Present
If you are anything like me, since joining Steemit, you've been sitting around in stunned awe half the time. It's simplicity and elegance belies the truly astronomical engineering, development and theorizing that has taken place in order to deliver it. I think it's fair to say that something quite remarkable happened when Steemit and Steem was launched and some of the reasons, for me, are as follows;
Freedom of expression - from comments to essays, photographs to art, one may communicate virtually anything and it will become part of a living culture, encoded and safeguarded by the blockchain.
Establish reliable chronology - having a time-stamp for every transaction within the blockchain will become more and more important as the Steem platform is used in more complex ways.
Enable micro transactions - voting with very low financial value is working effectively all over Steemit. This is a fantastic breakthrough because not only is there a low barrier to entry for everyone, but also the Steem network can be put to more uses than other networks.
Future
There are many other amazing features of the Steem network but what about the future? What else can we do with the Steem network?
These are not all my ideas, they've come from everywhere and everyone. But let's consider some of the potential.
Voting - maybe i'm missing something, but couldn't all voting, political or otherwise be conducted on a Steem implementation? Obviously, identity verification would be required and one vote per person.
SD, store of value - The stronger the Steem network, the more people earning SD, the more businesses delivering services, the more and more likely that SD will be considered a store of value. I appreciate that will take time and an established stability in Steem and SD but it could certainly happen.
Trade - every holder of Steem, SP and SD should feel incentivized (assuming you aren't making money from volatility or currency/asset exchange) to keep their Steem assets within the Steem network. That will be easier to accomplish when businesses begin to accept Steem and SD for their products or require Steem for use within the network. We can help build that demand.
Search engine - Steem can develop it's own search engine and then other companies can pay to use the service.....especially if they aren't sure about interventions with other search engines.
Big data analysis - given the nature of a blockchain, it may be that the data capture could be of a higher quality and when there are services that analyse and present that data, the conclusions could be that much more revealing.
Global emergency alert - services that automatically trigger a post to the network could be very useful. In fact all manner of robotic/bot type interaction could be a great benefit to enhance our conversations and understanding of the world.
Research Papers - science with integrity.....more eyes on the data and analysis. Would you rather have four or four thousand scientists looking at high quality data that cannot be altered once on the blockchain?
Please check out pharesim's considerable work towards this goal here
Archive - as with all blockchains, Steem has great potential as an archive for important documents or event history. Obviously, reliable entry of data/text is of vital importance.
Education - well i'm already getting an education within Steem from people who have amazing skills and experience. It wouldn't take much to formalize a high quality, free education on Steem.
Communities - due to the incredible economic design of steem, micro-transactions are made possible and therefore tiny payments and rewards are possible. This means there is little overhead to communities wanting to use the Steem network to organize and support one and other. Steemit is possibly only the first of many faces of Steem.....
AI accounts on Steem - how cool would it be for AI to be able to use Steemit and help build the platform further?
Steem research, satellites and space - Steem could become Google, but for everyone. Not everyone can afford a stake in Google. But everyone can build a stake in Steem. Steem could fund research and build a well of Steemian (hopefully consisting of 9 billion participants one day) shared resource, could develop it's own power grid, decentralized internet and space program.
Ok ok, i'm starting to get completely carried away now. Fine. The point is that Steem is a platform that can become what we want to make of it. The only limitations will be our ingenuity and determination. If we want to take Steem and Steemians to the moon, we can.
Additional features for the future
Prediction Markets - (as suggested by help-yourself) could be an interesting feature for reaching a consensus on the probability of future events occurring.
Gambling - (as suggested by chitty) could be an interesting feature for those with SD to spare!
Please check out pharesim's post here where he is already developing this feature.
Crowd funding - (as suggested by entropyjs) for gaining financial support from fellow Steemians.
Charity - transparent end-to-end donations tracked from source to destination, with a dash of reputation to ensure the funds are used as intended.