Turn up the Heat! Steem Luxembourg

Ok, I know, I'm the last one to post about this event but I promise you, you won't regret having had to wait!

So we did it! We had had our First Steem Meetup in Luxembourg

_{photo credit @christophe51}

You were already able to read about it in French in a post by @roxane who came from Belgium with @oroger, and in another post by @hightouch who was there with @siavach and other steemians from Strassbourg, France. We were also happy to have @alexvan who wrote about it in German

In the room there were other steemians including other members of the local chapter of "Steem's Witnesses" sect, @pstaiano (from @lux-witness) and @elmetro (from @exnihilo.witness), as well as @sikoba, @decodeur and @christophe51 (not all of them are visible in the picture below)

_{photo credit @christophe51}

But you know all that already so let me share with you what I presented there: why steem is the most advanced blockchain eco-system currently in production!

Indeed, if one tries to assess the performance of existing, production-grade blockchain systems, there’s one site that has been publishing a view for a while now: Blocktivity.info. It’s not exhaustive, far from it. I don’t see Bytecoin, not DigiByte, Decred, Ark, Ardor … But it has quite a bit of the big ones to be relevant.

Now this came out only a few days ago, last week. From China's Ministry of Industry & Information Technology “CCID Research Institute”. Notice something?

Distributed ledges don't easily scale. This is called "the scalability trilemma" and it's analysed in an article I often quote: "DELEGATED PROOF OF STAKE: FEATURES AND TRADEOFFS". It goes like this: "Different platforms try to solve this through different techniques. But even if the trilemma is solved, the market might not care. It is entirely possible that users are willing to accept tradeoffs in decentralization of block production or even safety in the name of better performance and easier user experience for certain use cases."

In the end what matters is the "design goal": bitcoin and ethereum are embodiments of a philosophy of defiance toward existing social structures. Steem is in a more nuanced position and is a broader, more welcoming house. While "censorship resistance" is quite present in its ethos, it doesn't see itself as an active tool of an anti-system revolution.

Here is a first batch of features (especially of the blockchain backend) that make Steem stand out:

The next image illustrates block creation in DPOS using 21 "witnesses" – 20 stable and a "backup witness" (@ura-soul in this snapshot) selected from the pool of backup witnesses (right column) on the basis of an algorithm weighting their "political support". In the next "round", the place of backup witness will be held by @dragosroua

Here are some very nice features of the steemd "business logic", but also the main limitation: steem is not a "smart contract" platform. Which is actually just as well: better to do something and do it well than try to do everything and be lousy in each!

Here's an example of a full-fledged information system which integrates steem as a component: SteemDB by @jesta

SteemDB is a web application built on top of the steem blockchain: it displays both live blockchain activity as well as permitting data analytics using a NoSQL data base (MongoDB if I'm not mistaken) where the data from the blockchain is continuously loaded in order to allow faster and easier treatment

Here are some more nice features that make the user experience so close to what "non-geeks" are used to:

Plus, something I didn't thought about but @alexvan reminded me, the possibility to get 3 days of respite in case of loss (or theft) of keys by keeping the liquid tokens, STEEM and SBD in "savings"

Finally, steem can be and has been integrated as a component in many complex web applications of which I've shown only a handful in this image:

@roxane presented then Steemit (you can see her in the picture below next to our common Nemesis)

@hightouch presented the wonderful @fundition project

I touched a couple of words about the impressive @busy

_{photo credit @christophe51}

and then Roxane took the floor again to present @utopian

So ... if you are not on Steem yet, what's your excuse?

_{photo credit @christophe51}

Turn up the Heat! Steem Luxembourg

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