I was one of those who fell victim to the hype of The DAO. I way over invested in it with > 50% of my ETH assets at the time. Thankfully I got all of it back through aggressive range trading even before the hard fork that recovered stolen funds, but oh what a mess. I learned a valuable lesson from that: never invest more than 5% of my portfolio into an ICO (that's the most I'm willing to lose if a project crashes & burns).
I have to respectfully disagree with you about Steemit being capable of all that Ethereum can do. The Steem blockchain certainly can crowdfund, in a sense, with post payouts. And I suppose that could also be looked at as an application of wisdom of the crowds. But I would argue that the sample size of people who vote on any given post is still too small to be statistically meaningful, and luck plays a large part in it.
Ethereum is more general purpose than Steem. It is essentially a Turing complete programming language built into a blockchain, and the mining process executes those programs. This allows enormous potential that the current early dapps have only scratched the surface of. Steem applications, on the other hand, do not actually execute on the blockchain itself but rather exist as separate apps that often manipulate and format data from the blockchain in various ways to make it more easily analyzable by humans.
I'm not knocking Steemit in any way, just saying it's an apples to oranges kind of comparison so be careful doing that. I actually think Steemit is much more suitable for social media than Ethereum because the Steem blockchain was designed from the beginning with that purpose in mind. Ethereum on the other hand was designed to be a general purpose blockchain-based distributed computer.
Yes you are right, I am aware of Ethereum's capabilities and I have even taken time to write smart contracts myself. Steem don't all functionalities just yet, but as far as I can see/hope that there will be smart contracts and many other features. This was merely comparison of Steem with the DAO. And I feel you on the DAO, that project messed up Ethereum big time. I was/am still believe in Ethereum, it will have its place and ride will be tough though with all recent issues. Any development on projects like Ethereum and Steem will bring blockchain to mainstream... I have to note that, comparison is friendly one and just my thoughts... Appreciate taking time to comment, brother! 😉
Gotcha, if you limit the scope of the comparison that way then yes, there is definitely some conceptual overlap and it's a good way to highlight the versatility of Steemit. I just wanted to make sure that people who don't know otherwise don't start thinking that's the full extent of what Ethereum can do.
I think smart contracts, in some form or other, are the future of blockchain tech. The race is on to see which smart contracts platform achieves market dominance, and Ethereum with its first mover advantage seems to be leading the pack for now. As you say, it's been going through some growing pains, but the recent troubles ultimately have made the network stronger & more resilient. It's good that those weaknesses were exposed and fixed.
It would be awesome if smart contracts could be incorporated into Steem somehow. Do you know of any concrete plans for this, or is it just what you are personally hoping to see?
There have been multiple posts about scripting language WREN which developers thinking to be a good choice for smart contracts, I think @dantheman made posts about potential implementations. Once it is out, Steem can be compared with Ethereum in terms of smart contracts as well...
Thanks for the info. I've never heard of WREN before, will do some digging on it.