Soil for gardens and communities

Things are moving faster with the EIP than I predicted they would which is great to see and while there are plenty of naysayers still, I feel that there is a much more dynamic and unpredictable ecosystem developing. What do you think?

The other day I wrote a post about the steem tap cosing and last night about the loosening of purse strings and this is what has been happening. While the author rewards were tightened up, the narrow distribution of Steem that was coming through the bots is now spreading a little wider and to the point that the bot have to change their behaviors.

As humans, we are always going to maximize (on average) but the goal is that maximization behaviors should work in the best interest of the larger community to support growth, development and the deserving citizens within. It is not an easy task and since the inception of token-based economics, we have struggled to differentiate the value of the goods, and the representative token. What this means is that people tend to collect the representation of the thing, not the thing itself.

This is why ownership is so important and why at least a few of us on Steem drive for the ownership of our digital real estate. Steem is the first layer of ownership on Steem of course and it is likely will always be the most important because it is voting stake in the direction of Steem, and the provider of bandwidth through Resource Credits.

However, SMT-esque tokens upon the blockchain add layers of ownership at a more granular level where users can own their community and experience within it. We have seen on the SCOT tribes how those who have taken ownership of a token in a narrow scope of a tribe have taken responsibility for it and targeted their content toward it.

When people feel they own their experience, they tend to treat it well as it is their own house and where they eat, sleep and live. The actual meaning of "economy" is household management and those who see Steem as their home are also the ones who generally look after it as they have to have a longer view so therefore the care and maintenance is part of the experience. People who run what they own into the ground will rarely realize a high price at sale.

But, Steem is an ecosystem with many players, activities, paths and approaches and due to the decentralized and at least partial obscurity of identity, there is also a lot of incentive to find the fast and easy way to reach personal goals. Personal goals might be to buy a block of land with earnings like @surfermarly did, or buy a meal. What people have to recognize is that usually, personal goals trump those of the community.

The challenge is finding the balance so that there is not only the chance to have some personal goals satisfied, but that chance is increased by actions that support the health of the economy so that others can have a chance too. This means that the road to maximization for the individual has to also contain components that support the maximization of other's who deserve to have their goals met, because they support the ecosystem too.

What this means is that a healthy economy is one that encourages a healthy economy and just like a garden, the weeds have to be extracted so the flowers can grow. The beautiful outcome desired by the gardener contains the process of systematically removing weeds that strangle the opportunity of the flowers by competing for resources.

The beauty of the Steem Blockchain is that STEEM isn't the flower at all, it is the soil in which the flowers can grow - it is the land - the real estate. What gardeners choose to build upon it is up to them and while one group might create a forest, another could build a place that becomes a plant-less desert. But, the soil can be repurposed over and over as new groups come in to try their hand at tilling the ground. This is a representation of what SMTs will be where some will be successful and others will fail.

Now, what likely happens is that the successful gardens that grow will start to cross-pollinate at several levels as they are all actually rooting-in to the same soil, the same digital earth. This cross-pollination will come through the collaborative compounding and opensource sharing of innovation and process and the movement of userbases across gardens, like bees across fields.

The massive potential of Steem for developers, contributors and consumers is the ability to inhabit the same digital earth and share resources, experience and have access to a highly diverse and distributed group of people to cooperate, compete and collaborate with to create a meta-matrix that contains a host of independent experience matrices all intertwined.

This is much like how the global economy works now except, the majority of ownership is unknown but highly narrow, and the majority of decisions and transactions are made in the darkness. Steem is an opportunity to build it all again with a much higher level of distribution of ownership at many layers and, with a great deal of transparency of both owner and decision.

There is a massive amount of value in this and it is this direction that the global population is looking to go as we speak, we are just ahead of the curve. The questions of privacy, content ownership, economic collapse and massive disparity between groups is continually highlighting the need for change while on Steem we are creating an experience of change.

This is not a fast or easy process of course because as much as there are ideals, we all carry an experience and habits from the past that are difficult to change. Making decisions at the code level is relatively easy but at the cultural level much harder to enact a shift quickly unless through force.

As I said to @smooth in a comment last night;

People usually act on default and the default plays need to be in the best interest of the ecosystem.

I feel that the latest changes have "forced" a shift in thinking and the incentive to support the shift through economic reward and social development so that there is again a chance for success for those who are supportive of the success of others. It is still self-interested action, it is just that the action of self-interest is more in the best interest of the ecosystem.

The default moves of maximization are far from clear now which increases the randomization and while the Steem tap closed in some respects, the pressure that the code applied is forcing the pipework to leak. These leakages are possibility where more diversified and unpredictable behavior can earn and, in general it will be through support of others.

These leaks are flowing into the fields and in time, they will be the lifeblood of the gardens that will grow on Steem at the layers above the soil. In time, the soil will raise a highly diversified collection of garden experiences that all that walk the digital earth can enjoy and perhaps, it is going to spill out far afield and into the analogue life too.

I know, I have always been relatively idealistic and positive about the future of Steem but if I am going to spend my time working toward something, being negative on the future possibility is not the inspiration that helps me be my best. We are not out of the woods yet by any means, but the paths of improvement are widening.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]