RE: An Argument for Long-Term Rational Self-Interest Versus Short-Term Irrational Value Extraction
Bad initial distribution, big first pump and dump that preceded the recent market frenzy for other coins, the platform didn't attract any interest because people thought it was a terrible site filled with boring people who controlled too much. We are just living in the aftermath of all of that and the prices were still dead compared to other coins right up until the point of their listing on Upbit.
And now, logically, many have a leave-it-for-dead mentality about Steemit and STEEM, they extract as much of the windfall from Upbit traders as possible because they know there is little to no organic reason for anyone to choose to invest large stacks in steemit when there is so much competition on the horizon.
Because it would be nigh-impossible to change the minds of most of the biggest whales and their collusion to keep a few witnesses in place it's impossible to change the code to anything other than what steemit inc and the whales wants, they're overly friendly for any "decentralized" system's tastes, so people see right through the charade and know that this place is centralized to all hell.
When you come to a place and see that your vote or voice don't matter much and all the largest players are the bad actors themselves, why would anyone stay? I get what you're saying, we need to change, etc. etc., and yes that would be the healthy attitude to have for anyone that wanted such a thing to survive and actually grow, but we've seen how little many of them care about actually risking some profits now to make the place a passable destination for people on the web.
Who know, clearly the best route for individuals in raw $ valuations was cashing out/powering down/self-voting like crazy over the past few months, maybe some of those who are doing so have good intentions and will buy back in later and not be so selfish. Or not, lol.
The initial distribution is certainly a concern. It's one of those things which can't easily be fixed. I'm hopeful SMTs will allow capital to flow into other areas and result in a dilution (to some degree) of STEEM while also giving it more value (just as ETH has seen value from supporting so many ERC20 trading pairs). It wouldn't surprise me if STEEM moves to more of an underlying support token for bandwidth and everything else with a social component like Steemit is done on an SMT.
The leave-it-for-dead mentality, to me, is very short-sighted. If they are wrong, they will sell into the buy orders of those who get it (or those who hold) and stick it out to see this blockchain get the respect it deserves as the most active blockchain on the planet (at one point more active than all the others combined). It has free, three second transactions with account recovery, a stable asset (somewhat), built-in time-locked savings accounts, and more. STEEM is amazing compared to most any other coin out there and STEEM is far more valuable that Steemit.
As for the competition, I've yet to see anything substantial. Most are still pay-to-play which I think the STEEM white paper rightfully explains won't work as well because of loss aversion.
This... sounds a little off to me. Do you think there's some grand secret conspiracy going on or something? Yes, the @freedom vote is significant for determining who is a witness, but what does that really impact? What is being prevented by the current consensus witnesses? What significant code changes to STEEM itself are being submitted and being rejected? It seems to me no one other than Steemit, inc employees are currently submitting any code changes. Until Appbase is released, I'm not convinced outside code changes would make things any better either.
What are some examples of code changes you'd want implemented that you think Steemit, inc and "the whales" wouldn't want?
What do you mean by "centralized all to hell"? Do you mean in terms of code commits, Steem Power holdings, DPOS in general...? To me, it's more decentralized than many POW systems, but that may be a separate discussion.
How should it matter beyond what stake holders in the system value it at? There's no free money generation system here. Every single bit of value distributed is because of investors buying STEEM to support the price. Those who don't understand that and get some confused entitlement attitude really confuse me. It's like tweeting to no followers and then getting all upset at the lack of meaningful engagement. Or getting mad at someone who builds a huge social media following and then brings them here to Steemit as well.
I hope more people making posts like this will help people to think differently and risk those profits.
The "clearly best route" was to sell Bitcoin at $1 if you bought in at a penny to gain your 100x returns. It was still the wrong decision. I have the perspective of being invested in BTC for more than five years. Most people don't have that. So, they sell. That's fine. Those who buy, understand, and think differently will, I think, do very well.
Thanks for your detailed comment.
Well, stake holders aren't currently leading the price action of STEEM or SBD. They've done so in the past pre-Upbit and haven't been able to get it over a dollar for most of the coins' histories.
I don't think they have to do any sort of 1933 confiscation to anyone in the west, once they've gathered enough data on people trading crypto and once the fiat situation gets bad enough they can always just pull the plug on tether and all usdt-trading exchanges in overnight raids.
There doesn't have to be a grand conspiracy, although there are accusations of pay 2 win as far as voting goes, freedom is probably another story all on its own. Self-interested parties, colluding or not, arrive at similar conclusions when it comes to protecting wealth.
It's fortunate for us then that most other social media crypto plays have hesitation about the longevity of crypto's elevated prices, this means that their attempts are also greedy, with them front-loading their profit-making and making things transparently bad for the end user in terms of possible equity shares they can get and how useful they ultimately are.
Which is why I agree with the nature of your original post, because STEEM could change, but that would require the entire SP distribution and lots of the witness's complacency to change. And if a player enters the field and is equipped with the right team and mindset from the start and is willing to forgo those sweet, sweet ICO moneys in return for more support from a broader audience base and a more involved, active community led by existing popular personalities on the internet then we'd really be dead in the water.
(to change)
How so? There is the problem with all the "wealth distribution" schemes I've ever seen. It just sounds to me like jealousy and theft. If SP distributes voluntarily, sweet. Other than that, what right do any of us have to tell others what to do with their own property?
I think SMTs will create a lot of new and interesting opportunities for many different approaches. I'm hopeful for that, anyway. Would be cool to see airdrops of new SMT tokens based on reputation and with a cap (meaning, for example, the airdrop only goes up to, say, 10k). Keeping things more evenly spread would be very interesting to see. I imagine you'd still get to the 80/20 distribution eventually, but it would take time and in that time someone might create a new competing SMT.
Wealth concentration is a big problem when it delineates who is a tastemaker on a social media platform. It's not like STINC selected a bunch of people who had an eye for how to spot social media trends or anything to receive the first batch of STEEM in the premine.
I see that more as a problem with content discovery than with wealth distribution, which is why I'm hopeful Hivemind will fix this specific concern as will SMTs which allow for fine-tuned control of who participates in the rewards pool via SMT Oracles.
As for "tastemaker," is that really your lived experience here? I rarely look at the trending page. I'm mostly engaging with my followers and people I follow.
Maybe it's more a problem with new people who show up and see crap content on trending because of Steem Power votes from people who don't spend time curating quality content which might be interesting or valuable to investors. I don't think we'll ever see rich investors spending all their time curating. Maybe they'll delegate to curation services and earn rewards that way. If curation rewards were increased, as many are suggesting we should do, that might help. The problem there is those without Steem Power who don't really earn much curation now anyway would complain even louder about the wealth distribution issue and the whales getting even more of the rewards through their curation.
No, what the whales want to see does not dictate just what content gets seen on the trending or hot pages, but also creates incentives among other users to create material that is suitable to their primary target audience, which is going to be other supporters with high vested amounts of SP and not just ordinary people who might stroll in from outside of steemit, you know, the kind of stuff that might actually see the platform grow in user numbers. The problem is, in a dpos system where most of the wealth has been distributed, and future wealth's distribution is determined by existing stakeholders, those new eyeballs don't really mean shit so no one catered to them in earnest.
A lot of your points are good but the point about witnesses blocking code changes is dead wrong. Many of the witnesses would like to see code changes but have been presented with none to even consider.
I mean, aren't some of them supposed to be coders?
Possibly, though it isn't necessarily a requirement of the role that witnesses personally develop and release code, assuming they can at least evaluate what is submitted and represent stakeholders in deciding whether to approve them or not. In theory, anyone can submit code and maybe witnesses approve it, maybe not.
In any case some are coders and have even written some modifications to the core blockchain code, but there is a lot more to it than the actual coding for code changes to reach the point where witnesses can consider approving it or not. The way the steem blockchain repo is run in practice, the entire process (meaning not only coding but planning, scheduling, reviewing, prioritizing, testing, etc.) is pretty much locked down by Steemit. It is very much unlike other open source projects I've been involved with and a lot more like a proprietary development process a large part of which seems to occur effectively behind closed doors (i.e. not on github, although the code itself is). For a long time it was explicitly stated that ideas for changes should not even be submitted to github and should only be discussed on steemit.com (which in my view is a horrifically bad UI for development discussion). Although that has been loosed up in theory, in practice, most if not all change or enhancement ideas that aren't on steemit's own (mostly internal) roadmap are still closed anyway.
In the case of condenser (the web UI that runs the steemit.com web site) there have been increasingly a few outside contributions accepted, and that is a positive development although I would still say that most of the process takes place within the context of just Steemit the company. Witnesses have little to nothing to do with the UI in any case.
In order for there to be real change where code changes includng consensus rule changes from other than Steemit are considered by witnesses would requires Steemit to revise its overall development effort to be based on open source methods where development and coding work can realistically come from outside the company and be considered through an inclusive process on equal footing, or alternately the repo would have to be forked, essentially "firing" steemit as its keeper. There has been some 'long term' discussion on the former happening, but only a tiny bit of actual motion.
Anyway, that was a bit of a diversion, but my point is that witnesses are in no way blocking changes, and in no way are whales voting in witnesses specifically for the purpose of blocking changes. It is simply not the case that the issue has even come up.
So in essence everyone is depending on Steemit Inc's large share of stake as a sort of proof that it and its process and roadmap are in the interest of shareholders in general, right? And at least at this point, things like golos aside, there isn't a large enough reason to fork and do things independent of them and compete against the main chain, probably because there is a very uncertain future with that as far as the ability to get any kind of traction going if the reset button is hit, and then issues with liquidity and getting the new coins onto any sorts of exchanges of note are just more variables that no one can be sure of.
I think that the wait and see approach most must be taking in being patient with Steemit is what works for now given the relatively high price compared to the rate of new developments coming out, if prices are high and you're already invested in this chain then the alternatives are much less attractive than if, say, steem were totally a near-dead coin and got delisted from upbit or binance etc. and there was more upside potential in starting something fresh.
I think that part of the reason for outside development being scarce other than the process being very much private and internally-driven as you've stated is the obvious issue that anyone submitting game-changing changes to steemit would probably rather take their ideas and skills to another upstart where they have a shot at getting a much larger share of stake in the project, considering that is how steemit itself was kind of arranged at its inception. And I don't think we'd get many open-source enthusiasts who code for ideals over money if this is how code changes are handled here with the past processes.
I can't speak for everyone. People likely have different views.
There have actually been several Steem forks, not just Golos. There are probably a number of reasons why none of them have really gained traction but I'd guess that the lack of dramatic success by Steem itself (at least in the terms that the cryptocurrency market cares about, which is mostly market cap) is a big one. If you fork a #30 coin, how many people will actually care? Yes there are issues with liquidity and such, but a lot of those are secondary to the primary issue of people caring enough to pay attention to a fork.
Hard to say. If you fork a #300 coin, do people care about that more or less than forking a #30 coin? And there have been and continue to be numerous "social-crypto" projects being launched. Again, I would say until someone shows at least one of them being a clear and dramatic success, interest overall will be muted.
Probably so. However, even modest improvements or incremental changes don't go anywhere. Steem/it does have a community and some in that community (including witnesses, but not only witnesses) are interested in contributing to the code. There just isn't a mechanism for it.
You are correct. The process is hostile to open source involvement.