SteemMag – Steemit’s Weekend Digest (‘Steemit is 4’ SPECIAL EDITION) #5: The Journey so far - Exclusive Chats With Early Supporters, Owner of A Crypto-exchange, A mini vox pop and This Week on Steemit……..

I’m highly delighted to welcome you to this special fifth edition of SteemMag, A Weekend Digest For Steemians …….
Every week, I take a look at some of the most important topics and have a chat with top Steemians who have expert views on such topics.

In case you missed it, here are links to Issue #1 , #2 , #3 and #4

(Thanks so much for this @cass. You rock)

This Weekend Special Edition has exciting packages you would love.
2 days from now - August 15, it would be exactly 4 months since Steemit was launched. Thanks to @gavvet for pointing this out. His post here gave an overlook on Steemit at 3 months…

SteemMag had a chat with 2 of the earliest supporters of Steem and SBD. Their pre and post-July 4 support has not only ensured that Steem has taken off nicely, but has also given the Steem tokens credibility and security.

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In page 1:
The first chat is with Dan Notestein, the CEO and founder of BlockTrades International Ltd – the company behind the market-making website, Blocktrades.us. Interestingly, he is also a whale and a witness.
Also, we would be having our regular This Week On Steemit.

In Page 2:
The second chat will be with a cofounder of one of the largest crypto-exchange platform in the world. Bittrex was among the first exchanges to support Steem and SBD and were very helpful during the first security hack.

We would also be having a “vox pop” style to examine one of Steemit biggest goals – To reward content creators.
SteemMag reached out to different Steemains to ask: Whats the nicest thing you’ve gotten with your Steemit earnings.

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A CHAT WITH DAN NOTESTEIN, Founder, Blocktrades.us , a whale and a witness - @blocktrades.

Hi Dan. Steemit is currently in its 4th month and it's been an amazing experience for everyone in the Steem ecosystem. And this success so far wouldn't have been possible without the efforts of some key players. Of which, you are one.

SteemMag:
Blocktrades was recently operating in a stealth mode, why did your company decide to take the risk of supporting Steem and Steem Dollars very early?

Blocktrades:
BlockTrades has worked with Steemit from its very infancy and we agreed early on to support the Steem platform (before the Steem client was even started). Particularly interesting to us was Steem's ability to reach beyond the existing cryptocurrency communities and introduce new demographics to the potential of cryptocurrency technologies.

SM:
Personally, you are a witness, a whale and a founder of a top cryptocurrency platform. How do you manage to combine all these duties effectively?

Blocktrades:

There's some overlap in my witness duties and the regular operation of BlockTrades. Currently I've prioritized our support of Steem over other cryptocurrencies to make the juggling easier.

My other contributions as a witness tend to revolve around providing business advice to Steemit and this doesn't consume a lot of "work" time, as a lot of the best ideas are "shower thoughts".

As for the job of being a whale, I recently farmed out some of the curation efforts to my wife/business partner, so we share that work now. It's still a lot of work to curate in an optimal manner (I've never had time to achieve even close to optimal returns from my own curation efforts), so I recently made some proposals to improve the process from the curator's point of view so as to improve the quality of the curator's efforts.

SM:
What has been some impressive developments on Steemit you've noticed? And which areas would you like to see changes?

B:
I think the most impressive thing was just how fast Steemit got started. That said, there are tons of features I would like to see added to the platform.

The top items on my list now are a button to "share" when a new user joins via Facebook as a recruiting vehicle, fixes to the current tagging system (lots of tags don't show up and can't be searched for), and a "introductory guide/reference section" for new users.

Steemit really needs a newbie guide that teaches the basics of how the platform works (voting/curation rewards, how to vote/flag, how to include images) and also some of the emerging "cultural rules" about how to make an acceptable post or when it's generally considered acceptable to downvote a post.

Steem.io was originally supposed to be this place, but I feel it has not kept up with changes to the platform.

SteemMag:
As an owner of a market making platform, what is your take on the current price of Steem?

Blocktrades:
As the owner of a market-making platform, I usually avoid saying positive or negative things about the price of any given cryptocurrency.

And in this case, as a well-known holder of a lot of Steem Power and developer of some of the core code, I guess my opinion is subject to a certain amount of bias. Still, the technical merits of Steem and the underlying Graphene toolkit should be pretty obvious to anyone versed in blockchain technology (or anyone, for that matter, who's ever waited for a bitcoin transaction to complete).

What that translates to in terms of price is a hard question to answer and really depends on the broader question of to what extent cryptocurrencies manage to overtake existing sovereign currencies.
But of the existing cryptocurrencies, it does seem to me that Steem has the best chance of consumer uptake, given its ability to rapidly reach a new class of users.

SM:
Blocktrades currently has a lot of Steemians that transact on its platform, do you have any plans or improvements to offer Steemians soon?

Blocktrades:
We've got a long list of features we plan to add to BlockTrades, as you might imagine. Lately, I've been giving a lot of thought to what we need to do in order to offer direct buying/selling of crypto with fiat money (e.g. US dollars, Euros, etc).

SM:
Where do you see Steem and Steemit in 8 months’ time (at its first year anniversary)?
B:
Things change very rapidly in the crypto world and there are a lot of variables in play, so it's very hard to predict just what changes will take place, especially as user adoption continues and new developers join the ecosystem.
I am impressed by how many new independent developers have already been attracted to the platform as demonstrated by the many 3rd party web sites for Steem now. All of these new people can really dramatically push the pace of development.

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There you have it. I hope you do enjoy this weekend’s special interview with @blocktrades…. If you’ve got a question, please make a comment below and I would see if I can get him to give a reply

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This Week On Steemit

A lot of interesting events happened this week. And in case you missed them, we’ve got your back. Here are some of the most important events that happened on Steemit this week.

~ @dan discusses the possibility of a people rank algorithm

~ A tool for weighted voting was released for Steemit’s power users

~ Steem continues downward fall with a new low of $1.38.

~ Meanwhile, SBD maintains a relatively stable exchange rate of 1 SD = 0.8 -0.9

~ Steem has once again drop to a recent low of 5th position on the coinmarketcap.com cryptocurrencies list

~ Transfers per day reached an all-time high of 5 708 on 2016-08-11

~ Posts and Replies per Day are still on the decrease perhaps due to the 4 posts per day anti-spam limit

~ Account creations slowed down a bit. It’s on the rise again though

~ Kevinwong successful implemented The First Steemit-Powered Dance Music Event!

~Kencode’s Smartcoins Wallet adds more features to serve crypto users better.

~ More tools are being released. For a comprehensive list of all 3rd party tools check SteemTools.com

Do check out page 2 for more awesomeness. I’m sure you would like it ;)

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