# Hello Steemians,
It has been 6 months, since the existence of Smart media tokens or the SMT concept. Roadmap 2018 is all about pushing this platform to the new limits. Bringing new reforms with some new change. Steem to beat Bitcoin by 2020 or so by Jerry Banfield. There's a lot of pending updates for which everyone are waiting, still waiting. I know updating a platform with 1M+ users isn't a simple game but its also true that it is going to be harder to develop something in an already developed country. New people are joining, abusers are increasing day by day with new tactics to cheat with this system. Abusers are getting richer, new users are just limited to minnow tag. 
https://steemitimages.com/DQmPyGvtaNrADUEGL6fhBKBqvkrGH31cuRiVojjrmvvQPsc/image.png

# Abusers
- The best thing about the decentralized platform is that a handful of person can make everything in their favor. In short, they can play with this system. By the way, these few handful people have a greater stake of steem.
- I know very few people can answer in such situations as few big cats users have a lot of steem and can downvote you with a greater scale just because of their ego which costs zero in real.
- We have been saying that this platform is decentralized, hard to hack, hard to ddos or like other security stuff, but because of this decentralized over-freedom people began to use it and few exploit it in their way.
- We have @cheetah bot and other bots to track the rate of plagiarism but everything went in the dust as these things aren't enough to stop the exploitation of this platform.
- And the bad thing about this over-freedom is that anyone with a high power can make others sit down on knees and accept their policy/agenda.
- We are still facing the similar issues and it seems like we have nothing to cure this. Except for standing-up, raising voice and getting downvoted by abusers.

# Sign up!
- This is a serious issue, after all, it takes 7 days to get your account verified. Back in September 2017, it took me 8-9 days to get my account verified.
- Now after 8 months of the span, the sign-up process is still slow and the only thing that was changed in this period of time is the signup webpage where you can see additional logos of d.tube, d.live, d.sound, etc.
- We still have few options like paying 1 steem to get the account quickly verified but the problem is that very few new joiners know about steem/sbd and 60% of them do not have steem to pay. 
- The invitation is one of the good alternatives but doesn't this limits the number of people joining us? We need to speed up the sign-up process or else we are about to see a tragic downfall in new members. Bad thing is that the tragic condition is right now!


# Promotion
- I still don't see any good promotion of Steemit except Jerry Banfield but that is to is not enough. We are having few meetups which are gaining some media attention but that is done by the user's and not by steemit itself.
- Bad thing is that people still look us (steemit) as a Ponzi scheme or scam. And it is getting hard to win their trust. Till now I made  8 people join steemit and the bad thing is that all these 8 guys left and are not active anymore.
- Well, I am trying my best but I will be more happy to see steemit people doing this on a greater scale. This will benefit us only.

# Roadmaps
- I have witnessed the two Roadmaps that is of 2017 and 2018, and as per my experience, we achieved only 30-40% of all the goals.
- All these Roadmaps looks good on paper but practicing it will take real guts. I know we can achieve it but if we get late then there will be no good of completing the homework after the submission date. 
- We have very limited time to make all things right but most of our teammates in steemit loves to fight only and most of these fights end with no conclusion.
- Okay, fight is good but with no conclusion, it's just a waste of time.
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