RE: Going Live on #blocktalk! with ned scott of steem and adrien of DTube
Steem is about reputation, not the money. If you maintain a good reputation, the money will follow. I agree with your point and have, with minimal effort, managed to generate some income just by writing, not investing.
I haven't been that enthused to see that some people are gaming the system by putting money into Steem and setting up voting farms. That is not the path to quality.
If Larimer is right about game theory and how Steemit is programmed to reflect game theory, that gamesmanship will work itself out. I think that people need to be focused on reputation here.
If Steemit becomes famous for good reads and writing opportunities, then Steem will increase in value. But if it is just going to be used as farm for upvotes, that will, in time impugn the reputation of Steemit and decrease the value of Steem.
Reputation is what matters here, so if people destroy the reputation of Steemit with voting cartels, upvote farming and the like, then we can reasonably expect a decline here. Hopefully, people here will choose a higher road and just post and vote based on the merits, not the nepotism.
I have to respectfully disagree here.
To many people continue to believe that the success of Steem is tied to the success of Steemit.
It is not!
It's a huge misconception about the Steem blockchain and is one of the main reasons the token is still so undervalued even though it's the most used blockchain in the world, has 3 second transfer times, has no transaction fees and is nowhere near transaction capacity.
Can you give me any other crypto that can actually compete with those metrics right now? On the merits of how we judge almost every other coin in the space, Steem is by far the best. But because most people don't understand that Steemit is not Steem, it is written off.
Steemit is a proof of concept for what one app running on the Steem blockchain can look like. There are already several others and SMTs will usher in Steem 2.0 where the ability to play with reward distribution and community building will be available to anyone.
It's the 100k different apps that will be built on the Steem blockchain that will determine the success of Steem or not, not Steemit, it's rules, it's community or it's reputation.
Now that is spirited discernment. You have touched upon a nuance that I didn't consider when writing my post. I have a habit of conflating Steemit with Steem, but you're helping me to see beyond my initial impression of Steem, the currency.
On that point we have agreement. Steemit the website, is just an app built on top of Steem and Steem delivers great performance as you have rightly noted.
So to be fair, the reputation that I speak of only concerns the app that is built on Steem. Steem is independent of the apps built on top of it. Dtube, Dmania, Steemit, Busy.org, to name a few, are all running on top of the Steem Blockchain. The reputation of those apps depend upon the inputs made by their users, and as such, do not impugn the reputation of Steem, the currency.
The Steem metrics you mentioned are the reputation of Steem the currency, and are in stark contrast to Ethereum, another currency with a blockchain that is getting a bit bogged down due to a few Crytpkitties.
I notice that you did not disagree with me on the point of reputation, just that the good fortune of Steem, the currency, is not tied to Steemit. So on both points, I see common ground. That's something I look for in everyone I meet.
It was a pleasure to meet you, sir. Thank you for your enlightenment. :)
Excellent response :)
You are correct, when you break it down the way you just did, we are indeed in agreement.
At this point every app built on Steem has to play by the same rules of the blockchain. The current state of Steemit and other apps is the same and will not change until SMTs come along. At that point we'll have a ton of communities attempting to find the best way to reward their users so that the best content truly floats to the top and is rewarded appropriately without bots or other "unfair" systems being able to disrupt the process.
As an example let's look at Dtube. Right now the same tactics that can be used to abuse Steemit can also be used to take advantage of Dtube. Once SMTs are released though, Dtube can create it's own coin and determine it's distribution method, total supply and reward distrubtion curve. All of these different variables can then be controlled within the Dtube ecosystem and played with until it matches what the Dtube community is looking to achieve. All of this is done without impacting Steem or it's process at all. But every SMT is dependent on Steem and that is where the true value of Steem will come from.
So now imagine that you have thousands of apps and communitites all playing with their own token and figuring out how to best use them to bring about the best way to grow the value of their community and thus their token. It won't take long for the issues we see here on Steemit to be ironed out and the best renditions will become powerful forces in the future tokenized social media space.
I too have had to learn to distinguish between Steemit as the first app built on the Steem blockchain versus the blockchain itself, the latter presenting far more promise.
However, as you acknowledged, Steemit is a proof of concept of the blockchain and despite the existence of others such as Dtube and Utopian, Steemit is at the forefront of what the blockchain is capable of to the broader crypto space.
The problems with quality content often not getting acknowledged, accounts that impersonate others, flag wars among whales, self voting abuse by some users (including Witnesses), vast disparities in rewards distribution, differing views on the inherent nature and corresponding value of SBDs, etc that are rampant on Steemit as an app reflect poorly on the Steem blockchain itself. And since the former is the premiere, first mover manifestation of what the latter is capable of, people invariably turn a blind eye to its potential. This will persist until the aforementioned issues are definitively addressed.
I'll have to respectfully disagree with you as well :)
Think about it for a sec. Does it matter how Bitcoin is mined? Does it matter how Ethereum is mined? Does it matter how NEO is mined? Does it matter how Steem is mined?
I'd argue yes, but only marginally. The value of those tokens comes from the scarcity, perceived security of the chosen mining protocol and perceived potential.
It's the potential of all these coins that give them most of their value. How Steem is mined at this point is pretty irrelevant in my eyes and reward distribution or "proof of brain" is still just mining. And as I mentioned above when we're actually talking about what the coin is capable of as a currency, it's smoking all of the above blockchains.
All the problems you mention in your last paragraph are easily addressed by SMTs and that's why all the focus of the Steemit team has been on bringing them to life and not addressing perceived issues. It's quite clear that actions speak louder than words and they don't believe those issues are a threat to the blockchain. The Steem price and rate of growth of the platform also support that stance.
That's likely because they understand that the value of the platform rests in being able to have a thousand different attempts to address those issues in the form of SMTs rather than trying to have one attempt to solve them for every app, which is a fools task.
No problem. I too look forward to the roll out of SMTs and do hope that they address some of the apparent deficiencies we have seen in Steemit. Like you, I feel the market is anticipating the launch of SMTs and perhaps that explains why the value of Steem and SBDs has risen. However, I feel their values would be further enhanced by foundational improvements to Steemit itself, and the rewards structure of the underlying blockchain as represented by it as its first proof of concept.
The transparency of the blockchain itself is what allows for these discussions to thrive - we all can see the positives and negatives, the good actors and the bad, etc. I recognize that this is all still a work in progress but for broader adoption to hasten, the little guy has to feel that his content has a shot at being seen. The Steem White Paper itself cautioned this: "Any imbalance in the give and take within a community is unsustainable. Eventually the givers grow tired of supporting the takers and disengage from the community."
Well said, I definitely agree that foundational improvements to Steemit itself would do wonders, it's just clear to me that the Steemit team doesn't consider that a priority compared to the potential of SMTs. My guess is that they'll circle back once SMTs are in the wild.
I'm not sure how much SMTs are driving the price recently though. I just don't see much knowledge about them in the space at all. Even here on Steemit I'm continuously reminded of how little people know about/understand them.
I have a feeling that once they are released and people see the concept in play they'll be able to then grasp the significance and impact, but until then I don't think it's gonna happen.
It's still to be seen if Steemit can even deliver on the SMT vision. Exciting times regardless and a fun experiment to be a part of as we get to watch it all unfold.
For me personally, no matter what happens, I've already gotten way more value out of this place then I ever thought I would, which is pretty cool and says something.
Please forgive my ignorance, but what are SMTs?that is a new acronym for me.
Thanks.
No worries, it's again part of the problem of why Steem is so undervalued. Not a lot of folks understand what's going on behind the scenes with the Steem blockchain right now and where it's heading.
SMT stands for "Smart Media Token" and it's where all the attention of the Steemit team has been for the last half a year or more.
You can read about them here.
You can just scroll down on that page and it will give you an overview or click through to the whitepaper to get all the details.
I agree. I had voting bots attracted to my channel back in June, it actually discouraged me from posting, because I felt bad for the bot owner. I was getting 1 or 2 sbd for each post, no matter how bad or good it was. Eventually the bots died :)
I know that feeling, seeing that 60 people voted your post, to then see that only 15 looked at it, ergo a voting bot, is a little discouraging when you put time and effort to provide quality posts.
yup, what is even more disappointing is when you write a 1000 plus word post, that takes sometimes a good hour to compose and one of your half cocked comments that took 1 minute to write gets more exposure and value. Sometimes it discourages me from writing new content altogether . Thanks for the feedback :)
I agree with your reply....gets frustrating a bit. now following you