One year ago today I wrote my first post. I explained why the Dot Com bubble is nothing like the crypto bubble. Little did I know this was PERFECT timing. January 18, 2018 was the EXACT day that the bear market began after Bitcoin spiked to $20k the day before. How crazy is that?

Looks like I promoted that post for $1.58. Which as we all know is 1.58 SBD which was actually worth $21.22 at the time. I wanted to spread my message to all of you, and I failed :D. That post paid out 3 cents... lol, but I didn't let that get me down.

Bitcoin Centralization

You know what else I said in that post? Bitcoin wastes too much energy and can't scale, which is why alt-coins will take over. I still believe in the flippening, but Bitcoin wastes no energy. That energy is well spent securing a trustless network in the face of a zero-trust economy.

This is especially true now in the winter. Honestly, I should own mining equipment. The electric energy lost from POW mining is dispersed as heat, so if you already needed the heat anyway you can mine Bitcoin for free. Imagine cooking food (already has happened) or heating your home/car. If you were already going to pay for these services anyway why not mine Bitcoin while you're at it? Free money.

Most miners spend a lot of overhead investing in power supplies that have very low resistance. These power supplies are efficient as possible by generating less heat. What if you wanted the heat in the first place? Then you could create a cheaper product that was even better at doing the function you wanted it to do.

This is how we can decentralize POW. It wasn't possible before because the tech was getting outdated every 3 months. A warehouse full of mining equipment can not compete with decentralized mining equipment that re-purposes the heat lost.

Steemit has Problems, I have the answers.

Ah yes, my arrogance had no limit. Like many of us, I saw that there were serious design flaws and I wanted to help fix them. Unfortunately, also like many others, I did not fully understand the technicalities of the blockchain, and many of my "solutions" were either impossible to implement or simply impractical. Still, one has to start somewhere and I'm proud of my entry-level flailing.

It took me a while to figure out promoting one's post was for suckers. You gotta buy the votes for better ROI. I promoted for 3.13 SBD ($29.77) and I got back $1.32. This post would have made money if I didn't get flagged at the last second by @rewardpoolrape. What a winner.

This account has since powered down to minnow but at the time had massive stake. It's the only time I've been flagged (at least the only time that I've cared). I complained about it the next day just like any frustrated plankton would.

I now think that account @rewardpoolrape was making more of a political statement about this blockchain. If you're allowed to act like he did, then that's exactly what people are going to do. He showed us aggressively first-hand what stake-holders can do if left unchecked.

A few weeks later, the market cap of Ripple XRP spiked to $124 billion on Jan 4, 2018. Today, the market cap of the entire cryptosphere is less than that ($114 billion). Pretty crazy amirite? Price action is fickle, and the cryptosphere is in a much better position today than it was back then from a developmental/awareness perspective.

Steemit Virtual Government: Find Consensus

Does Steem still have daunting problems? Of course. However, I've since learned that all of our problems can be solved with organization, communication, development, and reaching consensus. Many of the problems we think we have are artificial in nature. Back then, I had no idea how disconnected Steemit is from the Steem blockchain. The vast majority of our problems can be solved without any kind of changes to the core platform.

Steem is a Lego set, and that set is not corrupted, we've simply built a few products using the Legos, and it is those products that are corrupted. There is nothing stopping anyone from making a better product.

Simplicity is the beauty of blockchain. Your reputation is not stored on the blockchain. Steemit Inc. interprets your reputation on their centralized servers by interpreting the blockchain. Any developer can create their own interpretation of the blockchain. There are no limits and there is no censorship.

Steem Legos

• Operations that store text (blogs/JavaScript)
• upvotes/downvotes (power over inflation)
• Four different cryptographic levels of security to sign transactions with.

Steem Limitations

• Three second blocks
• Resource Credits
• Block producer republic (20 witnesses)

That's pretty much it. This is a good summary of the Steem blockchain. It isn't social media. It's very very basic but you can use those basic building blocks to make pretty much anything, as long as it doesn't break the limitations. What will we build next? The possibilities are limitless.

Where will we be next year? I look forward to it.

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