Would A Hard Fork Mean Starting From Scratch?
Three of Steemit, Inc's key employees have resigned. @andrarchy, @vandeberg and @gerbino have quit, which means the rolling out of SMTs will be questionable again. The coding is finished but from what I've heard, they've ran into some issues during testing that require some work to iron out.
The community as a whole seems to be unenthusiastic about a chain controlled by a single Chinese entity. Suppose a hard fork results in a sister chain with Steemit, Inc's stake absent. The issue will be getting listed on exchanges. Poloniex is out of the question. Binance has back-pedaled on supporting Sun in the takeover. Huobi is a question mark.
If all the popular apps used the sister chain, that would mean that most of the users would use it, too. I think that would improve our chances of getting the new token (STEEMC or whatever) listed. Besides, I think yesterday's debacle is a major blow against centralized exchanges.
The hostile takeover of Steem was discussed even in the Finnish language Facebook group on Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies today. I seriously believe the dominance of centralized exchanges must come to an end. Scandals like using staking customer funds and using them for voting is a breach of such magnitude that it will give the stakeholders of all DPoS chains a pause. There should be heavy emphasis on cross-chain atomic swaps as a way to provide liquidity to the space. The ability to create new chains and getting investors on board without having to depend on getting listed on massive centralized exchanges would be a major boost to decentralization in the entire space as well as booster for network effect. That cannot be over-emphasized.
The space is a turning point and getting that narrative across on social media is critical.
P.S. Please remember to vote for all the 30 community elected witnesses. It would be interesting to see the extent of our voting power. Do not vote for the current top 30 because they're all stooges of Justin Sun. If you have alt accounts, vote with them, too. Delegations do not affect witness voting power one way or the other.
Thanks for sharing!
If we can get more stake to vote for witnesses we could possibly repeat the soft fork and kick Justin completely.
At least we can try. All of the exchanges need to back down. It will be interesting to see how much voting power the community can muster.
Exchanges still play an important part in crypto prices and if STEEM will be delisted from the major ones, in case of a hardfork that would piss the Chinese entity trying to control Steem, then we would end up with worthless internet money. However, getting a new crypto and the respect from the crypto world, would put a lot of value on our backs and would even increase the chance of listing it on quite some notable exchanges. For the moment though there's still a lot of uncertainty.
All of the previous sister chains of Steem have very low market caps.
Golos, the Russian language fork of Steem, has a market cap of $0.86 million whereas Steem's is $62.34 million. Steem's market cap is over 70 larger. Whaleshares and Weku aren't even listed.
However, if all the apps and the entire community behind the new chain, it should be easier to get STEEM and SBD listed on exchanges.
I think exchanges are over-rated. Everybody is so damn concerned about some damn day traders. Makeing a simple bitcoin steem p2p exchange would be a good starting point and sufficient if we get the smt's, because smt's are going to atract tech-savvy investors which in turn creates demand for more exchange options.
The value of every cryptocurrency is nearly completely speculative at the moment. The valuations depend very heavily on speculative traders. Buy volume and sell volume are of vital importance.
I did back of the envelope calculations on the potential organic (non-speculative) value of Steem a few months ago based on the number of monthly active users (MAU) and revenue generated by social media platforms per MAU. The result was that if Steem were as good as the best of them, Twitter, which was capable of generating about $9 of revenue per year per MAU, then the price of STEEM that could support would be about $0.01. The regrettable fact is that speculation on a dozen or so centralized exchanges are where the money comes from into the entire space. It won't change any time soon but perhaps in the long term decentralized solutions like cross-chain swaps can replace centralized exchanges.