imagine this:

The Steem blockchain is obviously headed in the direction of fragmented communities who will all focus on a handful of DApps that they believe in and use on a regular basis.

Comparative to today where most people are using the Steemit interface and are blogging and commenting through that 1 interface and only using the STEEM token (although, we are already in the midst of the rise of other interfaces and DApps that have begun cultivating very loyal followings to their platforms).

One of the main questions for many Steemians is how content creators, curators and entrepreneurs will earn an income on the Steem blockchain. That is kind of the whole point, right? To earn an income and tokenize the web and provide abundant opportunites to everyone involved.

What I'm trying to get at here is that analyzing the blockchain now and trying to figure out how it's going to look in 12 months or 36 months or 10 years is a fool's game.

The Steem blockchain is going to look radically different in 12 months, let alone 10 years. When we are using the blockchain then and comparing it to now, today will seem like the dark ages - before everyone was actually earning anything of significance and opportunities are few and far between.

We can already see a glimpse with DApps/interfaces/communities like Actifit, Partiko, Steem Monsters, Steepshot, etc. that the opportunities at scale (at scale meaning, hundreds, thousands and tens of thousands of DApps on the Steem blockchain) are immensely more complex with this "higher dimension" of interaction.

“When we focus on commonalities, we get confused, but, at a certain scale, things become different. Mathematically different. The higher the dimension, in other words, the higher the number of possible interactions, and the more disproportionally difficult it is to understand the macro from the micro, the general from the simple units. This disproportionate increase of computational demands is called the curse of dimensionality. (I have actually found situations where, in the presence of small random errors, a single additional dimension may more than double some aspect of the complexity. Going from 1,000 to 1,001 may cause complexity to be multiplied by a billion times.)” - Nassim Taleb, "Skin in the Game"

This post may seem a little scrambled and all over the place, but there is one central idea that I am getting at:

The complexity of the Steem blockchain, in the future scenario of a DApp ecosystem with hundreds, thousands and tens of thousands of DApps all at the immediate fingertips of users will create such an abundant stream of opportunities that we cannot even fathom what that future will look like. We are building the foundational layers for something that is far more complex and filled with opportunities than our little minds can even compute!

And so, I'll leave you with this final quote from Nassim Taleb's book "Skin in the Game" (which is one of my favorite books of all time by the way, I'm almost finished reading it!):

“Individuals don’t need to know where they are going; markets do.

Leave people alone under a good structure and they will take care of things.”