Topic: Steem pyramid scheme revealed - page 70. (Read 107064 times)

So as of yet, there is no economic model for serving bandwidth directly from the blockchain, because the serving nodes are not paid.

This is a significant issue because how do you pay them? If you take it from debasement, then how many do you decide to pay? It wouldn't be a market. If they charge users fees, then the white paper needs to remove the lie¹ about 0 transaction fees (although these wouldn't be transfer transactions). Besides there are transfer transaction fees when you transfer in STEEM due to the much higher level of debasement while holding STEEM (even for a short interval of time).

The other problem is who pays for the bandwidth for sending the data for witnesses to send to all these serving nodes. If the witness nodes send only to one or two serving nodes, then those have a privileged position. Again who decides how many serving nodes there should be. It isn't a market.

The solution obviously is the users must pay fees to the serving nodes, who then pay the witnesses to serve to them. The witnesses would raise their fees as necessary to limit the number of serving nodes they serve to, in order to maintain their performance attributes.

So if users have to pay fees to use the network, then their SP balance needs to be transferable, which is impossible in the current business model of free signup providing from free SP that is locked up until they earn 30 SP from site activity.

See the insoluble dilemma now?

(Obviously you can tell I've been thinking about how to make a superior clone)

Obviously they can probably just go with adhoc volunteerism short-term, but to really scale to millions of free signups they need to solve this.

The only solution I have been able to think of is that Steemit has to be monetarily incentivized and it must pay for this network serving cost so that users don't need to. But then Steemit, must address copyright compliance. This is the solution I am thinking of implementing for a clone of Steem+Steemit. Note I would replace the dysfunctional voting system (which will prevent Steemit from crossing the chasm away from its circle-jerk blockfantasy demographic) with something that isn't voting and works correctly to incentivize the highest quality content with sub-communities demographic targeting. And of course others can create other serving sites to compete with the original one, but the users will have to pay on those. Eventually all users will have to pay for network bandwidth. There is no way around that but hopefully a revenue model can pay that such as some sublime (inconspicuous and unobtrusive) advertising. The main serving site can be funded by the blockchain during the initial phase of onboarding millions of free signup users.

Specifically I am contemplating a design with no debasement at all even if they are not locked up for 2 years. Much superior for investors. Superior for users also, but I will explain that later.

The irony that I had thought of in 2014 the concept of voting from debasement before (but not the 2 year lockup and STEEM vs. SP split) and dismissed it as dysfunctional (per my explanation yesterday). I had thought of in 2015 to incentivize free signups from Facebook and verifying they are real people. And I had thought of in 2015/16 this onboarding as necessary to create an ecosystem around my microtransactions blockchain design. But what I hadn't thought of until I saw Steemit in action was the ability to pull in new users because of the ease of creating blogging content and rewarding them monetarily. I hadn't thought of making the signed up users into content creators of that sort. I was thinking of them being more of sharers of content created by existing indie artists, e.g. music (which I still think is also a valid onboarding model as well).

Afaics (perhaps I am wrong?), Steemit is a copyright clusterfuck thus far. There are copyrighted images being used all over the site. The copyright holders will come extract blood from the Steemit Inc.

¹ That is another lie that I forgot to add to my recent blog posts "Lies about Steem and Steemit", with the word "lie" freaking out AlexGR.

Organization features like that are in development, starting I think with a feed of users that you follow (you can add users to your folllow list now, but it doesn't actually do anything).

Right now it is really just a firehose.

Or maybe because you made a thread attacking bimbos?  






I actually completely agree with these points. No one gets overtly jealous or hateful when they see someone's post getting a high # of upvotes on Reddit.. but you can clearly see it happening on Steem. Money changes everything and it will be interesting to see how these dynamics evolve when there is emotion is involved. As smart as the Steemit devs are, I don't think they have thought about all these factors that iamnotback mentioned.

However getting paid to post/blog is not a new concept, there was Bubblnews back in the day which was incredibly popular in Asia. I'm just hoping it grows significantly over the year before it's deemed unsustainable so my SP grows and I can cash out.


Also, to smooth or anyone who may have a say in Steemit... please update how everything is organized and categorized. I actually kind of hate the layout right now. It's hard to find a specific community or like-minded people to discuss certain topics with. No matter where I navigate to I always end up at the trending posts, which are personal intros or blogs 90% of the time and have nothing to do with what I'm actually looking for. Which again leads me to question whether Steemit is meant to be a personal blog or something akin to Reddit... at the moment it seems like a personal blog, as these are the highest paid posts and these posts are giving incentive to others to post the same way.

There's also a Search option in Steemit but it's a generic google search, why would I want that? I want to be able to search "bitcoin" and see the threads about bitcoin that have been tagged "bitcoin". Right now if bitcoin is not one of the options in the select topic drop down then I'm out of luck. I'm guessing these are all works in progress

Downvotes effectively cost you money. Every vote (up or down) reduces your voting power which means when you downvote and then subsequently upvote something else, the positive effect of the upvote is weakened.

This mechanism is quite hidden so it may not have much effect on behavior.

You learn some strange psychological things going on with this Steem platform.  For instance, I had 165 upvotes for a post and 2 downvotes.  I decided to look up and investigate who the two downvoters were thinking it might be some crazed Eth shill like Minecache...nope, two bimbos.  I have a feeling they downvoted solely because it was content on the front page they weren't interested in and wanted it replaced by mindless things like pictures of rainbows, cats, American Idol, etc.

I typically don't downvote anything, I just upvote the things I think are interesting.  I would downvote if it was just a spam attack like ASDFAFDSF, but these bimbos basically use a hivemind approach to launch attacks against anyone who doesn't cater to their vapid desires.  I'd like to hear what Anonymint thinks about this.  People who only upvote on posts they like and never downvote versus people who attack vote and the game theory surrounding it.  I haven't done a thorough investigation of all the incentives yet to figure out the outcome of all this.  I seem to recall there being incentive to not down vote just for the hell of it to screw with people.

I imagine if this thing was actually big with tons and tons of users, getting paid for a post would be rare and I think huge attack voting would occur and everything would resemble a Youtube rap video with 5000 likes and 5000 dislikes, then the game theory might change to where everyone is forced to attack vote.  I definitely need to put more time in studying this system.

this is so epic

https://steemit.com/steem/@dan/response-to-coindesk-article-steem-provokes-doubt-of-market-observers

That users are not particularly interested in cashing out relatively small, retail if you will, amounts of SP. They may not be for many years or even decades (of course assuming the platform becomes very successful, otherwise it goes to zero and none of this matters).

Once you get into the long term, the 2 year window can be largely ignored. There is pressure to enter and pressure to exit, with price determined by the balance between them. There is no possible clarity about how that balance looks in distant future.

Witness nodes don't serve data to users. They just sign blocks. They're run locked down without any user-facing services.

User data is provided by API servers, similar to Electrum nodes. Anyone can run one. Whether that becomes a paid service (or similarly one provided by app sellers to their users) remains to be seen.

Most of the content is pretty small anyway. As discussed a few comments back, it is just text and links. Embedded media is external. The bandwidth requirements for a full node will be high due to the size of the blockchain, but one such node will be able to serve many, many users with relatively little bandwidth per user.

Can the blockchain handle every user downloading the content in real-time from the witness nodes  

That would explode the bandwidth requirements. Also probably open the witness nodes to DDoS attacks. You must have some replication nodes then are users going to pay them with per access fees?

What point were you trying to make in text I had quoted?

I think I had made the point upthread that eventually those who have powered up, will eventually want to start cashing out their weekly amount. The illusion of printing money out of thin air is possible while most everyone of significance is powering up.

I agree if there is a lot of demand to enter Steem at that juncture, then the selling pressure can be absorbed. I think my point was there would be shift at some point in the future to more selling whereas right now we have apparently mostly powering up.

Once you've started the powering down, you aren't likely to revert because you'd reset the 104 week delay.

That question doesn't even make sense to me.

Some users will want to exit later. If it is successful others will want to enter. I don't know which will be the stronger force over which timescale. If it isn't successful it will go to zero.

Even if it is linked externally, Steemit serving the links could be liable for using copyrighted content in their business. Although it is on the Steem blockchain, Steemit doesn't have to serve the (embedded links to the) content. They should implement a copyright compliance team. Steemit is a centralized entity and thus is liable.

That is unless the user is downloading a client and the user is deciding which content from the blockchain the user wishes to request and view.

Can someone please tell me how much money Steem has given away to bloggers thus far? I want to compute an estimate of their acquisition cost per signup. That cost is all the money they are paying out to bloggers.

I want to compare with the typical acquisition cost for other social networks.

Hehe, you were sleepy also. Hope readers understand that is what happens when we work too many consecutive hours. I did several 24 hour work sessions over the past week. Was necessary because the several guys who wrote the Steem whitepaper didn't bother to explain all the metrics to us. So we had to go figure this out from scratch, what they had been thinking about for many months or year or more.

Tangent out (not addressed to smooth), I'll know I am getting healthy when I can do longer marathon sessions than the younger guys (not there yet). I'm awake 18 hours now and just finished an intense 2 hour gym workout about 2 hours earlier. I'm sleepy right now, but I also feel ... I better not say...

smooth, I think you are trying to argue here that there won't be a lot of SP stored up to dump later?

At least the Steemit blockchain is actually storing content, like it is designed to do.(The other stuff is a convoluted Rube Goldberg machine. But that's beside the point.) So how are those wonderful smart contracts and Dapps doing? Also, why are there now ETH and ETC? I thought their community was in almost unanimous support of the hardfork. Go take your FUD, and post it in one of the ETH ETC threads.There are certainly enough of them around here to choose from. BTW, please tell your ETH buddies to stop spamming Stemit with their ETH hype. It's getting annoying.

You are a glass-half-full type of guy, aren't you?

Steem is nothing more than a pump and dump. For those fools who bought it I feel bad. If you simply made Steem on steemit then little lost.

Purgatory is where spam merchants belong. I think Dante said that.

The Steemit Gestapo are on it. MasterYoda is being heavily downvoted, and it appears he does make citations. Too bad MasterYoda  powered up. He'll have to just put up with it for two long years. Wonder how many others will get fed up with Steemit and have to hang out in purgatory for two years?

The amount of articles reposted without citations is pretty ridiculous.