Despite bitcoin being popular as form of payment in stores around the world, the reality is that the transaction cost, speed and ease of use prevents it from being used as a transaction medium. By this very simple definition, it cannot be considered money if people can't use it in way that their brain is naturally accustom to. I want to give you why STEEM is an unstoppable force that will revolutionize money.

STEEM as a form of money

Money, for as long as it has existed within our minds, and as a socially acceptable construct, must have several properties.

1. It must have no fees to pass from one person to another
2. It cannot be counterfeited
3. It must be widely accepted and recognized.

If we think about each time we spend cash, we can freely give it from one person to another with zero fees, instantly and we almost never worry about counterfeit money. This is what made paypal so popular in the early 2000s, and what makes Venmo increasingly popular today. In conjunction with that, we are also supremely aware of each time we have to pay a fee to move money and how frustrating it is to pay the fee. Examples include paying for a money order, paying a 3% surcharge to counter usage fees for your debit or credit cards and so on.

Yet we have to accept this, because there is no other way around it - until the blockchain was created. Now I won't got into all of that because that information is out there already. Instead, I want to suggest that STEEM is the future base currency of the internet and the troubles that we will face as we become that currency.

Parallels and examples from real life, and why STEEM will be the defacto base currency of the internet.

Throughout history, technologies have emerged that revolutionize humanity for the better. Certain key technologies have caused what is equated to in the stock market, as a gap in price, upwards. David Morris, a Technology Journalist from The University of Iowa spoke at a TEDx event 3 years ago in 2015 and compared blockchain in the following way, which I think is a brilliant way to look at it.

BLOCKCHAIN WILL DO FOR MONEY, WHAT....
The car did for transportation
The telephone did for communication

How accurate are these statements?

Lets look at each one and see if we can draw an accurate parallel. First we need to establish how money works in today's age.

Money and how it travels from one place to another

Money needs to circulate, otherwise it would not be money and it would be as useful as the extra shot glasses collected throughout your vacations.

In order for money to move from one place to another, historically, someone would need to take it and move it for you, which may take days, weeks, months, depending on where it was being sent.

Today, money moves significantly faster, but most of us won't realize that it still takes a few days to clear. Checks still take up to 5 days to clear, bank wires still take 24 hours, etc,. and everything else is setup on a system of credit rather than money. It is important to emphasize that we are talking about moving money, not moving credit!

In order for money to move from one part of the world to another, the money itself must pass through several services and verification methods to authenticate it as it travels. This is where the concept of a trusted 3rd party comes into play. Most often, the trusted party is either a private bank or a clearing house. Both act as middle men who help facilitate the movement of money from one individual to another. This service is not free and it often means that a service fee is often associated with them. Despite paying for the service, the fastest transaction will take at least 1 business day to clear in a well developed modern society. Examples of this would be wire transfers, direct deposits or services such as western union.

The only other way to move faster, would be to utilize a centralized credit system rather than money, such as Visa or Mastercard etc.

Now that we understand money, lets look at other examples in real life to compare to:

The car and transportation

Before the invention of the car, land travel was limited by trains and horses. Trains required large banks to fund and operate, which is restrictive. Horses on the other hand, although ancient, allowed us the freedom to move where we wanted to, but maintaining a horse was a rather uncommon thing and time consuming task for most of the population.

When oil was discovered, and the combustion engine developed, the car became the king of personal transportation and people knew this. A whole industry was created around the car and there was a massive expansion of the oil industry as well as massive sponsorship of public roadways. The car literally revolutionized transportation with an intense amount of speed and flexibility when compared to the horse. The car became the new standard and in comparison, the only thing that could make the car obsolete is teleportation and helicopters, one does not exist, and the other is literally too dangerous and expensive to be in common use right now.

The car revolutionized transportation.

Telephone and Communication

Before the telephone, or rather, any form of electronic communication, messages were sent physically by messengers which took days to deliver. When the telephone was invented, the technology grew rapidly, and the infrastructure needed to support it grew rapidly. Much like cars, the technology was so good, that it was adapted rapidly. Messages could be sent instantly over long distances. Overtime the original telephone technology was overcome by wireless telephones and the only way for the wireless telephone to become obsolete is telepathy, which, for all intents and purposes, is not feasible for our pewny human brains.

The telephone revolutionized communication.

Lastly, blockchain and money

Money, as we established, takes days to move from one location to another. At the end of the day, we can be charged some rather high fees to move money around. Wire transfers cost up to $50 for a full transaction, western union is based on a percentage of what you send, and all other methods that are "free", costs several days of waiting.

But just like the telephone and the car, blockchain will change all of that and turn the movement of money into an instantaneous thing and STEEM will become a key component to that.

Why STEEM is in position to transform the way money behaves

Steem has already established itself as the number one blockchain that has scalable bandwidth through its dPoW. This modularity allows it to be controlled by the people through elected witnesses rather than the mess of what is associated with pure decentralization, which is often a red herring in disguised.

Steem transaction times are extrenely fast and for all intents and purposes, it is near instantaneous with consistent 3 second confirmations times. Steem also provides built in security and trustworthiness through its reputation counter and the ability to power up your steem, which doubles as a form of safeguard from theft. It also allows anonymity if you elect to do so.

Steem has reached many parts of the world and provided instant access to steem coins (once the account is created) .

Steem bypassess the need for clearing houses and puts the control of money back into the hands of the user since a trusted 3rd party is no longer needed.

The infrastructure of steem has been laid out already and the technology has been developed. The only thing we are missing is the marketing needed to inform the public and to further the spread of this technology on a large scale. This is where the efforts of the steemit.com team and any other developer in the past year has worked tremendously hard to achieve.

While the people on steemit.com often find fault in the blockchain through abuse by individuals, the grander picture is that it simply does not matter because the scale of the blockchain is still rather small. All of the existing abuses is scattered background noise from the lack of clarity that small usership brings.

Once other platforms fall, the migration of users on to Steembased services will be explosive and the rewards pool will be significantly harder to manipulate.

Possible future struggles

When someone logs onto any of the steem derived networks today, they might see a great future potential once they understand it, but they will likely see a comical current usage fraught with abuses from individuals that appear to be circle jerking each other for upvotes. It is important that we evolve out of this behavior, and the only way to do this, is to increase the number of users on the network before mass marketing occurs.

This is principal reason why I think the steemit.com developers have not yet marketed themselves. They are working tirelessly to perfect the communities feature and SMT's which is the main product of the steem blockchain.

The next difficulty that is commonly suggested is the "rewards pool rape". Without going into the technical aspects of it, the rewards pool is created out of inflation, which will reduce from 9.5% to 0.95% in approximately 20 years. In all, approximately 48,000 new steem is added to the rewards pool each day, which means that as usership grows, the amount of people fighting for that rewards pool grows and grows each day, and each person controls less of the rewards pool.

The reality is that the only way to have access to the rewards pool is to interact with the blockchain community. If you choose not to, then you are simply riding the wave of the growth of the platform. Everyone else is fighting to earn coins instead of purchasing them. The ability to earn the coins though, is a key component of the blockchain since it allows access to the funds without buying into, something that allows global growth. People do not understand the gravity of this right now since their vision is short sighted to themselves and how they can earn their own coins.

In conclusion, STEEM is in a good position to be the de facto base currency of the internet, and it is important to not lose sight of this. While the steemit.com developers appear to be looking away from the website and letting it destroy itself, the reality is that they are focused on SMTs and communities. If they do not launch this product, everything on this blockchain will essentially becomes a novelty item and just an experiment.

STEEM SHIRT GIVE AWAY!

I've worked in conjunction with @edgecelize to develop a fashionable way to wear your addiction to the steem blockchain! I want to team up with users to give away some free shirts as a way to promo the blockchain! If you run contests for SBD giveaways with a large connection to users and want to help me promo the shirt, by running a giveaway contest, give me a shout! Check out the link below to my announcement and reach out to me!

LINK TO MY SHIRT GIVE AWAY!