After the recent Hardfork(s), we updated our Terms of Service for MinnowBooster, but it quickly became clear that that would not be sufficient.
The community is re-orienting itself more towards curation, which is how it should have been the whole time, so we want to support that too.
Promotion not Profit
The name MinnowBooster already shows the original intention of the post-promotion service: We wanted to provide an option to boost minnows. If you purchase promotion for your post, you draw attention to it, and this promotion is what you pay for. The intention should be to get visibility for your post, not to pay for promotion to profit from it! In contrast to bid bots, MinnowBooster has always let you know what you will receive for the money you spend and has always been transparent in that regard.
To reinforce the sentiment of Promotion, Not Profit, we are introducing some changes to the process of purchasing promotion from MinnowBooster, effective approximately 12 hours from this post.
The changes will be as follows:
From the amount you transfer to Minnowbooster,
- 5% will be automatically sent to @null and thus burnt, decreasing overall Steem supply.
- 5% will be automatically sent to @steem.dao, supporting development on the Steem blockchain.
- The remaining 90% will be used to purchase your promotion.
MinnowBooster's quality standards and ToS still apply to promoted posts and will be enforced.
5% Burn Reduction on Liquid Payouts
At the moment, vote sellers and delegators receive a liquid payout that they can withdraw from the virtual MinnowBooster wallet into their Steem wallet, circumventing the Liquid/STEEM POWER split that's happening with a post payout.
To reduce the impact of this, we're making changes here too:
- If you withdraw STEEM or SBD from your virtual Minnowbooster wallet into your Steem wallet, 5% will be sent to @null.
- Because of this change, currently active automatic withdrawals will be halted until you turn them back on manually.
- If you purchase a vote from your balance, only the previously 5% to @null and 5% to @steem.dao are deducted. It makes sense to use your earnings from vote-selling to promote your own posts.
To further reduce the amount of available liquid STEEM and SBD, @minnowbooster will send 5% of profits generated through votes to @null.
The funds will be accumulated and sent to @null and @steem.dao once a day.
Save other Services
We want to remind everyone that @minnowbooster doesn't exist in a void.
BuildTeam runs several services like TokenBB, GINAbot, Steemvoter Betathat are currently free, except for the premium versions of TokenBB. On top of that, we have our own nodes to not add additional traffic to public nodes.
All of that costs money every month, and MinnowBooster helps cover these costs to a large extent. We are looking forward to a day when the STEEM price is high and other services are profitable, because then we don't have to rely on our promotion service anymore.
Until then, we strive to run @minnowbooster as ethically as possible, just as we always have.
Cooperation for Curation
The @minnowbooster account has a lot of available STEEM POWER and voting power that should not just sit there idle until somebody purchases a vote.
As we don't want to randomly upvote posts and since we don't have the resources to curate high-quality content, we've entered a cooperation with the @steemstem curation project.
SteemSTEM has a team of experienced curators that ensure the quality of the curated posts and check for plagiarism and other kinds of abuse. Their Steem UI steemstem.io showcases the curated posts and is its own interface, not just a Steemit copy.
Furthermore, steemSTEM has a team of ** honour members** who are volunteers that mentor new members, foster community interaction, and help track down abuse.
Overall, the steemSTEM project can be regarded as a valuable part of the Steem blockchain, which is why we will support it with votes from the @minnowbooster account.
More details on how that will work will follow soon in another post.
Summary and Conclusion
Tl:Dr, When you purchase promotion from MinnowBooster, we will first send 5% towards STEEM BURN (@null) and 5% to the @steem.dao, the balance will be used to promote your post. Then on the delegator side, we will deduct 5% upon liquid withdrawl, however, you can use your MinnowBooster balance to pay for further promotion instead and the 5% won't be deducted when you use your MB balance.
That's not all, in addition, MinnowBooster will be donating 5% of its profits from the promotion service to @null to be burned!
MinnowBooster essentially makes it easy for you to be socially responsible with your promotion and it will be very unlikely that your posts will be downvoted for using such a promotion service that benefits the STEEM market by helping reduce circulating currency automatically. However feel free to burn even more by setting @null as beneficiary to your post and really have a chance of being upvoted further by the community, provided your content is of a good standard.
We at BuildTeam are happy to see the community turn more towards curation. MinnowBooster has been one of our first projects, and the intention behind it has always been to give Steemians who aren't already millionaires or part of a closed social circle a way to be seen and have their posts acknowledged by others, to have a voice and not have to beg for votes.
MinnowBooster was never intended to be BuildTeam's only project. We kept on developing new services and took over existing ones that struggled to stay alive, like GINAbot and TokenBB. Our current focus is on these projects, and we're looking forward to a bright future.
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( Want an easier way? Use our SteemConnect proxy link! )
Disclaimer: This is a @steemvoter subscription payment post. Thank you to Steemvoter customers for allowing us to use your Steem accounts to upvote this post by virtue of your free subscription to the Steemvoter.com curation automation service. @steemvoter is proudly a @buildteam subsidiary and sister project to @dlease, @tokenbb, @ginabot, @steemsports. @steemsports-es and @minnowbooster.
Beneficiary Declaration: 50% @null BURNPOST!
I really like the initiative of start cooperation with SteemSTEM, they have tons of amazing posts to showcase the quality of their content creators
Thanks for those nice words! :)
well it's nice to make a change, even though the purchasing still there but you made some twist. I think it's fair enough and by the way, what is this @null or who is it? I clicked the username but it seems there's none to find in that account.
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It's an special account whose funds are unable to be used, thus you burn Steem sending some to that account.
Can I have an assurance that the token I'm going to send won't be a waste and it will upvote the memo I sent in return?
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@null is a default burn account that belongs to no-one except the blockchain itself. All funds that are sent there will be burned and lost forever.
I appreciate your time replying my question, but I'll ask other thing. For example I have shade token and I want to burn to use as upvote. How will I do it? just send that token and put memo by @null? is that correct?
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That would likely only be possible if the Shade token creator has it set up to work that way.
The HoboDAO is set up to allow people to burn Hobo tokens by sending them to @hobodao (a permanently locked account) with a post address in the memo area and that enters the author into a contest. But not all token systems involve a burn option.
For some reason, I totally missed this post. I am very glad to see @buildteam/@minnowbooster supporting the SteemSTEM initiative and to trust for doing what we do!
Thanks a lot!
Pleasure, thanks for working with us to enhance curation on Steem.
I guess that's the end for minniwbooster then. :(
Lol why?
There is already a terrible ROI, now they lose 10% more on top. So minnows would either use a better bot, or just power up the little steem they have earned
All bots are being targetted so it is more likely they will be downvoted if they use a standard bot over a socially responsible one. It's the same as if they were to initiate a burn post themselves.
Have you asked for permission from @trafalgar and @lordbutterfly?
:P hehe
loved this bot
You can still love the bot, it still lives :)
To everybody considering using their service, I should give you a fair warning. By purchasing votes from them you risk not only them stealing your STEEM but also downvoting you for the same ammout without even refunding you for the service they refuse to provide.
5 days ago 140 STEEM sent to @minnowbooster https://steemit.com/appics/@bebeomega/alpha-kw-8-appics-im-35590
5 days ago 0.001 SBD received from @minnowbooster We have noticed that the seller of your vote has unvoted your post: bebeomega/alpha-kw-8-appics-im-35590, after three days you will be refunded your payment.
"Hi @bebeomega, the decision was taken that the voteseller has a right to remove his vote if you are in a violation of the terms of our service therefore you will not be refunded and will remain on our blacklist until such time that you start posting in accordance to our #mb-tos"
So in plain text they decide they can just steal my steam and not refund me anything even though I have not breached any of their tos! So basically they reserve the right to steal your steem and there's nothing you can do about it.
So friendly advice run as far as possible from shady "providers" like this. There are way better and hones upvoting services and with those crooks you are taking a risk everytime you decide to use their service
The post you promoted was this https://steempeak.com/appics/@bebeomega/alpha-kw-8-appics-im-35590 which is a clear violation of our ToS.
Some people/groups/bots are burning 1% of their money. Others are burning 3% or 5%. Some might burn 10% or more. What about 50%, or even 100%? Think how much good we would be doing for the Steem blockchain, if we all just deleted all our money and went to zero! Think how valuable it would be, if there was almost none of it left?!?
It's basic economics that printing money via inflation devalues a currency. Steem has an 8.6% annual inflation which reduces by 0.5% per annum, the burning helps alleviate the oversupply. I would agree with you if Steem was a static supply token, however it is not, more gets printed all the time that can be dumped on exchanges to lower the price, bruning helps reduce the selling pressure.
If the steem user-base/economy grows at 8.6% annually, then the -inflation- is essentially 0%.
Yes correct, 8.6% is not a big ask in terms of growth, however it has been rather dwindling of late.
not to be to critic here but it seems to me that this will affect the buildteam token payouts??
If you are burning 5% of your profits that is admirable but are you not taking the payouts of buildteam even lower with this move. They have not been that good for a while but this will make it even worse
The alternative would have been a complete shut down of minnowbooster, because users were not buying votes anymore, scared to get flagged. There's no ideal solution, and we're working as hard as possible towards making other services profitable to increase the payouts again.
^this. I hold a few BUILDTEAM tokens and am always supportive of their moves to make their services promote good content. Long-term.
Thank you for your support!
And you're right, it's all about long-term. It's pointless to go for short-term goals if it ruins our future.
that is also why I am not selling my buildteam and holding on to them long term
We're giving our best to make that worth it :)
Development of good things just takes a bit, especially with low STEEM prices.
I stopped using most bots after the HF because - if I'm not making a profit, I at least want to come out even.. and that doesn't happen now with many of the bots unless you pay large amounts of STEEM, and I was only paying the bare minimum for votes.
After the HF and taking out curation, many bots are a loss.. However small a loss is a loss.
I suspect it is a bad ROI that has decreased interest in voting bots, more so than fear of downvotes, to be honest..
It's probably a mix of both. Not much we can do about it, but it's likely we'll eventually shut minnowbooster down. We want to focus on services that benefit the community more, like TokenBB, GINAbot, and DLease.
This post has been included in the latest edition of The Steem News - a compilation of the key news stories on the Steem blockchain.
Please dedelegate my delegated SP - the link provided on minnowbooster.com is broken.
The answer is simple, because there is no way to tell which of those "small account" are holding by real people, and this is definitely easy to be gamed by one creating tons of alternate account to receive those tokens. Burning however, works in a sustainable way to continuously benefit the community as a whole. The effect might be slow, but certainly guaranteed in a long run.
It's all about supply and demand. If there would only be 1 steem in the system and 1000 who wanted it, well that 1 steem would be much higher and equal to the same value if there would be 1000 steem available. (in theory). So by burning steem you make each other steem more valuable. Thus, helping everyone that already has some steem, including if it's just a small amount.
I don't know if you noticed but steem is closing in on 0 value. So burning steem is a great way to help preventing that. Trust me you rather want 10 steem worth 1 dollar than 1000 steem worth 0.0001. it also helps fighting the inflation rate.
Of course burning steem is not gonna make all this happen, but if enough are doing it you will eventually see its effect. For every steem we burn its a steem less that could be sold or that takes a share from the steem in the pool = more steem for everyone.
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I am not buying into that story.
They have fucked up by chasing away investors. They started up scammy ways to make Steem which did not end up working, now they are fucking things up even more in their panic and burning it lol .
The best plan would be to distribute it
I agree 100%.
The problem is there has been a period of abundance over the last years, especially with bot voting, the community landed up taking advantage of the abundance and engaged in practices like self-voting and extracting as much rewards as possible and leaving being not much value.
Steem because known for a place where bidbots are rampant and the sell pressure of everyone earning rewards and selling is not a sustainable model for investors so the price declined.
Those are the main highlights, I do agree with you in principle that distribution is important but we also need better retention strategies and onboarding funnels, no good handing out coin for people to just dump if they find Steem too complicated or uninteresting.
I see you have a negative 2 reputation, you must have been flagged alot?
Indeed. He has now become a non-person on the platform and can be safely ignored.
Get used to it because opinion flags will be the tool for censorship of dissent going forward.
There is only one answer which I don't see in the replies to this comment (weird).
Burning Steem decreases the supply, which is the number of coins on the market. As the market cap of steem does not change, this means that the price of steem goes up.
You want to give money to everyone, well, the price going up does exactly that, it gives money to all steem holders. However, creating new steem and distributing it to everyone equally will not really give money to people because the price will move down (since again the market cap doesn't change).
The market cap is the value of all the steem coins together.
So, when you see burning, it means that everyone holding steem is benefitting from it equally.
Good questions, let's wait to their response.
The idea behind burning the Steem is to counter the inflation of Steem. The rewards pool consistently increased the supply of Steem making it less valuable. When smaller account keep their payout and larger accounts burn theirs, then the overall supply (and value) of Steem does not change and the distribution of Steem shifts in favor of the smaller accounts.
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Well MARKET scarcity increases price. Granted, this can also be achieved by simply not putting your Steem on the market.
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It's a form of virtue signalling so that large accounts can continue to justify circle jerking each other.
To simplify it further, let's assume a hypothetical case where all STEEM are burnt but one. Now this 1 STEEM is worth the total market cap. Tell me, how would you distribute this 1 STEEM to 100 million people to distribute its value to all? Hope you got the perspective!
Inflation decreases by 0.5% per annum, currently around 8.6% so next year Steem inflation will be under 8% and dropping, so if we burn as well then it helps reduce inflation, no need to increase burn rate unless we want to and the price really needs more support.