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My wife started work this week and since she has to leave quite early for the bus, our daughter has been getting up at 530 am (much too early) to make sure she doesn't miss her. This means I have to get up also and since my only real sit down time to write is after 10 pm at night, I haven't had much sleep before I am off to work.

I am still at work at the moment, have a bit ahead still and the day has been painstakingly long as what I have had to work on requires attention and detailed precision. It is mentally draining and other than a rushed lunch, I have been sitting staring at an editing screen for 9 hours. 

Just waiting on the final render now. 

>There have been several "finals" but the customer has made changes that have meant reworking several times. They pay, so that is fine.  

https://i.imgur.com/1A6X0cC.jpg

I actually quite like the video creation and while I dislike the sound of my own voice, the editing process is a bit of fun and the immediate view of changes is nice, as normally the feedback for the projects I work on has a lot of lag. An action can take months for a reaction to be visible and in that time, there have been literally thousands of other actions that all have various types of influence on outcomes. Often the actions are made across departments, external consultants and on the customer side without a great deal of transparency, which muddies the waters and adds noise to the evaluations.

I don't mind this so much as I tend to enjoy the process of detangling outcomes from the events that led into them and then predicting the future possibilities based on the findings. It is one of the great things about Steem as there are so many "data points" to read from and even if I don't get everything correct, I think my predictions have been relatively decent up until this point. 

Of course, my long-term stances are going to take more time to enact and while everyone is in a rush to the moon, not all outcomes are able to be rushed. 

As I commented to @justineh last night:

>No matter how revolutionary this blockchain is, what drives people away is not the price or talk of Steem topics, not the quality or lack thereof of content or the complication - it is the incessant undermining of the community by members of the community itself. WE are our own worst enemies.

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We really are.

Justine said in her [post] (https://steemit.com/steem/@justineh/random-take-away-s-about-steem-from-the-bitcoin-is-conference)

>Each individual that own bitcoin benefits by the success of bitcoin.. so they help it be successful. The stakeholders and block producers contribute to things that benefit the ecosystem.. they sponsor spokesman who seem to represent it well, they help to fund outreach and every single person at that conference knew what bitcoin was, and what it did. We need some of that personal responsibility on Steem.

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Yes. Personal responsibility.

> every single person at that conference knew what bitcoin was, and what it did.

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This is part of the noise in the system that muddies the Steem waters because while Bitcoin is simple, the Steem blockchain has a wide assortment of use cases, application potential, growing communities, layers of tokenization and a diverse range of people from all kinds of backgrounds, many of whom will never explore the full-range of functionality that Steem can offer. On top of this, the motivations and incentives that drive users on Steem has a great deal more complexity.

There is one other fundamental difference between the two and that is, there is a direct financial cost to own Bitcoin - no one really gets it for free. Even the early miners had to have a mining rig of some kind and, they couldn't use their phone on a limited data plan. 

Being able to earn Steem by interpersonal interaction is quite revolutionary, however it does suffer the problem of resource competition and on Steem, this is very visible. While you have absolutely no idea how much Bitcoin I own (not much), you do have a very good idea of how much Steem and all it takes is one click on my wallet. Not only that, you can also see how much I earn on a post and, how much I have earned historically, all tied to my name. This goes beyond resource competition and adds the social competition into the fray, as well as the human emotions, like jealousy.

Bitcoin doesn't suffer the same fate, especially in the smaller amounts and as said, we are our own worst enemies. Because of the transparency of the Stem ecosystem, the community has to face the harshness of social success and failure publicly whereas most other crypto projects have no truly public interface that connects the userbase, at least not at this level and breadth.

And as I also commented to Justine:

>everyone has a voice here of some sort and just like on social medias, the loudest voices are not the ones that are working toward improvement, they are the ones searching for attention by any means possible and the path of least resistance is drama.

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All of the Steem dirty laundry is aired and worst than that, many of the loudest "airings" within the community are from those who do not have a wide or long perspective on Steem. What I find are the ones who *truly* consider Steem across the four pillars of *consumer, creator, investor and developer,* are not only the most level-headed in their approach even when critical, they are also those who are the most positive on the future success.

>I agree completely... and I don’t know how to fix it.
@justineh

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And, *here's the rub.*

>Responsibility

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While Justine can't fix Steem herself, like everyone else, she can always be part of the solution, not the problem. I see that Steem is quickly maturing in an immature industry and when it comes to how to improve it, it is going to depend on what one wants out of the blockchain. If someone wants this place to be a platform of content creators who get rewarded by the community, the first thing that needs to happen is the realization that some content creators need to be singled out and supported highly enough to attract other talent. We need influencers.

But, it isn't enough to just have influencers as the price of Steem needs to be high enough that an influencer can *get paid adequately,* and that means a higher price of Steem, which requires investors who hold to produce scarcity. This requires investors who see the value in Steem, outside of the fiat equivalent, those who like to be here regardless of price and, these people need to be supported. This is hopefully what the EIP will encourage more of, but that isn't enough either.

Because the investors will need to look long and in order to increase the demand and userbase, applications and development need to take place to create compelling reasons for users to not only arrive here to earn, but *consume* from our resource pool. 

While not there yet, the thing that is going to empower Steem is not the inflation pool, it is the content and experience we can offer with the potential to get a return on the consumption. This creates an economy and while many might not see it yet, it needn't be that far away if, people take some of that responsibility to add more now than they extract so that later, the extraction can be less at a much higher value. 

Most Steem users fail the marshmallow test.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]

*Just after the render finished, the customer emailed another change for the video. Consumers don't mind paying for getting what they want - we do it daily in our everyday lives - on Steem many think everything should come for free.* 

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