Topic: Steem pyramid scheme revealed - page 51. (Read 107058 times)

The sender can change the data slightly which produces a different signature. This can be used to encode whatever data you want. If the data is encrypted or otherwise obfuscated then it is between difficult and mathematically impossible to distinguish it from random.

The validators will not accept invalid signatures. Thus no way you can store any data you want on the blockchain. What is being signed wouldn't be stored on the blockchain. Please don't pretend you don't understand.

I didn't say the signature has to match, but it can still encode data.

You can employ countermeasures, They may increase the cost of encoding the data, but for things like links, the amount of data that needs to be shared is pretty low, and the value of sharing them may be very high. This becomes a likely-unwinnable arms race.


Good questions. They'll certainly all be removed from the web site. Beyond that we are in uncharted territory for the most part. Bitcoin had CP links mined into it, and probably other illegal numbers. So far that has not become a major problem. Steem might force the issue.

Technically incorrect in the case of asymmetric public-key cryptography signatures.

Afaik it is mathematically intractable to find a public key that enables you to produce a signature that maps to some chosen data.

So then we don't store the hash of what was signed. The data provider provides the match. So the blockchain doesn't store it.

Also there may be a heuristic to detect if a hash is not randomized data.

What about copyrighted material (the actual text, not links) being posted on Steem? What if someone posted chapters of a Harry Potter book, or something else from a corporation that is heavily litigious?

How would Steem deal with a DMCA demand?

What about if someone doxxed government officials on Steem?

What if someone posted Daniel Larimer's home address?

What if someone posted some company's "trade secrets?"

Or started using it as the new wikileaks to post "stolen" "government secrets"?

I'm just curious about how "a site that can't be censored" (without a hard fork) deals with the eventuality of when government guns come HARD and say "you MUST delete the following things....."?

I hate intellectual property laws but this is stuff that a company has to deal with if they have a central location for offices and servers, and have real people's names on corporate papers and can be shut down.

If Steem ever got 1/1000th as many users as Facebook, there would have to be an hourly hard fork. Think of all the stuff that Facebook or  Wordpress.com (the blog hosting part) HAVE to delete daily to stay in business. How will Steem deal with that?

Business plan: someone should make a blogging version of Open Bazaar. Would be WAY more useful than Steem from the censorship end.

I think you'll like this (binary turns are fun--and it's topical): https://steemit.com/olympics/@generalizethis/a-competitor-s-plea-to-phelps

This is little different from any other blockchain. There are links to CP and probably some other bad stuff mined into Bitcoin's blockchain.

Links are perhaps the least problematic since there is always someone else you can go to to try to get the data taken down.

It is very hard to prevent people from storing data on a blockchain. Even if you just store hashes, transactions, signatures, etc. all can be used/abused/misused (take your pick) to store data.

The data I need which I think will show if Steem is growing virally or not:

We mentioned this already upthread (in one of the Steem threads).

I think the solution is do not host the data on the blockchain. Host only the hash of the data.

The data should be served by other nodes. These nodes will decide which content they feel legally safe to serve.

Other technologies such as Bittorrent, IPFS, etc can attempt to serve this content as well.

The data will never be entirely deleted, it will just be an issue of whether it is easy to locate.

Users could digitally sign certifications of ownership or attribution of the source of the content, which would give nodes legal standing to host the content. Users then fight with copyright infringement claims. Perhaps registries will emerge.

Is it a strawman if I didn't attribute it to you explicitly? Perhaps there was an implied attribution which was begging for your clarification.

Good to hear you are agnostic (although I don't think that means you don't have an opinion of the likelihood). As you know, I am just trying to decide where I should try to focus my effort. I want to start coding, but I don't want to go waste my time down a deadend. So I am trying to ascertain whether I should try to partner up with Steem in some way (build some project on top of it, perhaps attempt to petition Steemit, Inc for funding) or go try to work on an alternative blockchain (or some combination of the two!)

It is a lot to think through and digest. There is technical, marketing, economics, politics, etc.. to consider.

I think it is not enough to classify the question as the strength of network effects because for example maybe (?) there can be very strong network effects without precluding strong internetwork effects as well. I dunno.


Edit: you did write upthread that a competitor would have an uphill climb against Steem's first mover advantage, but I guess that is somehow not the same as blockchain to rule all other of social networking blockchains (?). So it sort of did come from you. And I am not entirely disagreeing with you on that opinion. Again, I dunno.

Edit#2: I also want to emphasize that if Steem transitions to the masses, either the users need to become educated about the importance of censorship-resistance diligence, else I think it is likely that the open source mantra will be overrun and replaced with corporatism. Typically the masses are not diligent on anything that isn't cute and fun.

I used the term to refer to Bitshares which did have two Larimers directly and publicly involved. Steemit does not.

(I'm not sure I would agree that I ever trolled them; mostly prior to Steem/it I ignored them; sorry r0ach, even true when you were a Bitshares pumper.)

Regarding the "one blockchain to rule them all", that never came from me, so I'm not going to address that straw man. I'm agnostic on how strong network effects are on blockchains, meaning, in the inverse, how likely it is for there to be many of them. I'm even agnostic on whether any blockchains are useful enough to survive long term.

I read Medium has 30 or 40 million monthly unique users and appears that Reddit has about 17 million. Facebook has 1.13 billion daily active users on average for June 2016; 1.03 billion mobile daily active users on average for June 2016; 1.71 billion monthly active users.

So we can see that Facebook has 1000 times more reach than Reddit in terms of daily uniques. For monthly uniques, it is only 100 times, so this much mean that users return to Facebook daily but on Reddit they return within a month. So Alexa rank is not capturing this accurately.

So Steem is roughly 200,000 times smaller than Facebook by daily uniques. We do not have enough data yet for Steem to know the monthly uniques. It could be the case that the abandonment rate is very high and thus the dailies are just new signups cycled through the system, not aggregating to monthlies. In that case, the monthly uniques could be the same or even worse than the 200,000 ratio.

Again we concur, it is really difficult to analyze without better data from Steem. At least we have a rough idea that we are a long way from being able to conclude we are on the way to challenging Facebook.

How do you figure I ignored when I acknowledged the distinction in my footnote  

The point is that decentralized transparency naturally resolves to blockchain protocol proliferation.

There is no way you can put all the features and preferences users will want into one-size-fits-all protocol. There are tradeoffs of choices in the parameters of the protocol.

There is absolutely no technical reason users have to put their data only on one blockchain (although the economic reason with the tokenization might be an issue). Their UI clients can hypothetically interopt with multiple blockchains.


I think you are missing my latest implied point, which is that transparency is only orthogonal to control, if we have a proliferation of blockchains. Take into account my entire train of thought including the ability to capture the power vacuum by manipulating the minds of the masses (e.g. false flags).

So either we assume protocols can't proliferate because of interoption friction, and thus transparency is impotent because it becomes a winner-take-all political power vacuum, or we take the stance that blockchains can proliferate and UI clients can deal with this and thus there is no such power vacuum. I am leaning towards the latter.


Ditto what I wrote above.


It appears to be somewhat of a community euphemism for acts such as releasing Steem with a license that doesn't allow forking. I guess I just mimicked the community FUD for lack of time to repeat some long-winded description of the centralization issues which I have already done too many times. It was just a shortcut.

Suddenly father and son no longer communicate. Sorry I don't believe that. Look my stance is they can do what ever they want. And the community is free to make jokes about it. They need thick skin for what they did with the "sneaky" "pre"-mine, so I presume they can handle it. If for example, I was somehow brought into Steemit, Inc or something, then I'd need thick skin too. Not saying that will happen. I dunno.

Hey you used to troll "The Larimers". Funny isn't how our attitudes change. Lol. Relax man you know that is just cryptospeak around here.

I agree. I place little value on the analysis of internal blockchain data that I've seen so far because I think there is a lot of account scamming abuse, along with non-abuse account creation that doesn't come from actual users (such as what was and is needed for mining). We don't have any good data on the magnitude of these nor how it has changed over time. I wouldn't rule out that someone could analyze internal usage data and convincingly account for these other factors, but I haven't see it.

I think the Alexa trend is mostly valid (and shows growth, but somewhat slow and slowing). I did see the earlier comments you are someone else posted about Alexa rank being bogus but I think that mostly applies to smaller sites like individual commerce sites and blogs. When applied to sites with wider public use, especially when reasonably highly-ranked, I think it is useful. For example, that steemit is now higher ranked than bitcointalk is a reasonable result consistent with the rate of posting and the number of active users I seen posting. That this is only recently the case is also consistent with my experience.

(And by "mostly valid" I mean that it shows a positive growth trend only. I don't think it has much if any quantitative meaning.)


Steemit has about 5000 unique daily users (in practice slightly fewer because of bots). Reddit has about 1 million unique daily users (https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/about/traffic). I guess reddit has bots too, so not sure how that part compares.

The ratio is only about 200:1. I don't know if that is a good or bad stat in terms of prospects.

1 million reddit users is not surprising to me. Most people I talk to are not reddit users. Occasionally I run into them. With Facebook the experience is the opposite.

Afaik, we don't really have the data we need to know what is going on with Steem's adoption:

You're still ignoring the difference between decentralized control (which doesn't really exist here) and decentralized transparency, which does exist here.

It doesn't matter who owns the stake, whether it is Steemit or Facebook. For any such owner to fork the blockchain and censor it would be transparent. We already know, because Steemit Inc has told us (aside from common sense) that the steemit.com web site may be censored, and users who want to avoid that censorship will have to use different ways of accessing the blockchain. The blockchain is still censorship-resistant. Part of that resistance comes from the unavoidable transparency inherent in forking it to censor it. (A level of transparency that does not exist when Facebook, Twitter, etc. censor with no visibility or accountability by secretly manipulating the behavior of their servers.)

BTW, The term "The Larimers" is trolling (or perhaps you have been successful trolled by someone else with a "The Larimers" obsession) and false unless you have some evidence of more than one Larimer being in a position of authority. Ned is not a Larimer.

(I read your footnote.)

ETC and ETH are both nuclear forks on a major exchange. Two different philosophies, the latter of which is Narc control.

Those interested in capturing a power vacuum use false-flags to achieve their goal. They know how to manipulate the masses.

Also please re-read my footnote, as I was adding to it while you were writing this reply.

I think you can just forget the notion of one blockchain Steem to rule them all.

P.S. Steemit is just a website with a corporate controlled blockchain already (and some minions who pretend it isn't to give the illusion that we have achieved decentralization). It seems you are contradicting yourself. Narcs can play this deception game also. The Larimers are writing the playbook.

So could Steemit be destroyed if someone posted a bunch of "illegal content" on there? If so, that's a HUGE flaw in a business plan considering the current state of The State.

How does Steemit deal with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or, creepy kiddie touchers posting links and pix. I know pix referenced on Steemit are hosted elsewhere, but if references to them are hardwired into the blockchain, and it would take a hard fork to remove them.....

Seems like those two things right there doom this to fail.

If the entire system is replaced with a web site and the blockchain is entirely irrelevant and ignored, then sure. But then we don't need to discuss stake at all.

This is hard to do while still retaining the token rewards scheme. To get there, exchanges and others would need to accept the new change/fork to the back end. This change would be transparent. In other words, it is still a nuclear option.

How do you figure? If the masses don't care how the backend works, they may not protest. The censorship could even be seen as positive by the masses, removing beheadings, etc.. And the occasional censorship of WeAreChange, etc may go entirely unnoticed by most.

Note please see my footnote edit in my prior post.