Given @jack's excitement for the disruptive potential of Bitcoin, and his pioneering work in social media applications, it seems quite odd that he doesn't seem to be aware of the only blockchain protocol with tens of thousands of daily active users across multiple social applications. Steem is far and away the largest and most active social network on a blockchain ... and @jack hasn't even heard of it despite being currently enamored with Bitcoin.

Maybe Jack is just stuck in 2008. Perhaps he doesn't realize that Steem is what Bitcoin would be if it was designed to power web applications, instead of being designed to be "digital gold." Don't get me wrong, I love Bitcoin too. In fact, Steem has far more in common with Bitcoin than other blockchain protocols like Ethereum and EOS. It wasn't designed to compete with or replace Bitcoin, it was designed to do that which Bitcoin cannot.

Application-Specific

Like Bitcoin, Steem is an application-specific blockchain. Bitcoin's "specific application" is a distributed ledger with an incentivization mechanism that is designed to maximize the number of people who are competing to reproduce the database and authenticate the sanctity of the information stored on it. In order to accomplish these objectives its creators designed a token that would be increasingly difficult to earn so that people would be motivated to "mine" in the present based on the idea that whatever they earn today will be worth more tomorrow. But designing friction and difficulty into your software is the last thing you want to do if you want to encourage its users to create and share content.

These were all fantastic innovations that helped introduce the world to digital currency. Since Bitcoin is optimized for these specific functions it can facilitate token transfers to anywhere in the world in relatively little time, at relatively little cost. But the network is still far too slow to be used in web applications where users expect instantaneous responses, and because there are still significant costs associated with transferring Bitcoin, it can't be used to power applications that are free-to-use like Facebook or ... Twitter.

Smart Contracts ... Not so Smart?

Now imagine that any developer, anywhere in the world, could add whatever code they wanted to the Bitcoin network and force that network to execute that code in addition to all the code that handles token transfers and block production. The cost of running the network and the time it takes to process transactions would skyrocket! And yet that's precisely what Ethereum chose to do. That's why, despite massive investments of time, money, and engineering effort, Ethereum has zero applications with any real usage aside from maybe a few dozen engineers. Meanwhile, thanks to Steem's speed and fee-less nature, hundreds of amazing developers have figured out how to leverage this hyper-efficient ledger to power all kinds of amazing applications like steemmonsters.com, d.tube, and steemhunt.com. All without the need for so-called "Smart Contracts."

Steem: A Protocol for Web Apps

Steem took a very different approach. Steemit, Inc., the team I am a part of and that developed the protocol, essentially asked what needed to be changed about Bitcoin to enable it to power existing web applications. That meant that speed and efficiency would be key. Proof-of-Work was eliminated and the number of canonical block producers (the computers that host the database) was reduced to 20. Instead of competing with one another to perform more work, block producers compete to reliably produce blocks every 3 seconds in exchange for a salary in the form Steem Power; the form that stake takes on the Steem blockchain. The end result is a blockchain protocol that produces blocks every 3 seconds, every time.

The Importance of Stake

Since other protocols like Ethereum weren't programmed to understand "stake" the only option they had for charging people to use their software was a transaction fee. Since Steem does have stake, it could be programmed to permit a certain number of free transactions based on how much stake someone holds and not based on per-transaction fees. Think about it, if someone has already paid $1,000 to acquire stake in your protocol, do you really need to charge them another 50 cents just to send a token from one account to another, when that barely places any burden on the blockchain? Of course, the blockchain doesn't make these decisions arbitrarily. There is a first-of-its-kind Resource Credit system built into Steem that ensures the system is cryptoeconomically sustainable.

Because Steem is so efficient, you can actually do quite a lot with the small amount of Steem Power you get just for signing up through signup.steemit.com. With the 15 Steem Power users get, they can have the types of app experiences they have become accustomed to without needing to purchase any additional stake. Best of all, from the moment they begin using Steem interfaces like steemit.com, they can begin earning upvotes and the STEEM token rewards that they confer. To date, over $60,000,000 US Dollars worth of Steem has been distributed to people all over the world. That's $60,000,000 more than Twitter has distributed to its users ;).

Too Complicated

Yes, the system is complicated, but so is Bitcoin. Maybe that's why it took Jack so long to see the awesome potential of that protocol. It takes time to understand this crazy new world the blockchain community is pioneering. Perhaps we simply need to be patient and be there to answer any questions. After all, one of the biggest challenges in life is not having all your questions answered, but learning what questions to ask.

What Do You Think?

Why do you think @jack doesn't know about Steem? If you'd like to help bring Steem to his attention, write your own post about why he should look into Steem, and I'll be sure to share the best posts on steemit.com and on twitter.