Some of you who have followed my work over the last year on Steemit know that for quite a while I was doing some investigatory analysis of activity on the steem blockchain. Primarily relationship analysis using open source tools that anyone could run, along with code that you could run on your own platform and explore the things that you thought were interesting. And that was fun and interesting for me as long as SteamData was a going concern, because MongoDB is a far more pleasant database to work with as an intermediate than any SQL platform.
I miss that guy. I really do. I think the community is lessened by the absence of @furion's ongoing interaction, but I definitely can't blame him for realizing that the project was a bit of a money sink.
Some people might have been curious what kind of things inspired the research that I was doing because it differed pretty extensively from the kind of analysis that @paulag and the #SteemBI community often provide. (That's not to say they are not doing as good a job as anyone could in the environment we find ourselves in. But, for the most part, most of the analysis coming out of that group is quantitative and the things I'm interested in are more relational.)
In light of the recent discussion that I was involved with which took as its springboard @ned's response to @paulag when pressed for transparency on how much of the stake in play on the steem blockchain Steemit Inc. actually has their fingers on at this point, taking into consideration that they recently announced a 70% employee reduction, I thought that this video which just came out from the Neo4j guys was well-placed and well-timed.
In the Void of Concern
It struck me that there is a definite perceivable absence of people involved in the analytical side of blockchain technology who have a background in forensic accounting and an interest in understanding the relationships between players and what those transactions that everyone can count actually mean. Or at least there is all too little exploration of the space which inspired me to do some of the work that I poked around at, however poorly, for a little while.
Everybody wants to predict the next wave. Everybody wants to make money by selling off at the height of the curve and buying at the bottom, just before it goes to the moon. Everybody wants to provide the guidance for someone else to be responsible for their profit. For the most part, analysis of blockchain behaviors (and this is true of all blockchains, from bitcoin to XRP) is focused with laser intensity on investment advice – all the while throwing in the boilerplate of "this should not be taken as investment advice."
There's a hole.
That hole is largely forensic. That hole is not just mechanical but social, in that the community around blockchains tends to fail to make self reflection and self understanding at least as important as self-promotion. That hole is one of the reasons, in my opinion, that major financial institutions look at established public blockchain solutions and immediately go, "well, this crappy database ledger is kind of cool for building a cheap, decentralized database ledger – but we can actually use this token as a currency because there's no reason for it to be a currency."
It's the void of concern not just in the user base but in the development community for making the thing work. No more, no less – it needs to be a thing that works, it needs to be a thing that does the job, and it needs to be a community that is finding a need fulfilled, for platforms to have value.
And, assuming the community finds value in a thing, forensic investigation is the next step of that community saying to the wider world that they believe the value is real. If the value is real, people will cheat. If the value is real, people will act in ways that are hypocritical when viewed in the context of what they espouse as principles. If the value is real, people will pursue actions that undercut the mechanics as defined and subvert intent.
@ned reminds us that even if we're not talking about exit scams or any of the other innumerable ways that blockchain instruments have been used and abused to take other people's money, it's not just the fast buck people who are a problem. It's not just user communities who are a problem.
It's developers who never believed the blue sky stories they were selling to a willing, credulous, crypto cultist populace who are also a problem.
The Eye of Sauron
So what can we do as individuals who inhabit this new space where a lack of certainty is the general modus operandi, State intervention in markets is more than commonplace, and all the while simultaneously the system is grossly transparent, open to anybody who wants to actually poke at it as long as they have the resources to acquire and crunch the data?
Well, for one, we can think forensically. Trying to predict the future is all well and good, but we need more people devoted to communicating the present. Not just the dry numbers, not just the columns of data, not just putting it out there necessarily for our own judgment – though those things are incredibly important – but people looking at the next level up from those columns of data. We need more people interested in trying to figure out what those things mean while not making up crazy shit like Elliott Waves to sell the newest snake oil on the block. We need more people trying to figure out not just who the public bot farms are run by but where the traffic to the blockchain is being driven and who is profiting from it? We need people discussing how to algorithmically determine, or even if it's algorithmically possible to determine, if a group of accounts are actually bots, or value parking sites, or anonymous cutouts, or what have you. We need more people who know what those things are and can imagine new things that people may be doing to exploit or subtly aggressively capitalize on aspects of systems we are part of.
On top of that, we need more people that recognize that blockchain technology is not an end state. It's not a thing to be desired for itself. It needs to be a thing that helps build something that people actually want. And the point of the exercise is not just to keep track of a digital score with numbers that just keep going up all the time, but to keep track of useful, effective pieces of information which let people do things they couldn't otherwise do. When they are able to, when an actual platform which innovates and allows people to do things they couldn't do before comes into being, the platform has to be the focus.
In the case of Ethereum, the platform is a distributed computational engine. That's what they're really selling. The further they get away from selling that, the less well they do.
In the case of bitcoin, the platform is a currency, and as long as people wanted to buy and sell that currency, and as long as people were allowed to buy and sell that currency, it had a purpose. And every time that a State actor steps in, every time a major banking platform steps in, and points out that they don't want to trade bitcoin and that the social cost of bitcoin is going to go up (by way of State-mandated punishments), the lower the value of the platform that bitcoin provides – and the lower its value becomes in every sense.
Here, then, the steem blockchain. It's declared platform is social media engagement and specifically the half-price Reddit knockoff that is Steemit.com. Because it offers something that no other platform does, a means of keeping digital score based on global popularity and the potential to turn that score into actual things you can buy, it has a significant advantage over its complete absence of competitors. But the developers ignore the platform. Rather than recognizing what it was that made STEEM unique and useful, the social media architecture for which it kept score, it falls further and further behind, failing to produce value because of its platform, and along with the rest of the cryptocurrency market which largely had the same problem, leads us to where we are today.
We need to keep an eye on the prize. We need to understand, as users – not as developers but as the people who actually inhabit platforms, who have needs, who have wants, and who get gratification out of engaging with those platforms to benefit our needs and wants – that these things need to be seen and they need to be known. We need people who are willing to talk about them. We need people who are willing to criticize them. We need the space and time to do that analysis, not just temporarily but socially.
We need to have an eye seeking intently near and far for glimmers of the truth.
A Certain Understated Competence
"So," the most cynical and thus most like me among you might be prone to ask, "what do you intend to do about all of this?"
And well you might ask.
The answer is "not my problem."
Or rather, "nothing more than I have been."
Because for me, the platform is doing exactly what I expected and intended it to. It's acting as a relatively straightforward and simple blogging platform which takes Markdown directly, making my writing considerably easier, allows me to put out exactly what I want to say, where I want to say it, when I want to say it, and minimizes the ability of anything but a significantly organized jihad to keep people from reading the stuff I've written. Every once in a while (and not for many, many months), it lets me take some of the funny tokens that keep piling up in my donation bin and go buy something nice for myself.
I never put any of my own fiat money into the steem blockchain. The things I write about, by and large, except when I write about the steem blockchain itself, get almost no views and the small community to which they appeal don't really have enough pull (and by that I mean SP) to really be profitable to cater to more than I do. It's no longer quite as convenient for me to actually go poking around inside the blockchain itself for fascinating revelatory chunks of understanding and I have less motivation to because it's less profitable to.
I am, in short, exactly the kind of platform user which @ned has explicitly said he owes nothing to and that the platform owes nothing to. Forget the fact that I am a creator and produce content that sometimes people want to read; not enough people want to read it for me to be important. The platform I'm engaged with is not the platform that the developers the steem blockchain want to enhance – and that's okay.
Unless you're a whale, and there are a vanishingly small number of those and an increasing question of how many of them are actually finger puppets of Steemit Inc. themselves, odds are you're in the same boat as I am.
But maybe, once in a while, when the mood strikes us, when we are inspired by a piece of work that excites simply by nature of it being interesting, if we have an idea of something look at – maybe we should bring our modest competencies to bear to try and understand what's going on in this environment. Maybe you should take your laptop and your coding tools of choice and see if you can figure out if there are any interesting "circles of transaction" in the last six months. Maybe you should sit down with some of the code I wrote and some of the tools I touched, do some quick hacking to talk to SteemSQL (using Pony if, like me, you despise SQL and all it stands for). Maybe you should even check out some of the work of the #SteemBI community and give them some feedback, a little direction, nudge them into showing you some of the things you want to see even if you don't know how to reveal those mysteries.
Maybe you should deploy a little of your certain understated competence to try and cast a forensic gaze over the things around you. It certainly couldn't hurt. Maybe it could even help.
I won't pretend to tell you what you should do; certainly not when I won't offer you the same power over me. I won't tell you what to do with your time. I won't tell you what to do with your money. I won't tell you what to do with your opportunities.
I take money to write about video games so that I can buy more video games. I am the last person to tell you what you should do.
But I'll tell you what you can do.