Three years ago today the very first Steem block was produced and since that time the blockchain has continued to produce blocks every 3 seconds nearly without interruption despite constant growth in users and applications.
Community
Its first year in operation, Steem saw rapid growth due to the adoption of steemit.com, still the largest blockchain-powered social application in the world. That rapid growth led to Steem becoming the fastest and most transacted blockchain in the world by the end of 2017. But these are just vanity metrics. The most valuable metric was that we were building an amazing, hyper-engaged community. Best-in-class specifications are certainly important when you’re talking about a platform for building applications, but equally as important is an active community of users and developers. In retrospect, year two was really about reaching an inflection point of users and developers that would set the stage for the massive growth in Steem applications which distinguish Steem’s 3rd year in operation.
Dominating the Rankings
Steem apps are now dominating the rankings on stateoftheapps.com. Gaming applications like steemmonsters.com are showing the world that Steem is about more than just great social applications like Partiko, Busy and Esteem. These games are leveraging Steem’s unparalleled support for Soft Consensus to offer features that people previously believed required Smart Contracts that are difficult to code and expensive to execute. They demonstrate in objective terms that Steem is actually better for application developers of all types than the most hyped general-purpose protocols.
Scaling
This year we’ve made unparalleled strides with respect to addressing the real scaling challenges that blockchains with actual usage (of which Steem is far ahead) are facing.
Resource Credit System
The Resource Credit system was added to Steem in Hardfork 20 and that system has been functioning so well … nobody even talks about it. This system furthered Steem’s lead as the most advanced, sustainable, and scalable freemium blockchain in the world by implementing a market-based system on-chain which ensures that the amount of resources consumed by users is sustainable and scalable.
Free Account Creation
At the same time, this advanced system also enabled a revolutionary blockchain feature that no other chain has managed to accomplish even still: the ability for any stake-holder to create free accounts that are still capable of transacting. Any one with enough Steem Power now has the ability to create free accounts and give those accounts to those who want to join our community, helping to cement Steem’s position as the #1 onramp to cryptocurrency. At the same time, the Resource Credit system functions seamlessly in the background to ensure that these new accounts cannot bloat the blockchain.
MIRA
Soon, Steem developers will be releasing yet another major scaling solution called MIRA that will enable the blockchain to be run on commodity-hardware and not in RAM. As the only blockchain servicing web applications that provide real-time feedback with thousands of daily active users, the Steem developers have had to solve the real scaling challenges that application developers actually face. Most high performance blockchains run entirely in RAM which works great … until people actually use them. Once they do, running a node that stores an entire blockchain in RAM becomes prohibitively expensive.
Node Cost Reductions
Steem is nowhere close to hitting its limits in terms of transaction throughput, instead the cost of running nodes was the true scaling bottleneck. If no one can afford to use your blockchain, it doesn’t really matter how many transactions it can perform a second. By moving the blockchain to commodity-hardware we can ensure that the costs of maintaining nodes increases at a far more sustainable pace so that we can scale to the next level. There is no silver bullet to scaling. It’s about many lead bullets, fired in the proper sequence.
MIRA essentially resolves the scaling challenge of sustainable node-cost. With that out of the way, when transaction throughput becomes a true bottleneck, focus can shift entirely to integrating the necessary solutions. Such solutions could even be come from general-purpose protocol developers who will be forced to tackle those challenges long before Steem will thanks to its application-specificity.
Smart Media Tokens
Unfortunately, one important deadline was missed, and that was the release of the Smart Media Tokens protocol. Much of the work on this protocol is complete and once MIRA is released, the Steemit Blockchain Team will refocus on that project. We know that there are a great many people who can’t wait to launch their very own cryptocurrency that leverages Steem’s lightning fast block times, fee-less transfers, and revolutionary Proof-of-Brain algorithm. That's precisely why it was so important to shift focus to MIRA and ensure that Steem would be able to support all of the transactions that will come from the release of SMTs.
Every year of Steem’s life has been full of new developments and progress to an entirely new plateau of usage. While things never go completely according to plan, Steem’s ability to outpace the competition where it matters has been astounding. While we, the Steem community, have certainly seen our share of trials and tribulations, Steem has always continued to chug along every 3 seconds, allowing us to emerge stronger from all the challenges.
Year 4
The blockchain world is far too challenging and volatile to make accurate predictions. Year after year, Steem continues to surprise even us, the team that launched it. What we do know is that no other blockchain has undergone such heavy usage, for such a long period of time, and managed to keep up with the demand without skipping a beat. Not only that, but improve. Steem has 20 Hardforks under its belt, and another on the horizon that will introduce a worker proposal system into Steem (the SteemDAO) and the first Hardfork built by a community developer: @blocktrades.
We can’t say what year four will have in store for Steem, but we can say that thanks to MIRA, our amazing community of developers, and our vibrant community of users, the Blockchain of Opportunity is positioned to thrive.
The Steemit Team
Let's see...
Since Steem launched 3 years ago, it has gone from a Top-5 coin on coinmarketcap and fallen all the way down to around 40th-50th place, depending on the day.
Steem was #1 on Block'tivity in terms of operations, now it is 5th or 6th (depending on the day) with 1.2 million operations avg, while EOS is #1 with over 19 million operations.
https://blocktivity.info/
And then, if we look at some recent independent rankings of the Steem blockchain...
We can see that the CCID rates it #10 currently (it was #2 a year ago).
https://www.ccn.com/why-bitcoin-plunged-to-15th-in-chinas-bizarre-crypto-rankings
The recent letter ratings that appear on coinmarketcap give steem a "C" rating, which is only one grade above an "F" (there are no "D" ratings) and currently puts roughly 73 other projects ahead of steem with higher ratings.
https://app.flipsidecrypto.com/fcas-scores
Taking all of this in (and much more), and the last few years don't really seem like we are improving all that much...
With the current mindset, it will only going down to oblivion.
Not a single "big player" can't figure out simple math:
There is X coins pumped into the system every day, worth about 10-15k $ at the current rate.
Those 10-15k could be easily given to some influencers (take some from Patreon) or already successful websites (GuruShots, eRepublik, whatever...), or real marketing experts or any reasonable expert.
How many of those could be hired per day? The math is simple, about 50.
Instead of taking some experts, we are recapitulating fallen East-European economies from the 1980's.
If you want to turn your 1.000.000 Steem into 3 Million $ instead of 0.3 Million, go there and:
Be professional, stop living in that echo chamber and wake up
According to Alexa:
Well said!
Have you tried getting any of these ideas in front of the steem team?
oh my, such trickery,
you can't do that
BECAUSE ITS WRONG (thats what im guessing why they don't ....)
gods damn where do i find a steemit logo bare and blank here ...
EOS is a network that is full of almost entirely gambling services. It has potential, yeah, but those transactions are nothing to brag about when you look a bit deeper into them.
These coin ranking sites aren't really that useful when it comes to telling whether the project is actually good or not. Most just take into consideration volume and the number of exchanges they're listed on, then price.
All that said, the last three years alone in crypto have been drastically different. A lot has changed, and a lot of coins have been heavily punished by the rise and fall of the market. Every coin still has a few years left until we really see which ones last and make an impact; let's not forget that people bought up utter shitcoins from ICOs, shit like Verge, and the rest, and are still doing so. A lot of that volume is dumb money.
There are loads more coins around now too so it's unreasonable to expect it to stay in the top 3
Is it unreasonable to expect it to be in the Top 20? At this pace steem will be outside the Top 100 by this time next year. Currently 54th.
Great post, @andrachy! This year will be very exciting and super productive.
Happy Birthday Steem and Steemit inc. We started the distribution of commemorative badges to our
oldiesSteemians.We wish a long live to our favorite blockchain and, for sure, all the projects and developments you mention will contribute. Thanks for what you are doing at Steemit inc.
Happy Birthday! 🎉🎈🎂🎉🎈
Steem has such a cool story, it's a blockchain underdog that keeps on pushing along minding it's own business, soon enough though, people will have to turn their heads towards Steem and plug in or they could be left behind.
Thank you so much for all that you have done for the world opening up this amazing site, it has literally changed my life and the lives of others on the platform. I love all of you!
Happy Birthday Steem! <333 Changed all our lives with so many unforgettable moments
Hopefully we have many more years, full of success and moon style growth
@steemitblog,
First Happy B'dy STEEM! Then I am quoting this phase and I understood why MIRA first!
That's precisely why it was so important to shift focus to MIRA and ensure that Steem would be able to support all of the transactions that will come from the release of SMTs.Let's focus on year 4, hope we could see huge improvements and more DAPPs + SMT here!
Cheers~
Wow, so much has been achieved and created. One gets the feeling that steem is loved by those who steer the ship. Thanks so much to all of you who work so hard and share creativity and skill for the good of all of us. Happy Birthday:):):)
Happy birthday Steem ;)
Sorry but you forget to mention @steemhunt ;) which is one of the fastest grown dapp built on steeemit ;)
Right, and Brooklyn has a bridge for sale so I hear.
Happy to be able to say that I've been with Steem for most of its journey so far! But even more exciting times ahead!
Right on! I can't wait until the price of Steem goes back up to where it was on day 1, that would be an exciting moment!!
"The Resource Credit system was added to Steem in Hardfork 20 and that system has been functioning so well … nobody even talks about it."
Nobody is talking about it because it happened a long time ago now, and nothing came of the discussions and complaints anyway. It doesn't work at all. I'm always at 99.99% or 100.00% RC, even right after a post. Clearly I don't need the RC I've got. And meanwhile, accounts with less money can't post, comment, or vote at all! They're STILL locked out by HF20, and haven't been able to post since. Yeah, nobody is talking about it anymore.... great metric of your success.......
HBD Steem! Cheers to year 4!
STEEM is light, STEEM is love, STEEM is opportunity, STEEM is progress, STEEM is a R-E-V-O-L-U-T-I-O-N!
You're doing it so great! Keep up the work!
Happy birthday to steem!
Steem is destined to shine, and we can do this, together!
cheers!
Good
Happy Steem Birthday
The Coming Years are going to be amazing as well ..
2019 is the year of our Blockchain
Congrats to #steem on your 3 years successful blockchain operation.
On #steem, we win!
Happy birthday the people blockchain
4 years danggg I have only been here for 2 of those :(
Happy Birthday Steem!
Happy birthday steem. Go go go....
Congrats to all and the community as we continued to prove our worth despite the challenges. We should be proud we are still building!
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Still we have many years to walk together. Glad to be part of such a wonderful community.
Happy Anniversary ,...Happy Birthday...🥂 Just keep rising and keep sharing love all over...🤗
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Happy anniversary everyone! :)
Happy Birthday Steem, happy anniversary Steemians!!! 🍾🥂🎂🎉👍
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Happy Birthday steemit
I didn't know this is the day. Great to know all the details.
Proud to be a part of this community.
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Wow!!! Steem is four years already? Happy birthday steem and every steemians. Wish steem many more years to come.
Happy birthday to steemit
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Oh stop, you damn well know we have been on proof of wallet since stinc hijacked the chain to give us heajin and corrupt some other large stakeholders by controlling which side of the bread got the butter.
All hail, stinc!
Long live proof of brain!
Happy Steem Anniversary, Steem On 🔥
Good news!
It is a pleasure to be part of this community.
Thank you and successes to all!
Happy Birthday STEEM!😍
With everything mention in this post the future looks great and i am sure more and more great news will follow....
STEEM will keep rising and shine!
Happy birthday to my platform Steemit, happy to be part of it and continue to do so. May the successes continue
Everyone reading this can be proud to be part of Steem <3
Congratz to all of us!
Happy Birthday Steem!
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Happy birthday steem😊🎂
Happy Birthday friends!
Happy birthday to steem
Congratulations!!!! Y vamos por mas .
Happy Birthday #STEEM 🎶🍻🌱 Grateful for the opportunity to be part of the magic 🧡❤💜
🦋 Hugs All Around 🌊
Cheers! Let’s make this one heck of a year that no one will ever forget and everyone wish they where active for! It's a great time for all those putting in hard work and long hours putting down a foundation to build a future from.
Yes ! Excited for this fourth year !
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Happy anniversary!