RE: Are STEEM Witnesses A Cartel?
These are very valid points. Steemit certianly has problems in the way its concensus/governance mechanisms were designed and implemented. As you point out, the system is now rigged, and those at the top are sitting pretty, with no incentive to change it. Steem just sorta bobs along at the moment. Saying that, its got a lot of users for a dapp, beating every other blockchain-based social media I know out of the water in terms of user activity and ease of use.
What will be interesting is to see how much Mr Larimer has learned from the mistakes of Steem, and how much effort he has put into a competitor to be launched on EOS. I'm assuming there will be a Steem-like clone, but hopefully with a vastly improved initial distribution and governance mechanisms. Any insights on this, as i'm not following EOS closely ?
There were certainly a lot of things learned especially in the first year of STEEM and part of the reason there were so many hard forks in that first year. Things have improved but a couple of the things that I mentioned are tough to change after things were set in motion because it would essentially take the witnesses to vote on something being taken away from them and other benefactors of the ridiculous initial distribution so once it was in play it is hard to undo that.
STEEM is impressive in what it has accomplished and like you said it is one of the only real examples of a working DAPP and functioning ecosystem in the blockchain space.
I will be interested to see how @dan is able to address some of the issues that were ran into with STEEM. There is a team of Block One employees developing DAPPs and one of them is the next iteration of a STEEM like ecosystem but they were pretty tight lipped in Australia about any specifics regarding the platform. I didn't try to dig too hard but at one point I was having a conversation with two Block One employees about Dan's implementation of identity verification associated with the social media platform and they were both looking at each other and basically saying that they can't really talk about it.
I think in the end it will be very interesting how the system works and I don't expect it to totally replace STEEM or anything. It will just function differently and be a different sort of game that a lot of people here will just be over there as well trying to earn on both platforms.
Interesting - thanks! Will keep an eye out for dapps being released on EOS. I think you're right, a lot of people can recycle content fairly easily across multiple platforms.
I read there are a lot of debates around which direction to take EOS governance, as currently the voting for BPs is a bit dodgy, with whales in control once again (more here: https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2018/08/17/eos-whales-control-petition/).
Do you think EOS will amend this in the near future, and what about forks like Telos, which promise a 'fairer' system?
I think that amendments will be done but that there will always be a certain amount of issues. Nothing can be a perfect system. If Block One ends up using their stake to vote then that could help but also a lot of people won't like it as well. So it is tough....but I think in the next 6 months we could see some BP groups come up with some great tools and that could help set some of the great groups apart.
I think Telos and other projects can be a great thing as well as an experiment to see what governance works. That way DAPPs could run on either chain but it could be more cost effective maybe on Telos. I'm certainly not opposed to other chains. I think the competition would be good. And also those of us who had the coins at the end of the crowd sale will already have a stake in it which is nice.