My Opinions, Suggestions, and Hopes For Scorum in 2019

A lot has happened on Scorum since the launch of the wallet and the Blogging Platform over eight months ago. Can you believe that it has only been eight months? In that Time I have gone from my initial investment of just over $1000 worth of SCR @ $1.00 each when we were at the beginning of the Bear Market, to a total combined SCR and SP of now over 22K! Since my original goal was to start with just 300 tokens and try to build that up to as much as 2,500 SP before we reached 400,000 members and the bonus payouts ended, I think that you will agree that both the Bear Market and the air drop have been good to me.

I joined Scorum mainly because I was confident that the ecosystem the developers were proposing in the white paper was an opportunity to earn a steady income stream. My goal was to be able to earn enough in five years to offset inflation and possibly even become a backup income stream if I were to lose one of my current income sources. Reading the white paper convinced me that I would need about 300 SP to protect myself against inflation, and 2,500 SP to provide a backup income stream. My calculations stemmed from what I was currently earning on the Steemit platform at the time, I just wrote out an equation that compared these two platforms with nearly identical blockchains, assuming that Scorum would receive a similar amount of adoption over time. Since there are about 10 times more Steem tokens than Scroum's tokens I made the assumption that Scorum tokens would be valued at least ten times higher than Steem at the same membership levels. That was during the first week of January, 2018 and the price of Steem that day was around $7.00 and rising, which meant to me that if Scorum was in the same membership level as Steemit then SCR tokens would be worth around $70. So you see that I started out from the beginning with a very optimistic view for the future of Scorum.

So where are we now then? Unfortunately Scorum was hit by the beginning of the Bear Market while still in ICO, and since the time of the platform launch a terrible crypto winter has set in all the way to the date of this writing. Those $7 Steem tokens are now worth about $0.37 for a 94.7% loss in value and now SCR has gone from the initial ICO price of $1.00 to $0.07 for a 93% loss. The decline is almost identical and it is pretty much the same with only a few exceptions throughout the cryptosphere. But the worst part, besides the fact that the ICO didn't earn as much as it should have, is that interest in cryptos is so low among the general public that our membership growth has come to a slow crawl. But it is still slowly moving up and with dynamic and talented members working hard to spread the word about Scorum I believe that our numbers will begin to grow ever faster over time.

So what does all of that mean to you and I? It means that you have been presented with a golden opportunity to build a fantastic Scorum account during this lull! Had the Bear Market never happened and if Scorum had taken off like a rocket ship to the moon right from the start, then those of us who live off of humble incomes would have had little chance of building such an account. Imagine if we had reached 400K members in the first three months after the blogging platform had launched? These current large payouts would have already ended months ago. Sure the value of SCR would have risen dramatically by now, but what good would that do you if you couldn't afford enough tokens to have any significant voting power? We need SP to have voting power and without voting power you can't earn as much. Sure you could write a fantastic blog, and you might get enough upvotes to earn some money, but you would not earn much SP from the rewards pool to build your account and your voting power would be low for a long time. If you will notice it is those with voting power that earn the most, both from their blogs and from their curation rewards. Now is the time to build your accounts by blogging and curating as much as possible while it is still relatively easy to earn SP. It is also an excellent time to purchase tokens, how much longer do you think that we will be able to enjoy these prices?

I think that we are starting to see signs that our blogging community is beginning to grow and mature, gone are the early days when our problems were mostly about those who came to Scorum with ill intent or with high hopes for quick riches. Many of those early members were people who were here to get what they wanted no matter how much damage they did to the Scorum platform. We may be past that now, but we are still in our infancy as a blogging platform with only a few thousand regular bloggers.

But already with so few active members, like children in a schoolyard we are witnessing our members beginning to separate out into groups, factions, and clicks. This is a normal part of the process and it is only to be expected that these various circles will have varying opinions about what is best for Scorum and about how the platform should be policed and governed. I can clearly see power struggles starting to take shape now as well as some "he said she said arguments," hurt feelings between groups, bravado, threats, name calling and outright bullying from those with a lot of SP against those with little SP.

While this behavior shouldn't surprise us, it is still hurtful to individuals who get caught up in these things and it is bad for Scorum. We currently have no legal system here, there is no way for us to arbitrate disagreements and differences, it is up to us to try to be adults and do our best not to be petty, prideful, argumentative just for the sake of arguing, our outright rude and offensive to one another just because we're not getting our way. Just remember, if you ask other members for their opinion be prepared because that opinion might offend you. If you only want to hear from people that agree with you then say so up front. I wrote a blog early on about my thoughts on proper etiquette and how to handle disagreements on Scorum, you can find it here.

Scorum Etiquette Guide

If you think about it though, I believe that you will be excited about the fact that we are already seeing the beginnings of a political system on Scorum. Along with that will come all of the problems that go along with it, but it also means that we are progressing from anarchy to a higher degree of sophistication, which will empower us to gain a stronger foundation to build upon. One day there will be some form of a government and hierarchy established on Scorum, what that will look like I'm not sure yet but it will happen. With that in mind lets all be thinking about how we think that it should work so that the rights of the individual, no matter how small their account, can be protected from abuse at the hands of a bully with a large account. We will need a system that represents all of our members, not just the most powerful groups. And we will also need a way for recourse if we believe that we have been unfairly treated or robbed of what is rightfully ours.

The Scorum ecosystem is beginning to truly fire up now as the development team adds the final major pieces to our wonderful new blockchain engine. When finished we will be operating within the completed basic version, this will be enough to get Scorum moving along the track to adoption and the success that we are all yearning for. But this is far from the end of the story, what you see above is just one of the locomotives on a future train that will be long and powerful.

The Sports Betting Platform will draw more paying customers to the train and the Advertising Platform will provide more and more fuel to make the engine run faster and hotter. As we add additional sports to the Betting Platform I expect more and more gamblers to be drawn to Scorum. If we add betting with other cryptos and with fiat it will grow even faster. In my opinion the Scorum team should take a commission on all non SCR bets, this would serve two big functions. It will help fund further development of the Scorum Platform, and it will provide incentives for betters to establish accounts on Scorum and avoid commissions.

A key factor for Scorum's future growth will be the development of a easy way for our members to move in and out of fiat currencies with their SCR. If a person could take SCR and exchange it for fiat right in their wallet and then deposit that fiat in their existing bank account, then we would turn a lot of heads and really gain an audience! The alternative to this would be a blockchain based banking system with all of the modern functions and conveniences that we have come to expect from our local bank. Should we ask the developers to add a bank to Scorum and link it to our wallet?

All in all I think that we can be very proud of what our development team has accomplished working under these current market conditions. Unlike many other crypto projects, we not only have a working product but we have something that is already superior to many established Internet platforms that perform similar functions. Not only that, but we get better each passing week, which sure gets me fired up again for the prospects of our future.

When I said that there were many more possible additions to the Scorum engine, I meant that you should look around and know that Scorum with its Graphene based blockchain can do what just about any other project can do. Not only can it perform many other functions, but it can do most of them better and faster. As the sporting industry starts eyeing blockchain technology to solve many of its current limitations and problems, who do you think will be sitting here waiting on them with an already established user base?

You can read more of my thoughts on the Scorum Ecosystem here;

Scorum User Driven Economy

The bottom line is that I'm a firm believer that even when other projects have already, or are on the verge of losing hope, all of us here on Scorum will still be confidently looking ahead to a very bright and profitable future. Even if we do not soon see a move upward in the crypto market I believe that Scorum and SCR will begin to move up independently of the overall market. In fact, I believe that one day in the future we here on Scorum will be fairly independent of those market forces because unlike other projects that loosely throw around the word "ecosystem," we actually have become a part of this soon to be self sustaining economy that will vary more due to membership and usage levels than by what the world outside of Scorum is doing.

These are just my thoughts and opinions, I'm sure that you have your own and you are welcome to add them below in the comments. I promise to try and not get too angry with you if your ideas differ completely from mine. But I might silently hope that you get attacked by a million member flea army supported by multiple squadrons of mosquito dive bombers on a hot and windless summer night while skinny dipping in the Sahara desert.

Thank you so much for reading!