Agree 100%! Steemit and Steem are great ideas. I knew that as soon as I heard about them; but it took me several months before I got around to participating actively on Steemit.

There is a deeper reason why I am impressed.

Steem is an ideal platform especially if you, like me, are now writing primarily about asynchronous programming, including coins and decentralized application, network effects, and object oriented programming and actor models. The stuff now usually published behind steep paywalls. It gets read only years later and progress is boring and slow. Too few incentives in principle. Until now.

The interface is reactive and clean. So the only thing missing right now is support for LaTeX. And that is mitigated by easy uploading of images. All the same a hassle, and convenience is the thing that sells technologies, and remember it was convenience that sold plain paper printing and flying.

Steem valuation will go through the roof gradually after there is added typesetting by LaTeX. Or something close enough. Tying scientific content to a monetized popular platform means you can have open access journals without the fees!

Observe that monetization and blockchain coupled to popular content gives free archiving for any other content on the same platform. Including archiving comments. Nobody will discard what is personally valuable. So it can capture much of the present academic market of institutional players by competing along the lines of lower transaction costs. Universities are bleeding money on subscriptions or subsidizing archiving fees of their individuals to have them publish without paywalls.

In other words: billions of dollars. That bump in valuation could be lasting, I suspect, because institutional players would create another market position for Steem. Institutional players are essentially huge whales that are not spending their own money ...