Topic: Steem pyramid scheme revealed - page 63. (Read 107064 times)

I don't understand why buying products online with cc, paypal is any more of a hoop to jump through than buying with Steem. If you mean that the payer already has some Steem, then I can say they already have some fiat in their credit card also.

My point is that unless you are selling some product which is targeting only to Steem users (e.g. the Steemit T-shirts), then there is no advantage to adding Steemit's miniscule share of the online market to your set of payment options as a seller online. You should add Bitcoin first, as it has two orders of magnitude more users.

The number of tags will proliferate so much that no one will be able to really home in on which tags they want to click. It will effectively still be a firehose. I don't think you can solve the relevance problem with tags filtering.

You can tell how huge Steemit is gonna be if they actually implement the proper filters in the user interface like in this picture:

https://steemit.com/steemit/@r0achtheunsavory/steemit-feature-wish-list

So many tags will be proliferated, that filtering by tag is likely to become as much a firehose as is the site now. I don't really see that solving the problem of relevance, except as pertains to creation of dedicated groups which gain prominence over others, e.g. #bitcoin becomes prominent over #bitcoinfans, #bitcointalk, #bitcoinnews, etc..

I presume Reddit can limit the number of discussion sub-forms created because it is a top-down run site?

So... If Steem is to bad, crooked and secretly a piramid scheme then how it is possible it is still in top 3 the biggest coins - market cap wise?
People are so desperately to pump, afraid to lose or think it is not that bad of a situation? I don't get it.

Well...it's not something I'm good at - introducing myself... I don't like it at all. In fact, I have always preferred to skip that awkward introduce yourself situation...I'm the person that just randomly is there, and then, right before everyone says goodbye, I'm gone. I like the part in between all that, the part where you really get to know the other person. No small talk, no polite phrases just for the sake of being polite.... I want the real stuff, I want to go right to the stuff that matters. But over the years I've learned that most people prefer going the long way - introducing yourself, small talk, polite phrases, small talk again, than perhaps getting to actually know the person. So here I am, introducing myself.

I'm a girl, people like to know a persons gender, so I figured I should throw that in there. I'm somewhere in between 20 and 30, and hopefully I'll stop aging as soon as possible. I'm into a lot of stuff, like ethics, pokémon, gaming, drawing, dogs, psychedelics and empathogens, anti-aging, evolutionary biology and behavior, large scale geology...

No, I'm not holding a "steemit" sign, but I promise that this is me. I almost never lie, so if you believe me, the odds are in your favor. Holding a sign on the internet is risky business, so I've decided to stay off that path for now.

Asperger is something a person is born with, but since most people with this condition are males, I figured someone might find it interesting reading about an aspie girl. This is way outside my comfort zone, but hey, it's just the internet...it's not like it's gonna be here forever... lol jk.

What really matters any way? Social illusions are one game we play on ourselves because just like one ant, no human alone is really accomplished or resilient in the big picture perspective. Perhaps I may have some mild Aspergers also because there were many times I preferred playing inside my head than "pointless small talk" and I've been known to offend others with my communications when I am not being very conscious of my need to think of the way my words will be interpreted. Your blog post is funny and mental, e.g. "empathogens" lol. Your art talent appears to be impressive. Having been in the Bitcoin sphere since 2013, I am finding it very gratifying to observe blockchain and cryptography technology reaching the personalization interaction stage on Steemit. Thanks for sharing. Hope you find new and interesting horizons with new resources such as Steemit. I'd probably have more to say if I had more time to think about it.

It will be one less hoop for the consumer to jump through (cc, paypal) and AFAIK amazon isn't a good fit for all retailers (not sure why you mentioned it won't be in lieu of everywhere else--who would assume that?).

How does it make sense for small retailers of any significance to target a userbase of less than 100 million users instead of Amazon as you indicated? You know that Amazon allows small retailers to sell on Amazon. I could see some retailers offering products in exchange for Steem tokens when the active userbase reaches a million users, but this won't be lieu of selling every where else also.

As for the vaporware microtransactions ecosystem, we will see if it is every developed.

I forget the name, but you can order in on Alpha Bay.

Anyways, I didn't that it would happen only that I was watching for it--and it does make sense for small retailers--though it depends on steemit's growth, which depends on managements ability to groom stable communities within the platform--which doesn't seem to be happening (though it still could).

Can you give me some of what you are smoking?

No chance in hell of what you are fantasizing about.

The other thing I'm watching is whether any small retailers use steemit as a store front so they can compete with amazon's ease of use--have yet to see it.

P.S. @complexring does not explain math very well for laymen:

https://steemit.com/mathematics/@complexring/the-mathematics-of-fractional-reserve-banking

Everything he wrote there will fly right over most everyone's head. I am confident I could do a much better job elucidating that math point. I don't see the point of ranking that so highly when the masses will just get turned off by that content.

This is a salient example of how Steem's voting algorithm is preventing it from incentivizing any content which doesn't jive with the existing demographics of Steem:

https://steemit.com/travel/@chhaylin/the-steemit-couple-representing-steemit-in-florence-italy-in-our-travel-blog

There is no way that blog post is worth $6000. He is riding on the appreciation of his prior two blog posts about philosophy and that highly intellectual whales (e.g. @smooth, @complexring, @berniesanders) like him because he writes intellectual blog posts. But this one was not. It was some monkey-see-monkey-do travel story of which there are many copies already on Steem.

It is impossible for new demographics to form on Steem, because they get discouraged and leave due to the fact that only those who jibe with the existing whales will find enough rewards to make it worth continuing.

P.S. @complexring does not explain math very well for laymen:

https://steemit.com/mathematics/@complexring/the-mathematics-of-fractional-reserve-banking

Everything he wrote there will fly right over most everyone's head. I am confident I could do a much better job elucidating that math point. I don't see the point of ranking that so highly when the masses will just get turned off by that content.

Edit: Steem is really scraping the bottom of the barrel now by rewarding $4000 for this piece-of-crap:

https://steemit.com/life/@fairytalelife/it-happened-on-the-road-to-steemit-nirvana

In other news I was tired of hearing same old about "fair distribution" and writing the same again and again in comments, so I wrote an article of the "life-isn't fair-variety": https://steemit.com/steem/@alexgr/the-ideal-of-fair-distribution-in-cryptocurrencies-and-steem-can-it-exist-in-real-life

...per the power-law distribution of income/wealth it gets 85% concentrated to say the top 20% of content producers and roughly 38% to the top 1%...

Why would comments (and votes if you are referring to reducing data bloat) get pruned. Everything that is published is to be retained forever. There is important information in comments as well.

Who will decide which comments are important and which can be deleted. You come full circle back to the censorship problem again.

Without video KYC, there is no way to stop the identity theft and copyright infringement issues, because there is no way to hold anyone responsible for what they post.

Even if we attain a decentralized, permissionless blockchain, if we have no way to identify posters of content, then it can become illegal to host a full blockchain node because those infringed have to deal with Whac-A-Mole against innumerable Sybils and will instead be forced to petition the government for a complete ban of the blockchain protocol. We have to be able to move the enforcement out to the ends where individual posters can be sued. Once we can identify posters with their national identification (666) number then the government can just eventually turn off their number so they can't post to the Internet any more. I don't really like where this is headed, but I don't see any way around it, the Bible appears to be correct. My hope is that with KYC, the community can develop a self-policing system to blacklist certain repeat offenders (after much careful deliberation), so that it doesn't fall into the lap of the government and 666 number.

Additionally with out video KYC, there is no way to prevent whales from splitting their voting power to avoid any attempt to improve the otherwise what appears to be the insolubly broken voting algorithm by for example penalizing whales for colluding (and other reasons I will not mention because it would reveal some design improvements I am contemplating).

Let's consider orthogonally the way votes will be interpreted for rankings from the rewards paid due to voting, although they are as of writing unified in Steem.

The voting algorithm in Steem apportions a constant percentage debasement to the content producers and curators. In order to disincentivize voting for their own content (to pay themselves), my understanding from reading @theoretical and @akareyon, is Steem's algorithm pays more curation rewards to those with less stake who vote earlier on content (which presumes risk cost of not being able to predict which content will receive the most votes, thus encouraging voting for best content) and weighting the value of each normalized vote (on each instance of content) by the total number of normalized votes squared (on that instance), where normalized means an equal amount of voting power. Voting power is some composition of stake and recent voting frequency (refer to @theoretical and @dv8silencersteem for details).

The flaw in Steem's algorithm is whales nearly entirely control the rewards and ranking of content, because for example a whale with 1000 times more stake than an average minnow, will push content 100 (not 10 due to squared weighting) times higher in rewards and ranking than the votes of 100 average minnows. Additionally the higher ranked due to a whale's vote, the more exposure and votes the content will receive. Additionally there is the game theory opportunity for whales to collude in order to award themselves as curators and content benefactors, the maximum squared earnings bypassing the risk cost the earliness and squaring algorithms were intended to create. Also a side-effect of the squared weighting is that only a tiny fraction of the site's content is paid anything meaningful, although this is lauded by the Steem white paper as causing newbies to inaccurately access their earning potential and is intended to create a lottery gambling mentality (but how this can sustain and attract serious content producers isn't clear to me because favoritism non-meritocracies are not anti-fragile thus increase risk and discourage investment of time, effort, and other forms of capital).

Whereas, without a Sybil attack on signups defense, there is no way to alter the algorithm to limit whales since whales could split their stakes amongst many Sybil accounts to accomplish the same effects. Without Steem's earliness and squared weightings, minnows might still vote their conscience if voting to pay themselves is such a small ROI making it a PITA, but whales would surely develop automated bots to vote to pay themselves, because the potential extra income is significant to them (larger capital accepts lower fixed rate of compounded gains). And without a Sybil attack defense, there is no way to prevent whales from spliting their stake to escape any algorithm which attempts to prevent them from doing so.

Our solution is:

1. Prevent Sybil attacks on user accounts by ...
2. Forbid ...
3. Forbid voting with ...
4. Content continues earning rewards forever.

Thus the only way to earn ...

Since whales can't ...

To prevent dolphins (i.e. stake between minnows and whales) from voting for themselves  ...

Thus we can employ linear weighting of voting power ...

Due to the ...

A minimum transaction fee will be charged on transfers which is burned, so it offsets the debasement rate. As transaction demand increases, a greater percentage of the money supply will ... So eventually debasement is entirely offset by transaction fees and transaction fees can be reduced accordingly.

... Ranking is orthogonal to rewards, and each UI client will decide how it interprets votes to provide rankings. For example, like-minded heuristics may be employed.

Tokens may be transferred before they are ...

¹ Which much be less than the cost of buying a Facebook account. Note Facebook
  accounts have different market prices depending on if they are phone verified
  and the age of the account ...

Never underestimate the Larimer.  He probably already knows this and will just do it after he already on-boards all the users.  He probably knew it was a hard sell to do it in the beginning.  This is not a problem you solve resource free.