The simple fact is that this is a get rich together, slowly but surely platform. Everyone who boosts it improves the image of it, and this attracts more users. Amongst those new users are people who will make the platform even more powerful. I have looked at some parts of this system and I have identified where the most profitable activities here lie - mostly within the realm of building the platform up and expanding its utility for more people. When you look at @xeroc's blog, and you see that he has already made some $50,000 of rewards by building a programming platform for others to continue building the system up, it makes you realise that you can literally make a living as a programmer and system architect in this place.
I don't mind that for now I am only supplementing my income. I have faith that as my projects come to completion, more rewards will come because I have built something that others can build further upon. I chose to live physically where I do because I knew that in the beginning of any enterprise, the less costs you have, the more you can invest into development, and I personally believe, that it is possible, and Steem shows it is possible, to make something big, without incurring a big debt, that makes the outcome so onerously heavy that it MUST turn a profit.
Here, you can start small, make a little that supplements your income and lets you spend more of your time working on it. As you build your reputation, and the body of your work, the rewards slowly increase. I believe that I, as well as others who see the same pattern here, are going to from Steem launch bigger things that build upon Steem, and further increase its value, and importantly, market capitalisation.
My long term goal is to acquire sufficient funds that I can fund the development of a complete suite of distributed system software, that continues to bind together all of the elements we can already see examples of, together, into a more cohesive whole, and secondary to this, I have scientific research plans, to discover how to build machines that enable space travel.
Some may think I am crazy, but people thought we were all crazy even just 4 years ago believing that cryptocurrencies would be the beginning of something that would completely remake the world. The further this goes along, the more our views are vidicated. So I don't think it's that big a stretch to say that, it also naturally leads to what I aim to achieve, which is the end of an earthbound humanity, to a bigger future expanding into the limitless possibilities of space.
"limitless" - space is expanding, thus not limitless :)
Excellent observation. Similar in the way that the surface of a sphere is finite but boundless. This core concept I learned from Peter Carroll's book Psybermagick, in which he speculates on the quantum probability mechanics of magick working. In fact it's interesting because this is not a common view of magick, but it was first established as a principle by Aleister Crowley.
Carroll basically says that the way that magick and science work together, and really are the one thing, is that the probabilities of certain events are greater than others. Take money as an example. You can't just sit there praying that suddenly a pot of gold will fall out of the sky, the odds of this happening are so infinitesimally small, that even God would have trouble making this happen.
But if you are making something that someone might find valuable, your chances of bumping into a buyer who is so enraptured in your product, that they throw a pot of gold into your lap, in exchange for it, are much higher. Or maybe an investor who thinks that they can sell billions of copies, something you cannot possibly achieve, will throw the pot of gold in your lap because they think it's worth that much in production.