Steem - What Have The Hardforks Ever Done For Us?

_{Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay}

This post was inspired by a comment I wrote on @theycallmedan's post Proof Of Brain, Let's Talk About It. If you haven't listened to Dan speak about steem, go check it out, his enthusiasm and analysis are inspiring.

I have thought a lot about steem over the last few days and wanted to break down some of the successes of HF21/22 and some of the things that I think still needing addressing. I'm also going to touch on the future of steem as I see it and the myriad of possibilities.

I know I've been critical in the past, and that criticism has always come from a place of wanting to see steem succeed. And I will not stop being critical when it is warranted to help further the discussion and highlight negative behaviors.

The truth is that certain 'accepted behaviors' under the old system are being addressed somewhat by the economic improvement proposal and the hardforks. It may seem like a slow process for some, but it's a hell of a lot faster than I envisioned.

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What have the hardforks ever done for us?

REG: All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans Hardforks ever done for us?

XERXES: Brought peace.

REG: Oh. Peace? Shut up!
_{Quote from Monty Python's Life of Brian}

Yeah, well they certainly haven't brought peace 😉 but even if you're hurting over reward cuts after the hardforks it's undeniable that the trending page is looking a lot more attractive and the major abusers are being held to account. Even the most famous steem mega-troll has tuned over a new leaf.

What have the hardforks ever done for us (from a 'normies' perspective)?

• HF20 brought in resource credits that effectively killed spam comment farming.

I can't tell you how many comments used to appear on my posts a year ago with one nonsensical sentence in broken English, which was then voted to the top of my comments section. Not a great impression for new steemians who spend long hours writing to see a bunch of BS comments on their post. Thankfully those days are over.

• HF21/22 has brought free downvotes that have so far been utilized in a positive manner driving bidbotted vote stackers from the trending page.

This is massive! It shows the power of our community coming together in consensus. The consensus model of regulation was something that was envisioned from day one and is mentioned in the whitepaper, but everyone was either too scared to use downvotes, or they simply didn't want to sacrifice their voting power.

• Both hardfork 20 & 21 have allowed for the implementation of many technical improvements to streamline the blockchain such as MIRA, the funding of development through the Steem Proposal System and upcoming SMT's & Hive Communities.

What does do all these acronyms mean? Ha ha, I'm not 100% sure to be honest. But to boil it down to easy to understand fundamentals. Some have made witness nodes easier and cheaper to run, while others have set up a way for developers to fund projects on the steem blockchain.

All in all, it seems that there has been a concerted effort to change certain behaviors and cultures on steem. After being initially skeptical, I'm impressed with most people's behavior on #newsteem. I've had my head turned around by the concerted effort to get rid of shtposts on trending and the massive reduction of bidbot use. Even more impressive, is the decision of some bidbots to turn to manual curation to help support content creators while earning from curation rewards for their delegators.

It's a brave New world

The Future of Steem, A Myriad of Possibilities

What does the future hold?

Imagine a steem where every type of content has it's own token and community page. Where content is moderated and filtered to ensure quality is rewarded. The right audience gets to see your work and businesses with something to offer can advertise to the right set of eyes! Sound familiar?

Yes, steemengine are offering something simliar already. But it's an important distinction to make that SMT's will hopefully drive the demand of steem up as the system for creating them will burn considerable amounts of steem. As I understand it, they will also create demand as various people look to leverage the steem blockchain as they will need resource credits and steem power to function. Steemengine does create demand, but in a different way and a portion of profits are going to the site owners. The thing to note between the two, is that SMT's should create increases in steem's price in two ways. Firstly by burning steem when an SMT token is created and secondly they will create demand for steem to be bought to be used to create a token to fuel a community.

I have seen some comments recently talking about the possibility of forking out the reward mechanism of the steem token once SMT's are live/tested to increase steem's scarcity/value further. I have been worried in the past about the possibility of SMT's nullifying steems reward mechanism and I'm not 100% sure where I land on this right at this time. I can see that even if that becomes the case, the steem token will still have utility - through the demand for SP and RC's for community/business interests to create and run SMT tokens/communities - but I personally don't want to see it go the way of no proof of brain on steem. The question for me is; will we need to get rid of steem's reward mechanism with SMT burns and RC leasing creating new demand?

Also, as Dan pointed out in his post, with no active content creators on steem voting witnesses how do we keep a true consensus governance going on steem? I would argue that it is the many and varied opinions of the people who make up the steem community voting witnesses that keeps steem dynamic. Do we really want to give this up?

It's for these reasons, and others, that I'm definitely of the mind that we need to keep pushing steem as a place where people can create, curate and have fun interacting with people all over the world, while being rewarded. This is the dream! This basic functionality of steem is the apple hanging from the tree. It is the USP... whatever you wanna call it. It's the thing that is nowhere on internet 2.0... a truly unique system that the vast majority of the world don't even know exists.

If we forked the voting out of steem in an attempt to boost some other functionality and let all the reward mechanism go to SMT communities, it would be like spending three years hand carving and polishing a gem, then throwing it in the trash because there are one or two flaws.

Thanks for reading.

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