The exponential rate at which Steem grows may put on fast track a solution to the scaling issue that the Bitcoin community faces.Steem is a digital currency behind Steemit, a decentralized social media platform which rewards posters and voters online. Scaling Bitcoin has become a hot button issue in the community. This is the process to increase block size from its current form in which the network can only support up to seven transactions per second to process more like Paypal achieves with about 100 transactions per second, and as Visa does with about 4,000 per second.
In the wake of the Steemit hack
Recently, Steemit was hacked, with about 260 accounts compromised.David Washsman responded to those who claim the hack was intentionally organised by Steemit itself as false.
Overtaking the DAO
With Steemit being touted to be the bridge that has the ability to bring people who have no interest in cryptocurrency into its world, Steem overtook The DAO to be the world’s fifth most valuable cryptocurrency following its 1000% plus growth in the days following Steemit’s first cryptocurrency payout on July 4. After the $1.3 million giveaway, the number of transactions, posts, votes and new users signing up to Steemit’s decentralized Reddit-like platform tripled.
Steemit is on track to become one of the largest and fastest growing cryptocurrency projects worldwide in less than three months of its inception. As Steem reaches millions of people in the next year, it could possibly choke Bitcoin's capacity if all the people were to use Bitcoin as a gateway to buy in and/or cash out each month.Eeks, in a post on Steemit, wrote that Steemit is the killer app Bitcoin has been waiting for to bring fresh and diverse people into Bitcoin and into cryptocurrencies.
The writer says Bitcoin companies and their products do nothing for people outside the one percent who know and use Bitcoin. He citesPurse.io as the closest thing to a Bitcoin killer app to convince those outside the cryptocurency community but, as yet, hasn’t had much luck. The same applies to open bazaar, Bitcoin gambling and P2P lending sites, who have not provided a reason for those people to care about Bitcoin or a need to have it, except for speculative purposes.In an analogy, the writer concluded, based on available figures, that the new social media site could acquire at least a million Bitcoin active onboard users in a year.