Blocks from the Chains — Issue #113

Call it a pet peeve but. ..

6 min readJul 9, 2019

. .. San Francisco is not the center of the world no matter how much you might think your startup is going to change it (fb, apple, google)

i get it thou, you come from an area in the world with the title ‘silicon valley’ and yes it’s influenced the world in so many ways (for good and bad it can be argued) but that does not mean it’s always gonna cascade well for you if you have a company in the valley.

I realise this will be seen as negative (be positive phil!) but it’s just straight facts and I’ve seen hundreds of startups in Silicon Valley treat the way that local hyper connected users act and assume the rest of the world with it’s myriad of cultures and quirks is the same, it’s not! Not by a long shot!

Yesterday a gorgeous (and i mean stunning design) and thoughtful layout and just clean (ya know?) app landed on steem with a new blog post that steem was finally supported in their wallet, their social media tweets were anchored around the fact that 1 million + people are registered on the platform (true, but lots are zombie accounts tbh) and they are global around the world.

And so this is where my excitement turned to frustration, yet another app that launches on the US App Store, in fact i checked it out and it was actually in twenty something states, i presume because of the FDIC or something in the US which they have done the legal paperwork because ya know. .. money.

Metal looks to bring 16 cryptocurrency to the mix in there app and the best thing about it is that if you have your US account linked to the app you can straight buy STEEM with that card/account — that’s huge for the 20 something states in the US — i really have no idea how many US users there actually is alive in the million registered accounts plus we have. Anybody have that data?

Regardless, believe it or not I’m PUMPED to see another wallet/app support the steem blockchain like this in this manner because it really opens up the send to send and powering up ability of people being able to straight up buy steem in a mobile experience in this manner — i really wanted to test it out!

The Independant SPS mockup if LIT fam!

Yesterday i was surprised to see an awesome mockup of a potential frontend for the upcoming SPS system, the steem proposal system is a funded ‘pot of funds’ (from upcoming hf21 changes) which enables people to apply to do things on the steem blockchain for a portion of steem/sbd (I’m actually not sure which at this stage) — instead of devs hoping for support and upvotes they can actually apply and if people trust, believe, can deliver on that promise and it’s valuable to the community it will potentially be funded.

Regardless of how i expect that all to turn out (i expect the same 10/15 people to get access to funds in their little inner circle of value discussion) i do think the way that it’s presented is super important — which leads me to this mockup in vuejs that @dmitrydao put together recently i believe while spending time in Chiang Mai.

Bottom line, the design is stunning and completely ready for a mobile user to be able to participate and vote for the projects they want to see happen on the steem blockchain, i do hope that they use or decide to work with him on that frontend because i believe the clean design really does wonders for the steem blockchain — we will see how far up the chain he makes it thou, he’s a standalone person right now and we know how that goes down generally with the curation and community mobs.

Alright, that’s me for today, I’ve included a little YouTube video at the bottom of this newsletter about that frontend if you just want to get my feedback reaction to seeing it instead — have a wonderful day, positive vibes, forward motion!

Peace and Love!

__Humble

if you have not seen it yet check out this steem workers frontend. WOW!

# Metaphor (word of the day)

Metaphorn. A figure of speech in which a word or phrase that ordinarily designates one thing is used to designate something else. Example: “She was drowning in money.”