A Radically Updated Steem Whitepaper

in #steem7 years ago

The original Steem whitepaper outlined a vision for a blockchain database that supports community building and social interaction with cryptocurrency rewards. Over time, this vision has evolved, and the protocol to support that vision has evolved as well. The original whitepaper is no longer an ideal description of the Steem we see today.

We are therefore happy to announce that a new version of the whitepaper has been published, which is now technically accurate based on the current version of the blockchain. The new whitepaper can be downloaded here.

Some of the main changes made were:

  • Updated information regarding the new economic rules and drastically lower inflation rate implemented by Hardfork 16.
  • Changed the two year power down cycle to 13 weeks.
  • Removed references to liquidity rewards.
  • Removed references to mining/POW.
  • Updated economics with new inflation rules.
  • Changed SMD to SBD.
  • Changed SBD to STEEM conversion from 7 days to 3.5.
  • Added info on the 10% SBD debt ratio cap.
  • Added clarity to witness policy for price feeds and APR based on the SBD debt level.
  • Updated expected trading range for SBD peg under normal market conditions.
  • Changed voting from n^2 to linear.
  • Removed information on rate limited voting.
  • Added information on voting power.
  • Removed information on delayed payouts.
  • Removed information on the rewarding of parent posts.
  • Added info for 100% SP payout option.
  • Changed from 19 to 20 top witnesses.
  • Added witness who miss a block and haven’t produced in the last 24 hours will be disabled until they update their block signing key.
  • Updated information on bandwidth limitations.
  • Added information on SP delegation.
  • Used old inflation rules to create an "Initial Allocation & Supply" section.
  • Removed information on 10:1 reverse split.
  • Clarified Value is in the Links section.
  • Other miscellaneous wording and concept clarifications.

These changes are just the beginning. The main intention of this update was to bring the WP up to date, so that it did not contain inaccurate information. We will be releasing a new “Blue Paper” soon, which will be an entirely new document describing the Steem vision as we see it today.

There are many more updates soon to come, so stay tuned!

Team Steemit

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Thanks for the Whitepaper revision to the current "state of the art." ;)

Regarding the discussions about the present level of abuse, please read and consider @mattclarke's extremely simple, well-reasoned proposal here:

PROPOSAL by @mattclarke

I believe that his proposed simple, single change - restoring the balance between content creation and curation - would decrease the self-voting "abuse" and simultaneously draw "reader/curators" to the platform.

Not everyone is — nor should they be — content creators. Restoring a good level of curation rewards would encourage thoughtful reading and discourage self-voting on worthless comments.

While I'm here, I will also repeat my perennial appeal:

Please implement the long-promised perpetual editability in the user interface.

Thank you for your consideration!

😄😇😄

@creatr

Thanks for the plug, @creatr; and for your ongoing support. @timcliff has told me that a return to 50/50 split between authors and curators is something being discussed, although it's not clear if it will be sufficient to completely remedy the issue.
My other recent suggestion is not one I've seen fielded elsewhere, and would minimise the copy/paste spam while attracting some heavy hitters from outside steemit. (Perhaps for scaling reasons it would be best left on ice until after launch).

Hey, Matt,

You're more than welcome...

Thank you for consistently presenting quality ideas. I have found your thoughts insightful, challenging, and inspiring, and (whenever I remember the source!) I'm always happy to credit your brilliance.

I just looked at your "comment regulator" post, and at first blush it also sounds like a winner. Please don't ever stop bringing your great observations to Steemit. ;)

Agreed. I assume the reason it does not yet exist is there are game theory problems.
I hope they can be solved at some point...

The game theory problems even with only a 25/75 split can never be solved.

What happened to escrow transactions?

https://steemit.com/sip/@dan/escrow-sip-steem-improvement-proposal

Steem escrow transactions would facilitate:

  • crypto-fiat exchange similar to that of localbitcoins.com
  • trade of real world goods and services similar to that of OpenBazaar
  • lending with Steem as collateral that could be powered up and delegated back to the borrower

SBD would provide a lot of convenience for pricing.

The exchange, trade and lending would all happen using only fiat and the Steem blockchain and thus bypass Bitcoin as a gateway cryptocurrency.

This should increase the number of active Steem users, which in turn should increase the value and price of Steem.

I may be wrong but if the Steem blockchain supports escrow transactions, why not add the feature to User Interfaces such as Steemit.com and see what happens.

Steem escrow transactions would facilitate:
crypto-fiat exchange similar to that of localbitcoins.com
trade of real world goods and services similar to that of OpenBazaar
lending with SP as collateral that could be delegated back to the borrower

This, in my opinion is where developers should focus all their effort now.

It boggles my mind how no one has yet created a simple marketplace UI, where you can log in with your steem credentials and buy/sell anything without the outrageous ebay charges.
The escrow functionality has been here for months.
A marketplace is a key part of this whole project https://steemit.com/steem/@dan/steemit-s-evil-plan-for-cryptocurrency-world-domination
No offence to anyone but I see people building tons of useless apps on steem that adds very little value. Why not build something that will send steem to the moon instead?
The reason steem is still so undervalued is that most people still view it as a cash cow, when they realize the money earned won't actually exit the system, investors will pour money in.

Don't get distracted by the rewards, they are just a trojan horse. The real goal is to bootstrap a currency and a new economy around it.

Yes, YES!

I want an easy-to-use Steem shopping cart plugin to add to my website! ;)

Thanks in advance to the clever developer who comes up with that baby!

😄😇😄

@creatr

Thats what I want too!

Don't get distracted by the rewards, they are just a trojan horse. The real goal is to bootstrap a currency and a new economy around it.

You probably right, so where are the tools for the new economy? Wouldnt drive the bootstrappong of Steem with marketplaces enabled using Steem as a primary coin? Wouldnt bootstrapping not be supported when getting the existing businesses to use Steemit/Steem as another promotional channel? But, commercial businesses have requirements, and they need to be fulfilled before they even consider to extend their communication and marketing channels with Steem/Steemit. I do not see anything that drives this! Nothing at all! While I know business segments that can be very interested in coming to Steemit, I also know that features at the backend are required on which I do not have any control over, so I (and others) can not start investing in the frontend features required to onboard these commercial businesses. The risks are simply to high! While when creating and executing a plan to onboard commercial businesses in a solid way, with co-operation of the various parties that needs to be involved, can drive the acceptance of Steem as a coin tremendously! As mentioned in another comment to this post: I do see a tremendous lack of (commercial) product management, a tremendous lack of winning propositions, and a tremendous lack of getting much more out of what is already being build.

Steemporium . It's a start.

Its so easy for people to be not just distracted but consumed by the payouts.....
Steemit has so much potential. Lets get it together community!

The escrow feature is supported on the blockchain and works fine as far as I know (though no primary UI support; I believe there was a third party app announced once that did support it). It probably should have been added to the white paper if it is missing.

Driving features that are available in the backend, shall be done be introducing and launching relevant services. When STINC is trying to bootstrap a coin, and STINC owns the UI to the Steem blockchain used by 90%+ of the Steemians, it shall be STINC who shall lead to way to launch marketplace + inbuild escrow. That will drive the usage of it, and that will drive others to invest time and money in creating such services using the Steem blockchain. I really do not understand the way STINC is trying to bootstrap Steem. They invented the idea of a social network, but dont execute on it in ways they should do; Making Steem yet another of those 100s and soon 1.000s of crypto coins in the market; That is hell of competition! Personally I see a tremendous lack of (commercial) product management, a real lack of good propositions, a lack of building the wide bridges between the existing commercial worlds (businesses) and the cryptoworld (Steem in our case). Where is the money? At brands and businesses! How can they be moved into cryptospace? Make the inclusion of cyptospace and coins seamless to their current operations and technical implementation. What is required for that? Solid and well thought through features, interfaces, adapters very likely different form vertical to vertical AND active marketing and sales approach to those commercial business.

yeah, it works... https://steemit.com/@sigmajin/transfers i tried it out two months back, and even got it working with steem-js.

this is the gui... https://steemit.com/escrow/@xtar/update-on-escrow-gui-service-bulletin-board it was actually developed for golos i think, and just happens to work with steem.

I don't have a good answer. I guess lack of critical mass in terms of community size and some subset of that community being focused on building commerce apps.

Simple reason: opportunity cost.

From an economic standpoint, this can be simply summarized as “opportunity cost”, i.e. we do not pick the fruit from the top of the tree first. Everyone has an economic incentive to pick the lowest hanging fruit.

@smooth, just stating the obvious which you already know … my guess is everyone is too busy making money in other ways that have higher economies-of-scale or are easier. The “problem” for those in the crypto industry is they are making too much money without needing to produce the best software. Many of those who invested in crypto early such as yourself, no longer need to work as programmers. For most that happened by mid-2017, yet I remember even in 2015 your opportunity cost was already very high. Those who continue to do so must have some other form of motivation.

Luckily I was too ill (thus depleted of capital) to make a lot of money investing in the first wave of crypto, so I am still hungry. Plus I have multiple “other forms of motivation” as well. Gut tuberculosis was the best thing that has ever happened in my life!

Good answer

Thank you for this very well-stated and reasoned observation. Getting bitcoin out of the loop is critical to growth!

The @steemshop people should be all over this!

Right On, and Steem on, friend!

Hello again, @mkdouglas,

Thanks for letting me know about your recent article. I don't have time to read and think about it carefully at this moment, as I'm preparing for the San Diego Maker Faire...

Nevertheless, as this is such an important issue I have given you a 100% up vote and have Re-Steemed the article so that it will hopefully gain a wider audience.

I'll get back to you later after I've had a chance to read and think about it.

Thanks for offering to resteem. I am open to suggestions and criticism.

I also made sure to follow you.

Hello, friend,

I would have replied sooner but I've been "flat out" and not available here.

First, I actually did hit the Re-Steem button before leaving you that message, and thought that the Re-Steem had already occurred... I apologize that it did not. I don't know what happened? In any case, I have now Re-Steemed and verified that the article was Re-Steemed to my blog. I don't know what happened, but Steemit occasionally "hiccups" like that.

Still don't have time to read it, but maybe Monday?

Kind regards,

- @creatr

Just curious about something...

It was never explained why the previous n^2 algorithm and its ability to mitigate abuse/exploitation was eliminated in favor of a full linear algorithm, which has led to a lot more widespread/rampant abuse of the rewards system. The new algorithm requires not a single shred of "consensus" when it comes to the allocation of rewards.

Does this not present a problem for dealing with serial spammers and collusion, like we have been seeing since the last hard fork (19) was implemented? Are there any discussions or plans to address this, or will we just simply have to continue playing catch-up with all of the new abuse/exploitation - and continue to waste tons of voting power on something that was adequately mitigated by several different protocols which have been removed/changed in consecutive hard forks?

which has led to a lot more widespread/rampant abuse of the rewards system

This is an easy claim to make and when it comes to widespread I would agree it is obviously much more widespread. This makes perfect sense because under the previous algorithm the bulk of the user base (like 90%+) had virtually no ability to grant rewards and therefore no ability to abuse. That's like starving to death as a weight loss diet.

However, when it comes to the 'amount' or 'severity' of 'abuse' it is very difficult to be confident about that conclusion because excessive concentration of rewards and a few whales essentially siphoning off the entire pool (or nearly so) to a few preferred posters could also be considered abuse.

The role of posting, comment, voting, and rewarding in this system is to encourage widespread participation and growth of the platform. The precise allocation of rewards is less important, especially when that allocation is flatter and broader.

The new algorithm requires not a single shred of "consensus" when it comes to the allocation of rewards.

It does require consensus. If A upvotes and B downvotes (with equal weight) then no reward is paid. That is precisely a consensus-finding algorithm. If the community is unwilling to take a stand and downvote, it can't be helped.

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If the community is unwilling to take a stand and downvote, it can't be helped.

Agreed, but please help us by making down-voting anonymous. This way we don't get burned by stepping on the wrong foot. I see worthless posts that really deserves a flag, but then I check their SP, and decide not to pick a fight.

Yes this is a problem for anyone with low SP but at the same time if it wan anonymous then people could just go and down vote anything they didn't like all day long and no one would then be able to hold them accountable.
Transparency is the savior and we must protect that at ALL costs.

I agree that transparency is valuable. Unfortunately, it is making the fight against misuse harder. Maybe we need a more creative way to solve this problem. Otherwise, this problem is crippling the whole system. Low-quality content is being rewarded more than high-quality content. I am sure Steem was not designed to do that.

BTW, I have just read a post by @heavey about a new ICO that is similar to Steem. It is called Red Pulse. They have devised some solutions to guarantee high-quality content. Maybe, we should check them out.

I don't think that transparency is the problem. The problem is that almost everyone is here to make money and as usual willing to compromise honesty, integrity, fairness etc to get a piece of the pie.
I am sure there is already a solution that exists to deal with this and I feel the solution is just that this community curates content they feel is valuable and flags stuff that isn't. Guilds/groups are the way to go.
If a lowly wimpy minnow or plankton finds flag worthy content they can just report it to the group and the group with all the power can do the down voting if the warning meats criteria.
Its actually very simple, then the entire community becomes the security camera that sees EVERYTHING and the whales become the enforcement. Its perfect.

I think accounts should not be able to upvote their own posts. This way abusers will be forced to create other accounts to upvote. Those other accounts won't have a lot of SP and as such won't be intimidating to users who want to downvote their posts.

Maybe in the current situation a lot of people who would have downvoted the posts were scared off by the SP.

Its just as easy to transfer or delegate sp to a sock puppet.

The account posting spam and the account with the SP will be different. Other naive users will be more confident to downvote a spamming account with little to no SP. The SP account might still retaliate but might also have to deal with many naive users who downvoted his Spam account.

Let me try and give an illustration:

Mob boss (SP account)
Puppet (Spam account)
Government contract (Rewards from self voting)

Currently the mob boss can go for government contracts and do a bad job. People will keep quiet about it because they do not want to suffer the wrath of the mob boss.

If the rules didn't allow the mob boss to get government contracts, the mob boss would have to get a puppet to get the government contracts. If the puppet does a bad job, people who are not aware of the puppet's links to the mob boss will act to punish the puppet. If enough naive people act against the puppet, the well-informed might join in to punish the puppet. This is how revolutions happen. It requires enough naive (or brave) people to act.

Moral of this: it is easier to scare off individuals before they act than to scare off masses after they act.

I hope I made sense.

It makes sense but not sure I actually agree it would apply/work here on this platform.
Anyone with little sp/rep will not do flagging if they get retaliated on, regardless of it its from the boss or henchman. People are just as scared of the henchman as the boss. Because everyone knows the boss calls the shots and the henchman dish it out.
Steemit does have potential to be a place of honor and ideals but is currently very far from that. This community would probably actually be a lot better without the money yet none of us want to give it up either hahaha

Independent of the questions raised about whether this is a good idea, there isn't obviously any mechanism for doing this. To limit spam, the voter needs to be 'charged' for the bandwidth and vote power, which means the voter must be identified. To alter that would require some radical changes in the system design.

Agreed. The benefits of HF-19 far outweigh the negative impact of the spammers.

when it comes to widespread I would agree it is obviously much more widespread.

I agree with this statement in the most literal sense.

that is to say, under n^2, the abuse was more concentrated. It was a very few people making six figures annually (steemguild, curie, etc).

The total percentage of the reward pool going to spam/abuse is, i suspect, probably about the same (and if its higher, ite because many whales got fed up with fighting abuse and now just sell their votes), there are just more people getting some of it. .

Obviously, neither situation is optimal, but if we're going to pay out a significant share of the reward pool to abusers, the abuser community should at least be inclusive.

The Witnesses voted for linear over n^2 and that is why there is linear. Overwhelmingly, it appears to have positive results in terms of user engagement and growth. Consider other alternatives than n^2 to mitigate "abuse."

I'm sure there are many other ways to address the spam caused by self voting, none of them perfect, I just wish people working at Steemit were more engaged in the discussion of possible solutions, There has been at least 15 serious posts specifically about the issue and possible solutions and nobody from Steemit commented on them if only to acknowledge having read it.

Hopefully, they're actually already working on it behind the scenes.

Even I just wrote about the issues here.

I haven't exactly been here all that long, but the problems are obvious.

We'll see how long they'll let them drag on for fear of upsetting the "witnesses."

If nothing valid is done to combat the problem, we'll all be witnesses to the downfall of steem. :P

As much as I love Steemit, Steemit is very well known for horrible communication as well as PR.
Could be so easily fixed. Maybe one day, one day it will have to be in order to reach the masses thats for sure.

well, that's all detailed in the whitepaper.

Consider other alternatives to full linear in order to mollify new users and users who are not well-versed on how to build their social media presence/following.

And also consider that there were other protocols that have been eliminated, as I stated in my original comment. A series of changes has led to the amount of abuse/exploitation that we see today. If you'd like to know more about what's actually happening around here, feel free to visit:

https://steemit.chat/channel/steemitabuse

Also - talk with some of the whales around here who have been doing their best to counter the abuses. People like @transisto and @berniesanders, and other users like @pfunk and myself. If you want lists with figures, I'm sure we can compile some...and a few users are already doing it.

@spaminator
@sherlockholmes

Consider other alternatives to full linear in order to mollify new users and users who are not well-versed on how to build their social media presence/following.

Why don't you be more specific? Do you mean increasing the slope of the reward and curation curves?

It could be interesting trying to improve behavior by allowing these curves to pass an array of float couples that represents a polynomial function. For example if you pass [['1', '1']] it's like the current flat reward curve. [['1', '-1']] for square root curation curve. [['0.5', '2'], ['-1', '1']] for f(x) = x²/2 - x and so on. Maybe in that case just doing a % of quadratic + a % of linear.

Would love Steem to be able to offer those choices, but as I have literally told you before, IME it hasn't been found to be safely implementable. However, you're of course free to code it up and propose it to the Witnesses

Consider other alternatives than n^2 to mitigate "abuse."

Maybe you can be more specific as well?

It's one thing to just ignore what I typed in my original comment. It's another thing to go off about "float couples" and "polynomial functions" instead of actually answering my initial questions honestly. You know...the ones about abuse mitigation that had previously existed but now does not.

If you willingly choose to be ignorant about what's been happening since the last hard fork(s), then just refrain from engaging in discussions about it. Send me one of your other team members to honestly talk about it. Drowning the discussion with posturing, deflections, and distractions gets us nowhere.

He is not ignorant. They know what they’re doing.

He is not ignorant. They know what they are doing.

Why not use an extended error function curve (A Half-Gaussian) for rewards, this would allow newer users to be restricted in their voting strength, with moderate users getting more of a vote (those who have published good content and have made enough in order to have a vote), while still keeping the higher-steem users having more of the vote, this would seem like a much better 'In the middle' approach between quadratic and linear reward system.

Hi @ats-david, as a minnow, thanks for sharing your experience. Do you think more blogs that help to point out the worst offenders would be a welcome addition to the community, or frowned upon? e.g. Perhaps weekly lists of users worth flagging, or similar. Thanks

I think this is exactly what we are trying to get away from needing, and exactly what points out we still have many problems that need to be dealt with.

Can someone help explain this to me? I am a new user (joined yesterday) and all i see is a ton of bots and services to pay to promote your posts...not at all what I consider curated content. Before I decide to spend any time or money with SteemIt i'd really like to understand the plan for preventing that and surfacing actual content.

Content curation/filtering is the responsibility of the interface. Steemit or other interfaces can continue to rely on community curation or scale up using machine learning and other techniques to reduce spam and bot interactions.

@ned I'm sure the communities will raise the level of user interaction in both content creation and curation. They will make content so much more discoverable. I'm not sure if the feed will have changes to it too, to maybe include recommended content? Can't wait to get use the new UI/UX! I'm sure interaction levels will significantly increase.

Ned, you sound allot smarter about blockchain tech than you did before :)

Hum... that's all u got?

What about using a captcha? And why wouldn't Steemit want to filter that? Am I the only one who doesn't want to read a bunch of automated bot comments?

Captcha is ineffective for the reason that the underlying infrastructure is publicly accessible. Steemit can be circumvented by any willing body.

That's a good point - but Ned while I seem to have your attention for a minute here - maybe you could help me understand why someone who isn't into the crypto-craze would want to use SteemIt. Right now to me it seems like a big game of programming bots and/or gaming the system to promote posts rather than to surface good content.

One example of a community i read frequently is Hacker News - if something like that could exist on the Steem platform (meaning the quality of the content) and the contributors could get paid for their contributions, then I think Steem could become huge. Right now I guess i'm not sure if i see how that can happen.

Would you consider making the Steemit post/comment views data publicly available via a JSON RPC for example? This shouldn't take much, and would really help collaborative filtering and other machine learning to improve user experiences.

put .json on the end of any url on steemit.com, like the one you are on right now

Oh, wait, that doesn’t do comments.

Those are all already available via JSON-RPC from steemd at https://steemd.steemit.com.

That's useful info (which I didn't know) thanks, but I meant the views data as stored in Steemit's private database.

I'm doing quite a lot of work with the blockchain data, but it doesn't give the user page views which would be really helpful. Anyway, I don't expect it's possible, but thought it worth asking.

Yes, I'm aware of how the process works.

I'm not following. Witness choices is WHY there is a change.

Of course you're not following. You're so disconnected from the actual community you have no clue what's going on. But hey, as long as you're cashing out through your @alpha account via blocktrades, all is well in Steemit land, right?

Pull your head out of your ass and spend some time on the site. Maybe then you'll get a fucking clue.

Sorta gotta agree @ned, you have spent zero time talking to your fan base lately ;-)

I'm back to black soon.

Witness choice is how it happened. Why it happened is all about rationales and justifications.

There's WHY it happened. --> Choice.

And there's WHY it was chosen. ---> Rationales.

I agree. Rationales IMV tend to be very public. Users should go to their highly paid witnesses to understand rationales behind the choices. JMTC.

You know goddamn well that the witnesses have no choice. We've seen STINC flex their muscle multiple times to ensure the witnesses do as they please.

@ned in fact I have a conversation with you where you directly request participation in managing witnesses to ensure you get the result you want.

That's a bit disingenuous. You personally reshuffled the witness cabinet to insure that outcome.

I retract this claim.

That didn't happen. First of all nearly all of the top 30 witnesses (meaning the top 20 plus the next 10 who might reasonable by voted in their place) were in favor of it and second of all there has been relatively little reshuffling of the witnesses at all for months (for better or worse). Unlike some other proposals (including ones which Steemit very strongly supported and were not activated), there wasn't even much controversy over this one.

I remember there being some shuffling close to the hard fork time, but maybe I'm thinking of HF 17? Do you remember if there was more reshuffling then?

Anyway I have apologized for the claim, should have thought more before saying that.

maybe I'm thinking of HF 17? Do you remember if there was more reshuffling then?

I don't specifically remember but that is very possible. HF17 was more controversial (and ultimately rejected/withdrawn).

Sounds about right. Thanks

I don't claim to remember every detail of this past year and a half but I respectfully disagree. I had removed all votes and ordered personnel under contracts at steemit to do the same.

Oh, my mistake. Sorry for the false accusation.

@andrarchy did mention this to me about steemit's personnel under contract, not allowed to vote on witnesses!

Yes the hf19 was very bad for a lot of people, I still earn cents from it, even after having more that 1300 followers and posting everyday, I hope the hf20 will be fair enough to change the situation

This is the big reveal this week? You've gotta be fucking joking...

This is not the "big reveal", that will be coming in another upcoming post. We have a lot of announcements that will all be coming out very soon.


:D
tip! hide

I count the days... think blue

top six guesses

  1. soon (which is to say, roadmap soon)
  2. justinw put curly brackets around a steem-js method that someone else wrote. pay him $600.
  3. new CTO created in lab under blacksburg office.
  4. The original version of the white paper never existed in this timeline. It got erased when a t-1000 was sent back to kill Sara Conner when she was 9 years old, and was she was saved by 'pops'.
  5. New way to decrease accountability and make abuse easier.
  6. new plan to generate buzz by being unnecessarily cryptic, to the point of absurdity, about the (long overdue) implementation of new features.

what big reveal?? Did I miss something??

This white paper still suffers the technical flaw of the old one, in which line breaks get inserted when trying to copy text. Please recompile it.

I really agree with you friend. hopefully the steemit team realize it.

I hate that when texts do this. Can't use them in my text-to-speech software. Big bummer.

HOLY FUCK THIS WAS A BUNCH OF CRAP TO WADE THRU
So don't expect anyone but the most SELF INTERESTED to do so...

Looks like just an excuse for another comment self vote 😂

In a market where 0% interest on debt still demands a premium, it is safe to say the market is willing to extend more credit than the debt the community is willing to take on. If this happens a SBD will be valued at more than $1.00 and there is little the community can do without charging negative interest rates.

This has come and gone in last weeks. With price feed premiums, more SBD's were created and finally the peg is maintained. (by the way charging negative interest rates is not supported in current protocol)

and why is that?

love your work and contribution to the platform.. but you forgot something... you never upvoted me..;-)

Previous version of whitepaper for those who want to compare https://app.box.com/s/hmq5p0skko40vi55f8pi4j631sqe3los

no thanks.. i live now and not in the past.. but great that you share it... let the future come!!!

We are therefore happy to announce that a new version of the whitepaper has been published,

specifically what version of the whitepaper is this? Because, though its dated, reading it one really wouldn't get the impression that things haven't been this way from jump street (whereas most of the main concepts covered in the white paper are 540 degree turn-arounds from the original concepts presented 9in the white paper.

Wouldn't an accurate, intellectually honest version of the whitepaper be one that described the chain as designed, its philosophical underpinnings at the time of its creation, the changes that were enacted

tbh, if you know how far off this is from the original policy wise, writing it this way (trying to make it seem as if this was the original plan) makes it feel like a bunch of cobbled together rationalizations.

Yes, and a lot of the rationalizations are contradictory. For example:

Changing super-linear curves to full-linear represented a huge change in rationale and has had a significant impact on the system.

Reading the new version of the whitepaper, this reasoning/change/impact isn't apparent. It makes things feel a bit disjointed. The original, while people may have disagreed with certain elements of it, was at least coherent.

Changing super-linear curves to full-linear represented a huge change in rationale and has had a significant impact on the system.

not a huge change, IMO. downvoting and superlinearity were always intended to be somwhat reduandant to oneanother. At least, thats the impression i got from the original whitepaper. I know you blame linearity for a lot of steem s woes, but i don't agree with you that its the cause of a lot of the problems to which you attribute it.

a far bigger change is the philosophical take on inflation. Its fine to say "inflation is no big deal, fire up the printing presses" and its also find to say "moneysupply control is super important and we have to keep inflation in check."

But to start out saying "inflation is no big deal fire up the printing presses!" print yourself up a bunch of money, then as youre rubbing your hundreds of million steem on your titties say "oh we changed out mind. money supply matters now no more inflation" seems a little dishonest.

To go a step further and instead of saying "oh we changed our mind" just implying that its always been the policy by publishing an unannotated whitepaper well , that seems a step beyond 'a little dishonest'.

I know you blame linearity for a lot of steem s woes, but i don't agree with you that its the cause of a lot of the problems to which you attribute it.

This isn't exactly accurate. I don't blame linearity for the woes. I blame linearity for making spamming and other abuses more lucrative - and therefore more attractive. The ability to relentlessly spam is another issue altogether which is not caused by the linear rewards algorithm.

Awesome!! Definitely worth a read to stay updated 😉

Thanks for the update. There's no perfect system, but I can see you are trying to improve. I thought linear rewards could be a bad ideas as masses of bot accounts can have more impact, but people are working to counter that. At least the data is visible to analyse. I think reputation could be used to limit the posts/votes an account can make. That would reduce spam and mean you have to earn the right to use the system. It would hamper bots unless they had community support.

Wow, you have a great idea there seems to me... make em earn it!

We need some ways to set last limit the spam and this seems reasonable as it doesn't hurt for users.

I was really hoping for something to address some of the problems or something really new.

Seriously... This just makes me feel like throwing in the towel when an updated white paper is:

the launch of a huge addition to the Steem ecosystem, so stay tuned.

There have already been a few replies to this. The WP was not the 'huge edition' announcement.

Let's talk "BLUE"...

there's going to be an even bigger Edition to the whitepaper ? ;)

Blue Paper is coming; let's see what it contains ;-)

This is more of the order or addressing a long overdue fuck-up than something worth building excitement around.

So the Steemit whitepaper project on GitHub is no more? Guess my work was for nothing 😭

At least you have updated it.

We're going to migrate this new text to that repo soon in the form of PRs. Your work was not in vain. :)

The output from that repo with the updated text will be the canonical pdf version.

That's great to hear, awesome! 😆

Excellent, I am happy to hear this. I've always thought it was pretty crazy to have such an outdated version of the Whitepaper out there for investors to read and misunderstand.

Congratulations on updating the white paper and thank you.

Thanks for this much needed update to the white paper!

I think what some of the negative posters may be missing is that with all the upcoming changes coming soon, the documentation needs to be in order. My guess is that the devs are expecting a large influx of new users over the coming months, and want everything to be as accurate as possible.

I think it's worth being patient and doing it right, rather than haphazardly releasing new content that may or may not work. And, yes, documentation is an important part of any release cycle.

Thank you, devs, for all your hard work!

Happy to hear it has been updated.... it was getting to the point where it was a little sad/embarrassing to have to tell people I was trying to get to join Steemit "not to bother with the White Paper, it really doesn't represent the site."

Further to this, I REALLY hope there is some kind of long term plan in the works, along with dates and benchmarks... I'm talking 2 years, 5 years, 10 years... not just "the next hardfork."

JUST ONE MORE PERSON DEVOTED TO DOCUMENTATION and I could probably get many more people to join. But at the current rate, I was spending too much time making excuses for poor docs...

So when will be the end of beta?

It's not sexy stuff, but this was badly needed and I'm sure it represented a ton of work. Thank you.

Did you get in on the Pocket Token?

Yes, it's an interesting concept.

pocketsend:1000@donkeypong, Just for fun LOL

Successful Send of 1000
Sending Account: captainobviou3
Receiving Account: donkeypong
New sending account balance: 996900
New receiving account balance: 1000999
Fee: 1
Steem trxid: 406d1a412578d24b0957ad0eaa3b1aee9ec95fc0
Thanks for using POCKET! I am running this confirmer code.

Successful Send of 1000
Sending Account: captainobviou3
Receiving Account: donkeypong
New sending account balance: 996900
New receiving account balance: 1000999
Fee: 1
Steem trxid: 406d1a412578d24b0957ad0eaa3b1aee9ec95fc0
Thanks for using POCKET! I am running this confirmer code.

Thanksss

I would say integration is also very important to Steemit. Not discarding the need to continue providing a better blockchain for Steemit, but in parallel doing integration is key for a wider network to test new limits. Integration goes like other social media networks. The easier it gets for others to use, the more likely is the technology going to be explored and improved.

I would love to see integration with Crypto Cards (Credit or debit), decentralized exchanges and decentralized frontend. If steemit.com is down, there is little left to do with the blockchain, with the exception for all the other apps/software that use the same chain.

Thanks for the updated whitepaper.
I like the analogy of fighting abuse in the community.
The story of the "crabs in the bucket'' well explains it.
We cannot completely shut down abusers as it is explained in the crabs in the bucket analogy.

The goal of building a community currency is to get more “crabs in the bucket”. Going to extreme
measures to eliminate all abuse is like attempting to put a lid on the bucket to prevent a few crabs from
escaping and comes at the expense of making it harder to add new crabs to the bucket. It is sufficient to
make the walls slippery and give the other crabs sufficient power to prevent others from escaping

Yeah Right, just confuse about 1 Million people... sorry, it's too complex of a metaphor for how much it really matters to our platform here.
Just forget about this issue, and be done.

more crabs in the bucket hey? is that a analogy as in ,please we need to add more people to keep the ponzi going?

I like the contrarian philosophy on steemit. Most social platforms I've seen tell their users how to avoid getting crabs.

ugh...I was hoping for something a little more exciting than that. Even though it's a good thing, never create hype only to let people down...it's really not that exciting.

Yeah, I don't see how this even qualifies as "...the launch of a huge addition to the Steem ecosystem", as they stated in the previous post.

This is not the "launch of a huge addition to the Steem ecosystem", that will be coming in another upcoming post. We have a lot of announcements that will all be coming out very soon.

And maybe a jump in STEEM PRICE when we see BLUE...

That's encouraging. Thanks.

thank you for releasing updated information about steemit operations and I strongly support the overall change about steemit.

The original version of the Steem white paper for those who might want to compare the changes.

Will this result in a HF20?

Where exactly is HF20 spec? I would be interested to see it published here.

No this is just a piece of paper / documentation.

tnx for update

Weeee very good.

I have waited for it long time ago, because the code is a little complicated to read

can you help us define or calculate the percentage earned in "debt" by holding Steem Power and SBD? Is it 4% per year for each?

Funny, I was just reading the whitepaper just now and wondering when it'll be updated. Now you've done that so it's great. I'm anxiously waiting for the communities to be implemented. And the new UI/UX... That should do wonders to post discoverability and user interaction levels, and our income as a result. Great work guys!

not bad.. i would like to see adds implimented.. really kick the price of steem up, like were the fuck is the economic roadmap, these fucking nerds have no idea in economics, yeas lets print money like the fed, and hope the whole ponzi dont collapse lol...

U r a DUMB ASS

good information you posted? please explain how 100% inflation is great :) and how steem isnt a ponzi :).. o wait you cant..

maybe your just a bit sour ? cos you have over 100 k invested , : Dan has deleted transaction history on one of his account. https://steemit.com/@steem/transfers

Money sent a few days ago from https://steemit.com/@steemit/transfers is not showing as received on the steem account like it usually does. I don't know exactly why he doesn't want us to see the transactions but it looks like he is trying to hide something. Fishy

edit 2 : As predicted Steemit founders cashing out big time, they have been crashing the price from 5$ to 0.8$ and they are gonna crash it to pennies until there are no more investors to milk from.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@magnebit/steem-price-is-being-pushed-down-by-1-person-speculation-on-why-and-where-it-may-end-up

RIP steem power holders

Your are very misinformed. You cannot delete transaction history from the blockchain, period. Also, the post that you linked to is a year old and also misinformed. This is just FUD.

dude, its still relevant, all the big whale control what gets seen, i think its pretty stupid that if you have a lot of money you can make a lot of money, steem should be about the fish and earning your vote.. no i have 100 k and ill upvote myself and make 500 bucks a day out of thin air, you see what im saying.. They also need other revenue like adds.. to keep it sustainable.

Read the post, and the comments. Question, what is a "Blue Paper". With the update to the white paper are we going to get an updated FAQ. One that covers more about steem and steemit. Like a list of important links at the end of the FAQ, directing us to where we can find out what our steem/vote power is, and other pages that people need on occassion but have a hard time finding, like where is the site changes, request, wish list, suggestion box, who do I complain to links, excetera. (I keep losing the wales link to see if I am powered up or not.LoL) Thanks for keeping us little guys informed of changes.

I don't think Blue Paper has an official definition. It is just a name they are using for another document to be released.

Thanks for posting this, and providing the link. I am new, and have not read the White Paper yet. Looking forward to reading it now.

Super excited to read thru this! Great knowledge of the things to come as you guys "bring Steemit to the masses"!! Super exciting, thanks for all the hard work and for providing us an updated white paper to read thru and to show to others to explain Steemit's projection forward!

Hello! I'm glad to see you took the time to update Steemit's White Paper, I'm sure that will help a lot of old and new Steemians and I can't wait to see your new "Blue Paper"

THINK BLUE

Thanks for all the steemit team work, I wait for the next information...

Great, I was complaining why the whitepaper was updated as so many changes have occurred. The steem whitepaper should be the only official document to know steemit.

Huuuuuuuuuuuuuhaaaaaa! This is huge news ........glad to be a steemian mehn!

Great information, if I need to catch up on the operation of this platform, understand it a little more and hoping to expand the support for other languages, especially Spanish.

a lot of things has changed i hope that this will go for the right of the new steemians the #bigwhales will not be affected ...waiting for the blue

Awesome! 😎

I'm happy that the steemit I enjoy so much is still in beta. Would be over the moon when it'll move from beta to the stable deal.

Interesting the people here with tenure aren't that excited about this news

ok this is good but I am eager to hear (like everyone here I suppose) the big news.

I am sure this week will keep us all up in full hype. see ya guys, and please be awesome :)

i can say it! i'm REALLY, REALLY excited to be a part of this world change platform!
Keep doing the good job, we will never finish to thank you in future!

I'm glad this got updated, because reading through the old one was not fitting with my observations.

I guess I'll go steem through this thing now...

You guys keep getting better and better! Thank you for building a community of intellectuals and sharing in the profits of social networking. You are the facebook killer. web 3.0 app.

I have a question about annual interest on steem power.. someone know how can i calculate it or how much is it? cause i saw some calculator out there, but i think they are wrong. Thanks if anyone want to help me!

Great news, I was wondering when that fossil white paper would get replaced, for 8 months now. However, it should be stated that even a new white paper could be and will be changed in coming months/years.

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