1 Year On SCORUM (My Thoughts .... STEEM, WhalesShares ...etc)
I have been on Scorum for a year now but haven't blogged near as much on here as I have on STEEM, WhaleShares .....etc. There are a few reasons for that. For starters with crypto prices down in general a lot of times it is hard to justify doing too much work over on STEEM where there are more people and I have a bigger following. When I post some random thing on STEEM I'm able to put that out on WhaleShares, WEKU, BearShares....etc. With the content filter on here I can't just copy and paste that stuff to this chain. I actually agree with the content filter though. It prevents low effort posts that just strip value away from the reward pool. That being said the price of SCR has continued to fall overtime making it hard to justify putting in a lot of work on blog posts here.
Most the the content that I create on my YouTube Channel isn't about sports so it doesn't make sense to post it here unless I talk about Scorum.
https://www.youtube.com/brianphobos
I continue to watch the price of Scorum as now it is under $0.005 which is interesting because there is no inflation for the time being. Other chains that had no inflation like Nano and IOTA also have been hit hard except they don't have an immediate use case or actual platform to get on and participate on. One thing I have realized this bear market is that any crypto where it is "too easy" to earn more of it ends up really getting its price beat up. I doesn't matter if that is from massive airdrops, staking it, or blogging. People are trying to earn more to either live off of or to try to stack more ETH, BTC, LTC.....etc. So lesser known crypto projects can really take a huge beating.
Alexa Rankings
The Alexa rankings and traffic to this site seem to be increasing in general but oddly enough more than half the traffic is actually coming from Argentina and another 19.4% is coming from India.
An increasing SEO funnel is important for the sites future but it would be nice to see a more widespread distribution of people going to the site.
SCORUM, WhalesShares, STEEM Comparisons
Everything that has played out on the different STEEM Clones has been very interesting to me. For starters STEEM's inflation rate was way too much at 100% to start out with but then they took it down to 10% reducing 1% each year which lands it at 8.59% inflation but then having the STEEM Backed Dollar threw everything out of wack and the effective inflation rate ended up being over 17% for the last year which is insane compared to current inflation rates of Bitcoin and Litecoin of under 4%.
Scorum having 0% inflation at the current time with a content filter to help prevent plagiarism and low effort posts seemingly should have protected the price from falling so hard. As the bear market has continued I think a lot of people become concerned that liquidity will dry up and the money won't be worth anything once we get to the next bull run. I can understand this thinking in general.
WhaleShares has done something that in a lot of respects is pretty crazy in my opinion. They made it a tipping platform where you can allocate money to your "Tipping Wallet" and sort of manage your own reward pool. Tipping online rarely works to any capacity. The ingenious thing about STEEM was the rewards were being funded through inflation so it was a little bit of a hidden thing until someone understood it more.
Scorum has no inflation and the reward pool is being paid from funds allocated when the genesis block was created. The reward pool is supposed to refill from advertising money but the site really isn't getting enough traffic to make a significant impact on ad revenue generation. It is an interesting concept but there are a couple of things that sort of counter act each other. If the prices aren't higher than people don't feel it is worth their time to blog and if the content filter is strict like it is then the effort threshold is higher which is good from a quality perspective but then from creating a larger SEO funnel not as much content is being put up so it doesn't keep pulling in more and more users from around the world.
Positives
There are tons of positives about Scorum compared to STEEM and the STEEM clones. I honestly think it is the best user interface out of all of them and there is no inflation on the coins. As far as supply it is the most limited supply of all the other blogging platforms like this. Also there is BetScorum for commission free sports betting which could seemingly be huge. Oddly enough it hasn't seem to take off in an extreme way for some reason.
It is unreal how dormant the activity around a lot of these crypto projects can get when we aren't in a bull market.
What could turn the tide?
It is hard to say what will happen when the reward pool runs out. I would imagine people's blogging activities will really go down the drain if the rewards just shut off like a light. If there are Google Ads put on the site it will look more tacky for the time being but it could at least produce some revenue that could either go back to the reward pool or go into an account that will vote for people who are the most engaging on this platform. Like those who are commenting, upvoting, posting....etc the most.
There basically has to be a way to funnel in outside funds which then in turn is used to buy SCR whether that is through advertisements or from a subscription service. Or something so special that a person has to buy SCR to participate in something really cool whether that is a tournament or some kind of arcade style game.
What could turn the tide?
It is hard to say what will happen when the reward pool runs out. I would imagine people's blogging activities will really go down the drain if the rewards just shut off like a light. If there are Google Ads put on the site it will look more tacky for the time being but it could at least produce some revenue that could either go back to the reward pool or go into an account that will vote for people who are the most engaging on this platform. Like those who are commenting, upvoting, posting....etc the most.
There basically has to be a way to funnel in outside funds which then in turn is used to buy SCR whether that is through advertisements or from a subscription service. Or something so special that a person has to buy SCR to participate in something really cool whether that is a tournament or some kind of arcade style game.
Power Down Cycle
I believe that the creator of DTube is right about the premise of a power up / power down to not actually provide any price stability essentially. At this point the SCR price is in a long tail. If the power down was taken away all together there could be an additional dump but there would be a lot of price discovery in a very short amount of time. With under 30,000,000 coins and some of them essentially being lost by investors, I think that the price would sort itself out fairly quickly. Right now it is hard for people to invest in something where their funds will be stuck for up to a year. I know some people will say "I'm in for the long haul" but people want to be able to move in an out of assets easily if they want to.
Conclusion
Finding the right answer is tough to be honest. Successful cryptos need wide distribution and they have to have a way to drive demand to them but not be so easy to get that they just get collected and sold real fast in a race to the bottom. They also need liquidity to survive otherwise it is suddenly worrisome for investors because if they put money in they fear they won't be able to get the money back out.
It's really hard to say who has the best methodology of how to run a system like this combining social media (which is for everyone) and banking/finances which hardly anyone knows how it works isn't easy. There's ar reason most large YouTubers have their funds handled by a manager and have a team, people are too lazy and clueless to understand money
But I do think that more options that encourage certain behaviours could help. I like the idea of instant power down with you burning 5% or something of your holdings to get it immediately. That way people can take advantage of trades and who knows they might power back up.
I do feel steems inflation is quite high but as it ages out we should sort that out. Also, like the idea of using ad revenue to buy and perhaps burn coins which I think st inc should have been doing and also looking at more effective ways to monetise the traffic it already gets.
It is a tough thing to figure out for sure. There is a lot of things in the user interface of Scorum that are superior to Steemit and then some things that are better on Steemit or things that I liked better.
A lot of it is about the marketing of airdrops and stuff which can be really effective. STEEM has never done the marketing and Scorum's marketing push was initially and then they have went to a skeleton crew mainly.
It is a big positive that all the iterations of Scorum are gaining in Alexa rank overtime.
I really did believe airdrops would have been the next ICO hype. One would buy ETH to be able to invest in the next "big" ICO. So why would one not just want to hold EOS just to receive the next "big" airdrop, right? Or any other base currency.
Turns out getting tokens for free doesn't really incentivize the same actions.
I do still believe in the airdrop model or delegation model though...
It still is to be the future...
Interesting times ahead!
Well I do think the airdrop model was incentivize people to buy EOS. Stacking more EOS has been a very big thing for me because I continue to get airdrops and were given coins on sister chains like Telos which I sold for more EOS. Then I'm able to utilize the REX (Resource Exchange) to gain even more EOS and then now I'm able to vote for these proxies that are voting for Block Producers who are paying money back to voters so I'm getting even more EOS. It is pretty insane actually. Eventually I feel it is going to pay off in a very big way when people flood back into crypto in 2020 and 2021.
Lot of good info here. Thanks for sharing. I would love if steem cut the inflation and backed the token by actual revenue... that sounds like an awesome and much more sustainable model.
One of the interesting things about Scorum is most people don't know there isn't any inflation. It actually took me awhile to figure out how everything was set up over there. The witnesses are getting 900 SCR / month out of a pool set aside for that purpose and the reward pool was also set up at the genesis but it was only set to last 2 years. So eventually it will run out in about 8 months or so. At that point the plan was to have the advertisement revenue refill the reward pool and be sustainable at that point and also attract people there with the commission free sport betting and all that which would drive demand to purchasing the coins.
I just really think a lot of it was a marketing related issue as the founders have primarily went silent and having been doing a ton of updating. There is a media manager that is usually in Telegram and a few other things going on but the liquidity is relatively low.
The model does really interest me and I always keep my eye on it and do a little bit of blogging but since the coin value has dropped so far there is always that worry that it will go away all together.
Where were you able to get this information for Scorum? Can you share the source? I'm curious to study this blockchain more.
I've been following the project and do like the proposal. Using a blockchain to combine sports content creation with gambling makes a lot of sense to me.
I've mostly been looking at Scorum's gambling part recently and there's little to no activity on there at this moment.
https://explorer.scorum.com/en-us/
Here is the block explorer. Some of the information was from picking apart code in the GitHub and then talking to some of the witnesses and I also had two conversations over Telegram with the founders. I think there is a lot of misinformation about that project and there are a few key things that are holding it back in my opinion.
Here is the code on GitHub from the genesis for where coins were allocated.
https://github.com/scorum/scorum/blob/develop/genesis/mainnet/genesis.tpl.json
I have really went back and forth on how the project with survive. About the time I start looking at it again I really like a lot of things but then there are aspects of it that tell me to not invest and stay back away from it.
I've tried a lot of the other clones but never wanted to leave steem. I just see so much potential here and can see all of the other projects being build that will give it value in the long run.
There does need to be more external money brought into the system and steem.inc have started to do that which is great. They are also looking to help projects that will burn steem and market externally to bring more eyes onto steem. I wouldn't worry too much about the inflation as it's going down every year and there really isn't that much steem out there if we see a few million dollars thrown at the token. One good smt could get a lot of people interested in the token.
Well in the last year the effective inflation rate of STEEM was over 17% because of the price situation with STEEM Backed Dollars. It would be a long time before the inflation rate was as low as it is with Bitcoin or Litecoin currently. That is my worry and it is so much easier in a lot of respects to get STEEM than it is to get Bitcoin or Litecoin without spending a bunch of money on electricity for mining in the normal sense.
Steem certainly has the first movers advantage on this type of blockchain blogging platform and the most liquidity. Most of them can't ever get to a point where there is enough liquidity in the system.
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