My Takeaways from Stan Larimer Interview: Bitshares, Steemit, Dan & Ned’s Feud, and More During Live Q&A

Connie Willis of Blue Rock Talk (@bluerocktalk) hosted a two-hour open Q&A interview with “Godfather of Bitshares” Stan Larimer on 2/7/18. As you may or may not know, Stan is the father of Dan Larimer, Co-Founder of Bitshares, Steem, and EOS. I watched and asked questions along with several fellow Steemians (@Amos811, @reko), who also joined the Q&A.

Here are my takeaways from the interview (link to the full interview below):

• Hiring Lobbyists an Option

A participant asked Stan if Bitshares would ever pay lobbyists to represent and fight for cryptocurrency. Dan stated, “I would absolutely support that.” He also noted that the push would need to come from the community, saying, "I couldn’t suggest it."

• The Future of the Bitshares Token

A participant in the chat asked what would happen to the original Bitshares token if it moves to EOS. “It’s not going away. What you’ll see is probably a parallel chain,” said Stan. “I would be looking to introduce a Bitshares EOS that complemented it—providing nice bridges between “classic” and the rest of the EOS ecosystem, and probably implementing new features.”

• Stan's Thoughts on Steem

One of the most interesting questions asked during the chat was, “Is your thoughts on Steem the same as Dan?” Stan replied, “Absolutely, not…I would like to see a new Steem that explicitly addresses the problem of evil whales.”

• BTS Vs. Steem

I decided to ask Stan the following question: “What sets BTS and Steem apart, and why is BTS superior?” I was very curious as to how Stan would respond to this question. He responded, “I don’t want to pick on our little brother like that. Steemit is its own magnificent thing, but it’s specific to a universe. It’s not as general…I would say Bitshares is a general currency, and therefore has broad applications across the world for everything.” In other words, he believes the potential is far greater for Bitshares than Steem.

• Fixing Bad Whales on EOS Steem

Stan offered straightforward solutions to the problem of bad whales. “There’s a number of things you could do. You could get rid of the counterproductive flagging mechanism, which is being abused.”

Stan also mentioned creating an algorithm that looks at how many times a particular account has flagged an account with many positive votes. For example, if @BernieSanders has 200 upvotes and a single downvote from a massive whale (who is constantly downvoting this specific person), there would be no negative action taken--no impact on that user. –

• Dan Vs. Ned

@Reko asked about Dan and Ned drama. He said he knew nothing about that, but a follow up comment got him to open up a little bit about the alleged feud.

“When we first spun Steem off, Dan and his technical team went and joined forces with Ned. Ned was going to lead the CEO functionality of managing the growth of the system and Dan was going to work with his team to build the technology behind it. Those two went off together and worked together pretty well for the first year; seemed to have some kind of disagreement whether Dan’s greatest ideas should be open source or kept proprietary. That lead to their split and Dan going off to build EOS separately. I suppose that caused a little bit of hurt feelings…”

• Ned Being Sour on a Steem Alternative

On Ned being upset that Dan Larimer is creating a Steem alternative, Stan bluntly said, “He brought it on himself.” He added, “I’ve seen Ned downvote people,” and went onto explain how Ned downvoted a user who was launching a training course. “That destroys your system and that makes people want to build something that seems fairer to them."

I learned a lot from this discussion and loved having the ability to ask Stan Larimer questions and get direct and detailed answers. There is much I didn’t cover in my takeaways including new Bitshares partnerships and nodes in space. Watch the full interview here: