Yet I was writing about those who are joining Steem and not about s/w devs who work predominantly for Westerners.
Eventually India will be a huge market, but go to App Annie and study where the revenue on apps comes from. India is huge on downloads, but irrelevant on sales. 10 years from now, it will begin to shift significantly enough to matter.
....
Okay so there are 2 strategies:
* You get few rich people to sign up
* You get many poor people to sign up
In the end the total sum in either cases should be equal.
If you get 1 westerner with 10,000$ to invest in Steem, might be like getting 1000 poor Indians to invest 10$.
And it can be just as hard to find a person with 10k than to get 1000 people. So it's kind of the same from a marketing perspective.
Tangentially, there is a huge and growing demand (in the form of excess supply of cash) which is outstripping the supply of private equity, so providing a viable alternative to ICOs is critically needed.
2nd layer stuff is just now coming out. Ethereum ICO's are only the beginning. Wait until BTC smart contract systems come out, that will be the real deal. 70-80 billion $ eager for some big profits.
Either way it looks like the smart contract stuff is the future of private equities.
Apparently I didn’t convey clearly the stated point that the app ecosystem is driven by a profit model (and one better than Steem’s debasement via voting model). As for donations, I was only intending to refer to those self-selected core devs who have every incentive to see their baby conquer the world, so they will behind the scenes talk to the whales and make sure there are donations paid in public to give the illusion that they are working in a decentralized ecosystem. They may even be donating to themselves to fool the securities regulators, but who can prove that and besides the app ecosystem would presumably be highly competitive if there is significant profit to be made.
There is some conflict now between the whales and it might be bad for Steem that such high profile people are in a fight right now. But we will see what will happen.
Daniel Larimer was never really ideologically focused on changing the world. His focus is much more pragmatic.
The way I understood it is that he finished his mission at Steem anyway. He made the root of the blockchain for Steem. And he said in a recent interview that Steem is pretty much ready now, it only needs GUI design from now on for Steemit. The blockchain is mature enough. And he actually wanted to create a scaleable multifunctional blockchain which he could only do via an ETH ICO, thus he made EOS. I think the ETH ICO is only for fundraising the EOS blockchain will be kind of independent the way I understood it.
Nontheless it's an interesting project and I don't blame him for leaving, he already did a lot to help Steem. And Steem might need more engineering in the future, but if Dan wants to work on a "bigger project", it's his choice.
I haven't invested in EOS yet just to make that clear, but I might later once the situation gets more clear.