Topic: Steem pyramid scheme revealed - page 50. (Read 107064 times)

@dantheman (Daniel Larimer) upvoted my blog post, but as expected no other whale did:

What are you trying to do?  STOP IT!  If people keep reading things like this then NOBODY will buy Steem and the Larimers and their Chinese Communist backers won't be able to make big monies pimping out their "Steem Girls".  This is totally not a pyramid scheme guise... srsly... this is going to revolutionize smut 2.0 blockchain technology everywhere.  I'm just going to say it... it's practically genius.  Creating a highly inflationary currency which you and your cohorts control 99.99%, and then you pay some bimbo trash in this currency to lure in suckers who you attempt to convince that it's highly valuable, while you are cashing out at every moment you can.  It's really crafty, because even though everyone has restrictions on selling, you own such a significant amount of Steem, that even if you manage to cash out a quarter of it, you've still made millions.  Who else besides the Larimers could think up such an ingenious plan?

+100

The whole thing is clearly a very elaborate scheme. There's no real demand to buy Steem from anyone if you think about it. Content creators and curators create their own and can cash out. But who buys Steem? Gullible people and speculators, that alone can't keep the price up forever.

Steem the currency has no value in my opinion, content may have value so one can argue SP itself has some value. However SP is basically the same as Steem, it just dilutes at a much slower pace. The site can work exactly the same without anyone buying Steem. And that's what really makes the wheel turn. If no one buys Steem anymore and goes back to 1 cent, the whole thing collapses, the big payouts stop and that's it.

They should've made a deal with some marketing company or other sponsors to keep the price of Steem stable every month, that would make more sense.

The fud is all over the place (insert a puke smily face here)

Steem will implode on its own...

Steem goes Kaboom (well let's just say the rewards really need to be an onboarding gimmick and not the be-all and end-all of Steem):

https://steemit.com/steem/@anonymint/blog-rewards-can-t-be-widely-distributed

Hopefully this post will be one everyone can refer to when people complain about the distribution of rewards. (Assuming I haven't made any huge errors in my thought process)

I am not 100% sure this is kaboom for Steem, as indicated in the concluding section. It just sheds some light on the delusion that everything can be a perfect nirvana. There are apparently intractable tradeoffs in doing air drops this way.

In the comments, so far we are emphasizing the positive Tl;dr. I like that! Nice result so far to see people getting it and taking a positive realistic outlook.

These are the reasons why crypto will never make it without real grownups steering the ship.

well it costs something if you want to invest into it and it actually might be a great designed pyramid scheme though i doubt there is enough clues

Powered down SP goes to STEEM.

If there was one huge power down (I haven't looked) that would probably be the 'steemit' account. All the rest of power downs happen at more or less random times and are not synchronized. I don't know what Steemit's plans are for their powered down STEEM coins other than the long term plan they have stated to give away 40% to new accounts and sell 20%. They have at various times turned on and off the power down on the 'steemit' account.

It certainly does seem plausible that traders would be watching that.


I'm not sure I'm following this but let me try to explain it clearly.

The vesting fund contains STEEM POWER. That STEEM POWER can only be converted to STEEM (1:1) according to the power down rules (1% per week, etc.). STEEM can be converted to STEEM POWER (1:1) by powering up.

The vesting fund can be denominated as VESTS, which represent shares of the vesting fund. VESTS are created and destroyed by:

1. Power ups (creates new VESTS)
2. Power downs (destroys VESTS)
3. Rewards paid in SP (creates new VESTS, and SP is added to the vesting fund so as to not dilute the vesting fund)

The exchange rate is the number of SP in the vesting fund divided by the number of VESTS. The exchange rate is modified whenever new SP are added to the vesting fund as anti-diluation payments. This increases the exchange rate per VESTS but does not change the number of VESTS.


Correct.

thanks for informing op i was planning to invest
my btc to steem

I'd say perhaps thousands if they are really serious and have a botnet of IP addresses, because they can hypothetically still sell those Facebook accounts for more than it cost them to create them. Of course they have their time opportunity cost of capital, while they wait to sell them unless they are only creating them as buy orders are received.

Pretty much figure that eventually it can be that every sold fake Facebook account is first a Steem account before it is sold, if there exists some game theory strategy that is profitable using Sybil signups on Steem. I presume it is possible to change the private key and remove the ability of the Facebook login to access the account? But most who are buying FB accounts wouldn't realize to try to login with them on Steem at this juncture.

There was just a weekly power down that occurred which makes ~1% of the SP liquid. So perhaps this is generating selling demand.

Does anyone know where the powered down SP goes? Into STEEM or STEEM DOLLARS?

My understanding of smooth's stance is that nefarious data (e.g. stolen launch codes for nuclear ICBMs) can be encoded any where in any digital datums.

I retorted that the validators of the blockchain will not allow an invalid ECC signature, and it is intractable to control the bits of a valid ECC signature.

He also countered by stating that the payment amount datums and even the number of inputs/outputs in a transaction datums could be encoded with data that has some other meaning. My retort is that the blockchain validators would not make such an interpretation, and thus any such interpretation must come from an external perspective (e.g. an external UI client or any external program). And I explained that we can make external interpretations of any data posted on the Internet, so basically everything every where could become illegal. Which is absurd. No court is going to rule that the blockchain is illegal because someone distributes a UI client that pulls launch codes out of blockchain payment amount datums spread across perhaps numerous disjoint transactions. They will instead declare that UI client illegal (since it contains a special decoding algorithm) and go after it.

If we allow unvalidated text and blob fields on the blockchain (i.e. not disjoint data spread across numerous transactions and intentionally not verified to be of a certain limited scope), then yes maybe the blockchain can be culpable. Perhaps smooth is stonewalling because apparently (?) Steem is allowing that.

I had offered what I think is a pretty good solution and perhaps (?) Steem doesn't do it the way I suggested.

I want to make the blockchain just a record of what happened (i.e. enforcing the consistency and consensus), not a store of the content. By making the two orthogonal, I posit we gain certain properties.

This is an example of the sort of design work I do.

Edit: smooth was correct that my original idea of using a hash was flawed (although he didn't reply to me and instead put it in his reply to MWD64), assuming the outputs of the hash can be so deterministic (which I think may be possible to filter out with a heuristic but it might be problematic). Normally it is impossible to produce a hash output that is for example comprehensible text. There is no way to find an input which will produce such an output. Thus a heuristic may work. But instead we can use ECC signatures to avoid the problems with a heuristic.

Forgive me if I feel somewhat skeptical sometimes as to the sincerity of others. I've taken people at their word in the past and it hasn't worked out always so well for me. I want to make money and do something good at the same time. I understand vested interests. If I am on my own project, I won't try to pretend I am unbiased any more. Well I think I am not pretending now. I think everyone knows I am going over the design of Steem with a fine-toothed comb and with the intent to find flaws in it. But it does me no good to invent flaws that aren't serious. Nitpicking will only cause me to fail. So I discuss here with intent to be sincere and objective as I can, often catching myself along the way and righting my ship when it is keeling too much to one side. It is an imperfect process.

Steem is crashing nowadays, it is worthless at all. Many retarded use this system to cheat free money, shame on them, especially bts founder dan

I think the confusion was I thought commentators were stating that no liquid STEEM were in the vesting fund and I thought only VESTS would go into a "vesting fund". So I was confused as to where the liquid STEEM were accounted.

Now I think I've been told the VESTS are not in the vesting fund, so therefor liquid STEEM are accounted for in it, and the SP are accounted for in the VESTS. Is this correct? If not please provide some complete definitions. This is  getting ridiculous. How can anyone know WTF is going on if the damn terms and design isn't documented. I try to guess based on different statements which makes it look as though it is my error, but it is a failure of clear communication.


What I understand now is that when we "Convert" our SBD, it retires them and converts to liquid STEEM. Whereas, when we choose "Buy or Sell", then we exchange the SBD for liquid STEEM and the SBD is not destroyed.


Again it was the commentators in my blog who caused me to believe the vesting fund stored the VESTS, which caused me to wonder why the liquid STEEM in the vesting fund were backed by VESTS. I was just following what I thought people were saying.

I can't read people's minds. There needs to be clear documentation. The white paper afair doesn't explain all about VESTS and vesting fund terms (unless it is buried and I've forgotten?)

I am referring to an ECC signature. You are apparently thinking of transaction data? I don't know why it is so difficult for you to understand that afaik it is mathematically intractable to control the bits of an ECC signature.


Payments are numbers. Anyone can write any filter they want to reinterpret any data any where on the Internet as anything. Everything would be illegal. So obviously this will never stand up in any sane court-of-law.

You are being absurd.

Are you interested in improving things or just nonsense.

The signature is the data. Imagine one bit per signature. That's enough to transfer short links without too many signatures (but it isn't hard to do better).

You can easily encode data in the amounts of payments. If amounts are hidden you can encode data in the number of outputs, or if number of outputs is fixed, you can encode data in the timing of payments.

There are a million ways. How contrived these measure get will be a function of how much effort is put into suppressing it.

I already wrote in 3 posts, that the data being signed wouldn't be stored on the blockchain. So only the signature would be stored. Afaik, it is mathematically intractable to find some set of (public key, signed data) that will produce a desired signature.