Topic: Steem pyramid scheme revealed - page 74. (Read 107058 times)

LOL, as if my tiny 1-2% stake even gets me a seat at the table.

If they manage to make a success of it I stand to do well, but I have zero say about anything. Probably quite a few things would be different if I did, but I don't so I'm just a passive investor like (almost) everyone else.

Carrying on from my prior post...

Furthermore, please note that the Steem white paper's claim there are no transaction fees is an obfuscation of the truth (i.e. it is a lie). Users need STEEM and/or SP stake in order to send any data to the blockchain, i.e. stake-weighted bandwidth limits. The stake holders vote on delegates who then vote on the choice of amount of dilution of the money supply in order to pay the various nodes in the system which validate and maintain the blockchain.

Since this dilution of the money supply debasing the value of the STEEM and/or SP holdings of the user, then this is analogous to paying a transaction fee. The difference is that if the users were paying transaction fees, we could have a competitive market of competing aggregators (e.g. steemit.com) which the users are paying, instead of Dan, Ned, and smooth deciding for the users how much to pay the various nodes (thus kickbacks, overpaying, and all sorts of corruption possible not to mention being very vulnerable to legal action from the government and/or RIAA). Worse is even if the user is not using the system, their stake is continuously being debased! It is not a meritocracy!

This is why people are stating that users will need to periodically buy more stake with outside currency, if they don't earn enough from blogging, because the Steem system is debasing them continuously. So there is no advantage over transactions fees (except for not needing to validate a microtransaction each time a user votes) and some severe disadvantages. I am telling you all that the Graphene blockchain design is not sufficient. I didn't waste the past year or more fixing Satoshi's design and not choosing to adopt Dan's DPoS, because I am an idiot. I did that, because I can see that DPoS is a dead-end direction.

We covered upthread and the other Steem threads, that the insiders' 80% of the money supply (stake) "pre"-mine is not going to be diluted much faster than 10% yearly (and even that 10% is assuming they don't use their voting power to further concentrate their stake), because we were able to compute from the published blockchain data that the attrition rate of new signups is roughly 80% and thus the majority of the 40% portion of the "pre"-mine allocated to giving away to new signups, will become abandoned and thus removed from the effective money supply.

CoinHoarder, this is what I mean when I say Dan always produces designs which are socialism or top-down collectivism, instead of true decentralization and maximum degrees-of-freedom+resilience. I always know he will do this. It is something in the way his brain works which AnonyMint observed back in 2013 in our discussion/debates on this BCT forum.

I think STEEM is good idea. But I think the price is BS WAY over-valued!!!

You did. I was thinking of your post when I wrote the post you are replying to. I don't forget things that easily.


But those will exist only with approval of Dan and Ned who control which features get added to the Steem blockchain as I wrote:


They are subsidizing the cost of running Steemit.com with their whale sized stakes in Steem.


You can't separate the two, per my reiteration above.

The government or RIAA can sue or force Dan, Ned, and smooth to do what ever. There is no permissionless resilence here. This is the problem with a proof-of-stake blockchain. I dare say it isn't even a blockchain, but rather a distributed corporate database.

It would be very difficult if not impossible to make a competitor which is actually a decentralized system, because of the need for all users to see all the changes on the blockchain. My design for an improvement to Satoshi's design, hinges on the fact that users don't need to see the transactions of all other users all the time.

Although the site was accessible and people could post, vote, and comment, no payouts occurred until July 4. Many people probably thought it was a fraud or would fail by then, or just have no users. When the payouts were made and many people actually got money in their hands, interest in the platform increased enormously.

They are making money from months and months then why the sudden pump ? don't you think it should have been a breaking news then ?

If you have the time to post ,try it. But don't buy steem at these prices.

I could have sworn I posted this just a few hours ago: https://steemit.com/piston/@xeroc/piston-web-first-open-source-steem-gui---searching-for-alpha-testers

If Steem is successful there will be many clients, not just these. Steemit has said they are planning to open source the web portion of their client "soon".

Control of stake is another issue, and probably a more valid criticism.

smooth et al, please check my logic on this.

I am thinking that steemit.com (and not the users) communicates with the 19 delegates (witnesses) for the DPoS Graphene blockchain. I believe this is why when steemit's servers were recently DDoS attacked, the blockchain was not successfully DDoS attacked, because those witness nodes can easily filter a DDoS attack since they know they will only be interfacing with steemit.com's servers (IP addresses) most of the time. Also with 19 of them, they each only need to absorb 1/19th of a DDoS attack.

But the problem is that I presume steemit.com is not sending all the blockchain transactions to the users for the users's computers to validate client side, thus the users are completely dependent on steemit.com to send them correct data. Meaning steemit.com could influence the rankings that users see and thus the votes that users sign client side. Thus really steemit.com is a centralized controller in the process.

So it almost seems pointless to put all that data on the Steem blockchain because users have to trust an aggregator such as steemit.com. We can argue that users could choose between different aggregators as a justification. But it almost seems pointless because the Steem blockchain is controlled by stake which is controlled by a few insiders who elect the 19 delegate witness that validate the blockchain, so in essence the features that get added to the blockchain will be the ones that benefit closed source steemit the most, if there are competing aggregators. Think about it. Nobody is paying steemit.com anything, so what is paying for it.

In short, the entire thing is a farce. It is just a distributed corporation in the form of key stakeholders. Thus really if the RIAA wants to sue, they can just name the top stakeholders, since these people control all of this system.

I think it is nearly impractical (implausible) to build a truly decentralized blockchain system that needs to aggregate all the data from all users periodically and distribute to all users, and remain scalable to 10,000s of transactions per second while also remaining persmissionless.

Making sure this sticks around.

And now I get 404 errors and unknown account errors when I try to go my account--that's some coincidence.

@smooth, if I need you to witness for account recovery I'll contact you by way of the stone quarry company's shareholder's hotline number. Risto has a secret message only he and I know, so he can verify further if you have doubts. Doubt it is needed , but just in case.

The best thing to do is have a verifiable introducemyself post. If you look at them, you'll see if you can tell a story about yourself with words and images, that you humanize yourself for the reader and people are more likely to give to someone they can empathize with--plus there's an incentive to bring new users into the site and the motivated upvoters know this. Also, technical backgrounds seem to do as well as a cute face and boobs, so if you have one, nerd it up.

After that it's really a matter if you content creation is your thing or curation or a mix--feel like there should be moderation incentives, but don't think there are (and look at the above post for why).

The problem with steemit is that posts are way too long, most people nowadays don't bother reading long stories they want to consume the most content in the least amount of time.

Btw I made 5k by posting fake intro post, I created 4 bogus profil, took photos of travel and stuff from facebook wrote a few things and made over 1000$ per post on average, some users asked me some proof which i ignored. Only thing i had to do was to order 5 sim ( in UK u can get as much as you want) so yeah pretty good site

That article is very myopic:


What he means is that the content is public on the blockchain and is not owned by anyone. Anyone can use that data from the blockchain.

But he fails to understand that the value of a social network is not its content, but its users ongoing use of the site due to their investment in the communities of the site.


He fails to understand that indie content can be a lot more interesting and precisely targeted to smaller audiences (coteries) than Hollywood content.

And indie artists do give away free promos on their work in order to upsell other work or paraphernalia.

Indie artists often jam with their fans so they are in tune with what to create. Also they iterate in smaller morsels, and get feedback along the way.

Putting some content on the blockchain, doesn't mean creators have to put all their content on the blockchain.

I had joined steemit and made a couple of articles and am wondering is it still viable to post there and make a little extra income or is the system rigged in favor of certain writers? I see mixed feedback primarily negative now but want more info from those successfully using it.

That's even worse as facebook is a data whore, which pickpockets marketing data on your way out the door,

"Excuse me Madam, did you see my wallet?"

Pulling up her stockings, "We, no! But might you be interested in a fine gold watch?"

"No, thanks -- If you'll just kindly give back my ID, I'll go."

As far as payouts go, you can't have it both ways. Users can't simultaneously hate the payout scheme and not care about it. They can act like both, but the reality is a degree of one or the other.

If they are the 1.3 billion from Facebook, they aren't likely using Reddit either with its 0.16 billion usership. There are so many different things that users can do on Facebook. Steem is so one-feature-wonder.

And my point is the monetary payouts are not important to most users (because they aren't significant).

The concept of Steem has some upside, but fully leveraging the conceptual model is going to require a lot more development work.

While I don't necessarily disagree with this analysis, I think it's too specific. I want to see exit polling data. From the few rage quit posts I've read, it sound like the same threatening tone of #7: https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@generalizethis/a-shitcoiner-s-guide-to-shitcoin-logic

Are they seriously abandoning their account to make comments on reddit that will never earn them a cent or collect curator rewards on another site that doesn't yet exist? Steemit is the only game in town (that pays in something other than karma hugs) and likely the payout today will increase over time if the site is successful--so either these people are irrational or full of shit.

There are plenty of metrics that could help measure this, but I'd like to see the stats for incoming and outgoing users who have validated their account--these are people who are serious and who you can be fairly sure are real--though I did see a couple of guys with more than one introduceyourself post yesterday (some will try to game this as everyone knows this is where good money is being focused, and with good reason).

It is a lot of work to create a social networking site with a rich enough feature set to attract users outside of some highly motivated demographic.

Looks to me that Steem is getting mostly people who know someone affiliated with blockchains and/or are trend followers and early adopters of new ways to make money online.

To cross that chasm to be able to have viral spread of any user on facebook, requires you have a much more rich feature set than Steem has now. Most users would come to Steem and not find any thing interesting to them, nor any activity they are interested to do.

It is not easy and they have a lot of work ahead of them.

And any competitor will have huge amount of work ahead and catch up.

And there is no guarantee of gaining mass adoption. It is not clear that this model of paying most users nearly nothing and a few others large rewards adds anything to social networking that users really want and need.

I am thinking will need more enticement to cross the chasm. People basically use social networking for relationships and other things that interest and entertain them. The activity value is probably more important than any payout, unless you can really replace their day job, but can you with this model?

The model that might work is the professional bloggers earn a great income on the site, then the other users come there for them and the community. But so far, I don't see what sort of trend developing on Steem, but it is early still.

Alternate/sybil account.

You guys got me. What is an 'alt'? I infer it means insider, but why name it 'alt'? Edit: you must be mean multiple alternative accounts for the same insiders.


Agreed the blockchain specifics can hypothetically be improved over time. The most important for Steem (and any competitor) is the usership adoption and qualities of the community building and content. The blockchain aspect is important for the network effects which requires decentralization, etc, but that isn't the highest priority out of the gate. First priority is prove their enough usership value to kickstart the ecosystem. Note network effects could accelerate usership, but they are not usually impactful immediately on launch.

"blocktrades" is not an alt, it is an identified person/business who has done work for Steemit as a contractor. Obviously "dan" is a founder, but I wouldn't' call it an "alt" of steemit (there are other well-known founder accounts). There rest are indeed alts that they identified as such during the launch.