CH #5 In order to properly understand the big picture, everyone should fear becoming mentally clouded and obsessed with one small section of truth. Xunzi

Every chapters can be read on their own. No need for any previous knowledge about Steem either.

*Steem is a cryptocurrency and a blockchain based social network which monetarily reward its users for content they create and vote they make. Users get paid with Steem which could be equated to some sort of shares. Posts with the most shareholder’s votes rise to the top of Steemit.com or any other websites who use the Steem blockchain.

The Ultimate Steem Book

Introduction - The Ultimate Steem Book / Audio
Chapter 1 - My Steem Witness Application
Chapter 2 - Decentralized Governance / Audio
Chapter 3 - Steem's Ultimate Introduction / Audio
Chapter 4 - Attention Is The Ultimate Currency / Audio
Chapter 5 - The Most Positive Influence In My Life! PART 1
Chapter 5 - The Most Positive Influence In My Life! PART 2
Appendix 1 - The Ultimate Guide To Steemit (Working On A Revision)
Appendix 2 - The Most Beautiful Thing I’ve Ever Heard (My Best Paid Post)
Appendix 3- A Very Inspiring Quote By Dan Larimer

Steem Is The Most Positive Influence In My Life! (sub-titles)

Part 1

Teaser
Joy!
Steem Solves Fundamental Problems
Wealth Concentration And Freedom
Steem Conflicts Away!
Steem As An Investment
Steem Vs Fiat Currency
Two Billion Steemians: A Thought Experiment

Part 2

Teaser
The Future Isn’t Set Yet!
Why And How I Became A Witness
Life’s Fundamentals
Steem Scalability Announcement
End Notes
Bringing Closure

Teaser

Let’s imagine a parallel universe where there’s 2 billion Steem Power holders and each have 200$ worth of Steem Power. That would put Steem market cap at 400$ billion compare to today’s Facebook market cap of 315$ billion which is the 6th biggest market cap of all publicly traded companies. Apple occupies the first place at 586$ billion.

Factor in sales, profit and assets of both of these two companies and everything I said previously about Steem and this parallel universe doesn’t seem so parallel anymore but more like a very probable future. How fast and what would be the impacts of such a shift is anyone's guess. (Facebook has 1 billion daily users and 1.7 billion monthly.)

Joy!

In the previous chapter I established the fact that what we put our attention on determines who we become. After all, we are the sum of what influenced us whether it be from our conscious attention or sub-conscious attention.

(1m49s)

Steem Solves Fundamental Problems

The number one thing I want people to put their attention on right now is the fact that Steem solves two of the most fundamental challenges humanity has to face.

First, money or national currencies are issued or created out of thin air for the sole benefit of a small group of people at the expanse of everyone else and Steem flips this on its head where money is create by the rules set by the whole for everyone's benefit.

Second, even if someone were to conclude otherwise about money creation, wealth is nonetheless concentrating into the hands of an ever smaller group of people getting ever more powerful while a growing number of people are becoming ever more powerless. I discuss how Steem solves those two problems below.

Wealth Concentration And Freedom

Wealth concentration leads to centralization of power and vice versa. The control of information/attention or what influence society and individuals is a prerequisite to any consolidation of power. As Liam Kane has put it:

Education can never be politically neutral: if it does not side with the poorest and marginalized sectors- the 'oppressed' – in an attempt to transform society, then it necessarily sides with the 'oppressors' in maintaining the existing structures of oppression, even if by default.

For the most powerful people, corporations and institutions, Steem is another place where control of information needs to be exercise. Every empowering thing whether it be information, technologies, etc., create existential risks to the existing current structures of oppression from which the power in place profit. Richard Shaull, drawing on Paulo Freire might have put it even more succinctly when he said:

There is no such thing as a neutral education process. Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of generations into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes the 'practice of freedom', the means by which men and women deal critically with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.

People, corporations and institutions always derived their power from some sort of consensus and must always seek to sway any consensus, reasoning and discussions that are challenging their power. After all people in power have much to lose when their system get dethroned.

(2m29s)

Steem Conflicts Away!

All attempts to sway Steem consensus will inevitably play in Steem's favor. If someone or a group of people try to acquire and growing % of the total Steem Power in an attempt to reward the consensus they want to see being adopted, this will make the price of Steem rise and thus every rewards will also rise accordingly.

Growing rewards will lead to Steem gaining in influence over an ever larger group of people. Most of these people if not all people will have incentives to understand the truth about wealth and power concentration, centrally issued currencies as well as the many ways in which Steem is a much better alternative for everyone.

Another option to create or sway Steem consensus is to use words to which I want to add: “Our words have meaning! Our lives have value! Our voices have power! United we stand! Divided we fall! Let’s unite! Let’s create valuable consensus that benefit everyone fairly.” I love the quote below. I don’t want unnecessary punishment happen to anyone.

This, then, is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well. The oppressors who oppress, exploit and rape by virtue of their power, cannot find in this power the strength to liberate either the oppressed or themselves. Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both. Paulo Frere

Steem As An Investment

When Steem market cap doesn’t grow then Steem wealth only moves around and no new wealth (besides new content) enters Steem's economy. One way for Steem market cap to grow is when people feel strongly about some consensus and they buy Steem to strengthen this consensus, voting for the content and people that back this consensus.

The opposite is also true. People who feel the need to challenge already established consensus will also buy Steem Power but with the intent to reward consensus challenging the already established one.

The greater the risk you are willing to take the stronger your faith in your opinion and the greater your resulting profit or loss will be. Dan Larimer

There’s many other reasons to buy Steem Power but I feel like those two really help at giving a good overview at what Steem could become.

Let’s look at it this way, because everyone have incentives for the market cap to grow and because Steem shares become more valuable when a growing number of people pay attention to Steem, everyone have incentives to vote for posts they recognized as generating the most positive influence which will keep people inspired to comeback for the valuable content they are seeing as well as helping in producing such content.

There lies one of the many reasons why, in the long run, it isn’t economically sound for people to upvote base solely on friendship. This might be even truer for large Steem shareholders.

In resume, people favored by the current system of fiat currency have strong incentives to perpetuate the lies that their system is fair, while we Steemians have strong incentives to expose the truth about their Machiavellian system and reward, vote and strengthen those who expose and oppose the centralized control of currency issuance which is a wealth and freedom robbing mechanism of unrivalled scale.

If Steem truth annoys central banks or other powerful institutions who feel their power threaten, then they’ll have to buy Steem and power up as well as use words to try to sway the Steem consensus in their favor and whoever doesn’t create consensus dilute their Steem stake to those who do.

Also when comes time to vote, I don't think people will limit themselves to only consider what's in the posts but they will also consider what is publicly known about who made the post and if the two align. In other words, I don't think people will end up voting for people who create positive content but have a very destructive way of life and this is another pretty awesome thing to keep in mind.

The whole Steem tamperproof money issuing and banking system and in this case more particularly the way Steem handles and rewards the most beneficial/empowering information any one can come up with have me hopeful for a much more enjoyable future.

Steem Vs Fiat Currency

Steem is the only technological solution in use today that solves the problem of wealth concentration/power centralization.

Steem are issued in a decentralized manner according to a set of publicly known rules that most benefit everyone and can’t be secretly issued or counterfeited. On the other hand, fiat currencies are issued by centralized power, they are subject to counterfeiting and the rules regulating their issuance or in other words who get what of the newly created money is inevitably in the total control of those in power.

The rules controlling Steem issuance can be changed through a weight voting system called DPOS. For obvious reasons, there’s an incentive for every Steem holder to vote rules that benefit everyone fairly.

Money occupies a central role in our society and thus our lives. The greater influence someone or something has, the greater its potential is for consensus. As I reported in my introduction, the wealthiest 1% owns more than 50% of the world’s wealth or more than the 99% of people and the wealth keeps getting even more concentrate.

I just thought it was worth resharing so I keep remembering.

Wealth concentration and currency issuance aren’t just 2 topics. They’re fundamental to our society. I’m just one guy, among many billions, trying to put the most fundamental problems and thinking about their solutions in the forefront of our minds where they belong.

We all have our personal challenges but let’s not forget the big picture, how it affect us all and how Steem in conjunction with other cryptocurrencies seem to bring viable solutions. Steem is a unifying tool and probably the best tool we have to solve all the tyranny we see in the world.

Steem leads to an ever growing decentralization of power where everyone can build on freely available ideas put out by others. What is determine to have the most positive influence on Steem rises at the top and in return influence the most people.

It's interesting to note that no one has the monopoly over enlightening thoughts or experiences that happen in a day and that the technology and whole design is to allow everyone to share those experiences and idea in the most mutually beneficial way possible.

All trades only cause resources to change hands. The goal is to move physical resources to the highest purpose the most efficiently. Dan Larimer

Everything good about Steem is essentially lacking from the current economic system of fiat currency. The more centralized power gets, the less available empowering ideas are being freely circulated, leading to a vicious cycle but now the Steem cat is out of the bag so to speak.

Two Billion Steemians: A Thought Experiment

Let’s imagine a parallel universe where there’s 2 billion Steem Power holders and each have 200$ worth of Steem Power. That would put Steem market cap at 400 billion compare to today’s Facebook market cap at 315 billion which is the 6th biggest market cap of all publicly traded companies. Apple occupies the first place at 586$ billion. Factor in sales, profit and assets of both of these two companies and everything I said previously and this parallel universe doesn’t seem so parallel anymore but more like a very probable future. (Facebook has 1 billion daily users and 1.7 billion monthly.)

In fact to some it can seem far fetch to think it won’t happen or that Facebook market cap wouldn’t have faded into oblivion much like many other companies. How fast this could happen is anyone’s guess so is how much of a societal change such a shift would cause. (Visa’s market cap is 190$ billion, Western Union 10$ billion and Bitcoin is 12$ billion).

To give a better perspective on such a scenario, let’s imagine there’s a top trending post that calls the biggest corporate bank to immediately lower their profit margin 1%, to redistribute this 1% to their customers and if this isn’t done, calls on everyone to boycott this bank. (I’m not making allusion to tackling centralized money issuance here.)

I doubt any company, institution or government putted into a comparagle situation would wait for those kind of posts to be the top trending post before announcing something. Also other banks would certainly chime in with statements of their own. The more such a company would wait the more their share’s price would risk serious collapse.

Steem shares would probably sky rocket now that every companies would somewhat be answering to Steem Consensus, Steem Direction or Steem Unit! It’s now easier to foresee even more radical changes Steem could bring. This is just a very rough thought experiment but I hope it gets the message accross. This might be just wild musing too but no one knows what the future holds.

(43s)

Part two will be publish tomorrow.

Notes:

The words "shares" and "shareholders" are use loosly to convey an idea
The teaser was written before I read this comment made by @dantheman

Upvoted, following & resteemed. ♨️ New here to the steemit community, yet learning more each day. Personally vesting in Steem as the "next big thing"! I'm working a definition about explaining Steem & Steemit to friends & co-workers. What I've come up with so far is "Imagine Bitcoin meets FB & EBay"?

Though there's more to it than that, I was an owner of Bitcoin back @ $70 and sold later on to purchase college textbooks @ $320. (Only owned 5 coins)

Not paying much attention to crypto currencies, I stumbled upon Steemit. Seeing Bitcoin @ $635 (at the time) I was 'shocked' - the "value of Steem" IMHO, is far greater than Bitcoin, as it is tied to a social platform and plans for a developing market space. I'm not a gambler, but an old pony chaser at the track once explained to me what a Trifecta was.... 😉

Steem Is The Most Positive Influence In My Life! Let’s Make It The Most Influencial Thing! Let’s Unite! Let’s Make Steem Cohesive! Let’s Give Steem Direction!