Was there an obvious flaw in the system that would bring it down?
Everyone who hasn't been using some other method of posting and upvoting knows that there has been some issues with STEEMit lately. But, the bigger issues has to do with the hopes and dreams of everyone on STEEMit who is honest with themselves.
The Payout!
Let's take a look at the chart for STEEM price since it was launched in March of 2016.
There were two points in the history of STEEM where the price shot up and everyone was enjoying the riches. For the people watching the first spike, the downfall probably seemed like the end. Those, like me, who came in after the 2nd drop, still had/have hope that STEEM will shoot up like a new BitCoin or Ethereum. I remember just a few months ago seeing all the articles about people saying STEEM would hit $100 or $1000 or even higher within the next year.
Welp, right now, STEEM getting back and staying above $1.50 seems like a bit of a stretch.
What went wrong?
First off, I'm no expert in cryptocurrency. If I was, when I looked at BitCoin back in 2010, I would have bough a load of it. And, I'm not an expert in trading, since I have a few losers in my portfolio right now. So, I don't know if the price of STEEM will continue to stagnate for the next six months before it hits new (old) highs. But, I am curious and want to learn about stuff.
This morning, after yet another outage on STEEMit, I found this article on the Twitter feed.
STEEM is not decentralized. From the beginning it was and still remains highly centralized. The launch of the STEEM network was heavily rigged to ensure that the developer and his ‘friends’ had control over majority of supply. Furthermore, this has major implications for the Steemit platform.
Needless to say, the author of the article did not like what was going on with STEEM. This article was written 19 August, 2016, which means that STEEM was coming down hard from its $3.5 high that made those who had accumulated a bunch of STEEM a good deal of cash. So, at that time, it did look like the author had some legitimate concerns.
The article pointed to a message board and a thread about STEEM and those trying to get started with it.
Steem - A experimental Proof of Work blockchain
I decided to skim through the thread and found this exchange.
I am not sure what it means, but I took away that it meant that for every 1 VEST each person had, all of a sudden it became 1 Million VESTs. That would give people a higher reputation, but I'm not sure what else that might do. I know that reputation, at one point, actually had a purpose in determining voting power and curation rewards. Did everyone on STEEMit get a huge boost in May of 2016 that would give them an unfair advantage over anyone else who joined later? I don't know, the thread was closed and I didn't see them discuss it in the replacement thread.
In the replacement thread, a person began to do a rant about Dan based on his "stepping down announcement", which happened about 1 year after STEEM was released to the public.
Today I submitted my Resignation to Steemit, inc
I'm sure brilliant people are always looking for the next thing to do, but doing a two line post about "resigning" seems a little wanting. It also leads to concern about how truthful the rants against STEEM are.
The Rant
I already answered the problem with its economics in prior posts in several steem threads.
Larimer leaving now makes it a scam because he actually leaves after there is no profit to be made on the project at the all time lowest exchange rate and lowest market cap of the project. They instamined 80% of the supply from the short POW in the first few days (I was there, you can find my my comments in the very first steem launch thread) and profited till this very moment, you can be sure they maximized their profit as long as they could. The exchange rate is dumping on a daily basis and Dan is most probably leaving so he can't be made liable for the project dying as there is no way this project can get away with creating money out of thin air. He did the same with BTS and the charts don't lie.
If the economics of the project would be feasible there would be no panic seen in the charts, you won't get anything from buying STEEM except voting power on an unknown platform (STEEM isn't viable as a curreny) and on the other side you get people dumping free money for some reposts (implying here they are friends of the whales as a few people are in control on who get's money on posts, friendship/agenda > quality on the platform).
Even Larimer realized the platform is born to die and he tried to change the whole payout model together with a controled inflation. Guess what? It doesn't work. What is that if not realizing it's shit?
On the topic of "goes to 0", it's just a phrase. This will go down to the point where using the platform won't be profitable to anyone and not worth anyones time* thus people will just go back to the better built and more popular alternatives (even if those are centralized) or will go to the next better built decentralized platform.
I'm using the simple one liners because this project is a disgrace to this forum and doesn't deserve any respect. Even your developer and founder left the project with a simple one liner comment on his own platform.
Enjoy your pile of shit even Dan Larimer backs out of.
Again, I'm not expert on cryptocurrencies and stuff. I have hope that whatever is keeping STEEM price down and the problems that are disrupting STEEMit will go by and be in the past. I also hope that the bots and the spam decreases as well, but I don't know how to solve those problems without some heavy handed moderation. And of course, with heavy moderation, you end up with censorship.
Anyway, just an interesting thing that came up.
There are some bad mechanics on the Steemit platform but the idea that any place you go to is going to be fair or evenly distributed is unrealistic?
If you are willing to buy into a higher SP level why is that wrong? Those people are actually creating a real -world currency influx to the Steem economy. If you leverage relationships on this platform to advance on a social network...you're networking, no?
Anyone that drives traffic to the platform from their existing accounts is doing everyone a service.
The Steem market volatility seems to be giving way to a more even distribution of value to a wider number of users. I'm still learning here but what is happening to the value of Steem seems to make sense to me given the user growth?
Nothing wrong with buying into SP. And, yes, it shows a commitment for a long-term investment.
I believe the complaint was about how easy it was to get STEEM rewards in the initial roll out. There was a Whale war about it last year or early this year, just before HF19 happened.
Alright, I definitely need to go back and learn more about those early decisions. judging from the charts though, it seems the that the Steem economy is more reliable and generally worth more than it was. I have some additional thoughts on this that I'm still formulating as I learn but I think the general trend is positive. Thanks for getting back to me.
Yep, seeing the light. It's more like high school here everyday.
I am wondering if any of the people who were part of the start would see this article and make a reply.
I won't hold my breath.
I haven't researched the beginning as much as I should have. I enjoy the site but have been seeing the lopsided payouts and whale conspiracy posts more often. The Larimer deals need to be looked into.
I saw it for myself with jeff berwick and dollar vigilant , then noticed way more. Good idea ruined by greed.
Hopefully the good communities built here will keep on and keep strong.
It is one thing to be rewarded as a creator and early investor, premining for yourselves, like the bitcoin gold fork seems to do, is bad business
Yes, the Whale-circle-jerk stuff doesn't seem to help much with the validity that everything is equal on STEEMit.
I don't know if it was a Good Idea ruined by greed or a Good Idea with a ideology that had no concept of human nature.
"I don't know if it was a Good Idea ruined by greed or a Good Idea with a ideology that had no concept of human nature."
Brillant!
Wow great post Dean!
I think i mention to you few times about Steem price and about all those over optimist blogs that mention Steem at 100 usd or even more.
The main thing that is keeping Steem on the low price is the constant supply. I mean each vote that is given generates it. It is very simple!
I always mention that because of this the most optimistic price for Steem is somewhere between 2 and 2.50 usd. Maybe i am wrong who knows!
Like you mention i am not an expert and i always like to read and learn new things.
As for the platform i think it is here to stay for a long long period of time!
And us will do the same here!😉
Have a fabulos day and always Steem On!
Actually, the upvotes don't generate it, it is the constant filling of the Reward Pool. It is done daily and automatically. I tried to explain to someone that it wasn't the same as the mined coins, which only seem like they are added at a constant price.
They said that in the 20th year, the inflow of STEEM will drop so that it won't have as high of an inflation rate. I am guessing, that at that point, those who stuck it out will be rewarded as the price goes away from the USD$1.00 point.
Very confusing how steemit even works. Does it seem unfair? Yes. Is there a better alt? Not sure.
I will enjoy posting and commenting here, but I won't be investing here. That could change, maybe if it changes to a more transparent forum, or I see something that changes my view. So much change happening everywhere like yt censoring and useless facebook, where else could we go?
Minds and Gab are apparently the only other option, but they are still limited.
Of course, getting an audience is the hard part. But, at one time, everyone was all aboard MySpace.
So much for social media platforms.
Does @originalworks count blockquotes? Who knows. LOL
The @OriginalWorks bot has determined this post by @deanlogic to be original material and upvoted it!
To call @OriginalWorks, simply reply to any post with @originalworks or !originalworks in your message!
To enter this post into the daily RESTEEM contest, upvote this comment! The user with the most upvotes on their @OriginalWorks comment will win!
For more information, Click Here!
Special thanks to @reggaemuffin for being a supporter! Vote him as a witness to help make Steemit a better place!
Well who knows what will happen with it?
It is a bit like high school like @fractalfreedom said. There's like a club at the top that is popular.
When you look at @arcange Daily STEEM Statistics, it doesn't look like the argument that power is limited will change. However, there are those who did jump in lately, but they bought into Dolphin/Whale status. Which makes them part of the "Cool Kids".
I think the biggest problem is steem finding value. If we increase the number of users 10 fold and the number of steem currency units increases, then it may become more prevalent and therefore could gain value. Could be that it needs to be based on something like advertising. I have no clue how steem can fix itself without a major overhaul.
Since STEEM Rewards Pool only increases at a certain rate and will continue to decrease, you would assume that increasing the number of users would actually increase the value of STEEM. However, the issue is, STEEM isn't used to purchase very much. It is only on a few exchanges, two of which have trust issues, and the other options of using STEEM to purchase things is almost a complete secret.
While I was going through all of this, I found out that I could use Coinbase to connect to my PayPal and send my STEEM there to convert it to real money. With a 4% charge of course. But, I had no idea about it and I still don't think it would help with STEEM price, because I would just be selling off SBD in order to get real cash.
Exactly, not sure if this can work without steem being sent out from here en masse. Would have to become a more widely used/adopted commodity. Why would any new user come to steemit, unless it were lucrative. May take much much longer for it to theoretically become more valuable, maybe so long that users drop before steem can gain steam...
Coinbase accepts Steem or SBD? I thought I had to change it to Bitcoin in order to put it in Coinbase. Sorry, I'm a noob so I literally was following tutorials, lol. But now Bittrex is ...suspicious. Binance got a couple of good reviews but my browser says it's a phishing site. There's a third I'm checking out. If I could send to Coinbase, that would be cool.
It looks like you still need to convert it to BTC.
Hi there @deanlogic. Would you care to develop further and explain better what's the process to send your Steem/SBDs to Coinbase, connect your Coinbase account to your Paypal and the exact exchange procedures to finally obtain real fiat money out of Paypal?
Thank you!! :)
Further research determined that it was still a Steem/SBD to BTC conversion and then a connection to PayPal through Coinbase. I am not sure if Coinbase is still supporting it or not, because I haven't tried it myself. If I do, I will post an article on it. I just haven't been at the point of cashing anything out.
Oh! good to know then. Thanks for the heads up. Looking forward for the step by step tutorial with names, hairs and signs of the entire procedures and updates on your next post.
Cheers!! :)
Interesting. And with everything. Nothing is guaranteed and there will always be haters. I am with you - Let the positive energy sing!
Unless one is part of the development team, keeping positive about things and continue to provide content is the best we can do.
agreed
Yup, all newcommers must realize it sometime...
Lots of smoke an mirrors around here.
Good find
Seems there is more than one place that is calling STEEM a scam from the start, but that's probably as simple as a handful of people who are in many groups.
But, at a minimum, people who show up should know it isn't a "Get Rick Quick" thing. Even though there are plenty of people from Minnow to Whales trying to point out how to do so.
Seems there is more than one place that is calling STEEM a scam from the start, but that's probably as simple as a handful of people who are in many groups.
But, at a minimum, people who show up should know it isn't a "Get Rick Quick" thing. Even though there are plenty of people from Minnow to Whales trying to point out how to do so.
This post has received a 1.93 % upvote from @buildawhale thanks to: @deanlogic. Send at least 0.50 SBD to @buildawhale with a post link in the memo field for a portion of the next vote.
To support our curation initiative, please vote on my owner, @themarkymark, as a Steem Witness
Wow, brilliant article! I definitely see all kinds of problems with steem as well.
I even see people (including witnesses) make a killing off of things like bid bots that literally cheat, and nobody can do anything about it, so it goes on and on.
I also often wonder why steem is set up so confusing if its so open and transparent? Im definitely going to have to look deeper into steemit and see whats going on here. Thanks for the heads up.
Unfortunately, this article will probably be buried in the sea of spam on STEEMit.
Look at the volume of the first spike. Im assuming that was driven by less supply so less amounts of volume were required to drive up the price.
Second the markets go through a period of boom and bust. Looks like an accumulation that is going into a tightening wedge so we will either see another price spike or price drop once that wedge consolidates.
I think the first spike was driven some how, by the first allowable power down.
i will remain hopeful that the value of steem will rise as more people start using the platform.
awesome post. upvoted and followed buddy.
Thanks.
Hopefully more real people and less bots and spammers.
This post has received a 2.33 % upvote from @booster thanks to: @deanlogic.
Interesting.
I think I love the idea of this site, of being rewarded for creating and curating quality content.
These bots seem to retract from that IMHO.
How does he think money is created?
Did anyone not read the white paper. This why there is SBD in the first place, because steem is subjected to a certain yearly inflation. As far as i'm concerned, steem has done well to remain between $1 and $2. A currency with an unlimited supply will def be subjected to high yearly inflation. The cryptomarket is still young. With merely one million users, and steem being just a few years, why woukd anyone expect the price of steem to rocket? Steem is not driven as much by hype anymore but its ability to fulfill its realworld application. The coins you see skyrocketing hardly have any working applications, just pure FOMO and overhyped coins. Steemit is here to stay for the longterm. Lets see how the currency does in 4 to 5 years. I still don't undetstand while people are always chasing abitrary high profits without realising work has to be done to vack it up, otherwise it will come crashing down hard and fast. I'm looking towards steem being a stable currency with a value of $5 to $10.
That will probably take place between year 16 and 20, according to the plan.
$3 to $5 is ok too.
It's not a matter if it will die.
All curencies die. Always have. Always will.
It's a matter of HOW it dies.
Unlike physical fiat currencies in a system without public ledgers, the open ledger STEEM allows the people to track the "flow" of money.
That in itself will allow for real-time monitoring of inflation/deflation.
All money systems collapse, but a money system in which the actual users have the ability to monitor and exercise personal control over has never existed.
Its gonna get interesting, one way or another.
You want to know how to monetize Steem? If you follow the Whale approach, you do the following:
I've often wondered if Steemit had been INTENDED to be a scam from the beginning.
I draw a parallel with Trump.
Trump was INTENDED to win the Republican Nomination.
so that Hilliary could win the General Election.
something went wrong.
(wrong for the democrats and the deepstate...but I repeat myself)
Did something similar happen to Steem?
Good reference. Yes, Hillary Clinton was set to win against Trump, mostly as he was symbolic of conservatives, nationalists, patriots, of the people who want smaller government, better borders, etc etc, in order to symbolize the death of nationalism, etc etc, for the birth of globalism, etc.
But, she did not win, apparently since she is not the President at the moment. So, something must have gone wrong, some may feel and say.
And Steem may be a good thing, too. Maybe Steem is like Luke Skywalker who was INTENDED to replace his father, Darth Vader, AKA Anakin Skywalker as foreseen by Emperor SOROS, Rothschild, Bill Gates, Disney, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Agenda 21, United Nations, EU, Oprah, NWO, etc etc. And we know that is the heart of the first trilogy of Star Wars. Maybe Steem is Luke of Return of the Jedi.
Good post, I hope you're wrong but I did enjoy this article all the same.
@originalworks
Perhaps steemit was designed to fail. Perhaps it was used as an introductory drug to get folks excited about crypto currency only do diminish some forms of crypto and bring in the chosen crypto as the one selected world currency. Steemit may not be it. Perhaps it is the intro drug. Thanks for sharing.
That is possible, but don't we already have the almighty dollar which was already digitalized and is already used in so many countries and can be wired kind of like Bitcoin and who would want to take the world from digitalized dollars only to introduce us to something that would function in the same ways as the dollar? Yeah, it is possible. Many things are possible. And yes, governments want us to go to their money systems. So, people are trying to get us back to fiat, to the dollar, to digitalized money, to whatever, because world banks and Rothschild and others have had control for so long and they will continue to try to have control over money systems and stock markets and assets and resources globally speaking and we can bow down to them or we can seek alternatives or whatever...... that is the game of life that we live in and we can give up or we can continue to fight for love and life and destiny and oatmeal and for our children and everything. I'm Oatmeal Joey.
Steem can always fail. Yeah, America can fail too. People die too. Does that mean people should not go to school, work, fall in love, get married, have fun, learn, teach, travel, live, love, laugh, etc? Some of that is too deep for some people, haha. Talk about philosophy.
I believe that life is all worth it even if it is not because I would rather regret what I did and tried than what I didn't try or did or whatever in life. We can try Steem and Bitcoin and many things in life. We can take risks and Steem can fall but it can also rise. I like Steem for a lot of reasons and it is working and it is better than many alternatives. Doing something is better than nothing. If people have better things to do than Steem, they are free to do so. We all know Steem is better than Facebook. YouTube, Twitter, main stream social networks, media, etc, generally, in theory, and in practicality, for so many reasons, and we are all making friends, contacts, customers, fans, audiences, enemies, money, influence, experience, etc, and that is good for so many reasons. Steem and Bitcoin and Gab and Infowars and Drudge and Wikileaks and blockchains and Dtube and cryptocurrencies and Bittorrent and decentralized systems will continue to rise in the future for so many reasons as we boycott Rothschild and Disney and Soros and Google and Facebook and Bill Gates and Apple and Twitter and YouTube and Hollywood and others. Don't keep all your eggs in one basket.
The volume is for buys and sells, which is why it is probably keeping a stable value around $1.05, instead of dropping down to $0.50.
If someone somehow made an agreement to fix the price of STEEM, that would be more worrisome.
Yes, it is wide open. https://steemwhales.com/ Shows a lot of information and you could slowly parse through some of the data that way and by clicking on user accounts.
Of course, when you start clicking on user accounts and then see the transfers of money to different accounts and such, it makes you wonder even more. Maybe someone could make an app that links it all together, but it cost money to ping the blockchain for information.
I guess the worry is, if the creator jumped ship 1 year after it was born and moved on to EOS, is there anything left to develop out of it. Hopefully the remaining team can figure out a solution to the current problems.