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Topic: Steem pyramid scheme revealed - page 75. (Read 107064 times)

legendary
Activity: 1092
Merit: 1000
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legendary
Activity: 2968
Merit: 1198
July 24, 2016, 11:12:14 PM
The 50,000 Steem Dollar question on everyone's mind is weather or not STEEM will become more "unstoplable" like Ethereum Classic, or more centralized like Ethereum Core.

For the most part no one (with a few exceptions) is even asking that question. The 50K SD question is whether enough users will sign up to make it worth caring. That was the real issue with Bitshares as far as I can tell, not whether it had the right number of delegates or not. No users = no one cares = number of delegates doesn't matter.
sr. member
Activity: 336
Merit: 265
July 24, 2016, 11:04:24 PM
Correct, Dan knew that we could only afford 20 miners at first, but when the community grows, so will the miners.

...

When DPOS grows, so will the number of miners.

Is that correct  Huh

As Steem grows it will have more users and more bandwidth requirements.

The cost of DPoS is 0(n2) where n is number of nodes because all transactions must be relayed to all nodes. So you can't scale the miners to help scale the bandwidth. That is precisely my point the Graphene isn't really scalable.

That was the most significant design issue that I had to solve in my design. If you pass all transactions around to all nodes, you can't scale decentralized because the communication load scales quadratically in number of nodes. But if you don't pass all transactions to all nodes then you break Nash equilibrium. But I think I found a solution to that.
sr. member
Activity: 336
Merit: 265
July 24, 2016, 10:57:48 PM
The funny part is, Anonymint is worried about some parts of this thing being unworkable when Larimer broke literally every single social contract possible in Bitshares.  If you are required to slap yourself in the face 10 times to log in to make this thing functional and keep going, that is what Larimer is going to hard fork it to.  The entire thing could be completely different or wiped at any day.  It's possible Larimer himself taught Vitalik how to hard fork.

The disabling of signups was done on Steemit, but signups continued on Steem blockchain.

They are hardforking Steem on the 26th to disable liquidity rewards as that was being gamed.

They are also changing some of other block chain protocols on the 26th.

But they do say it is still in Beta.

I agreed with your other post about DPoS being vulnerable to centralized.
legendary
Activity: 1260
Merit: 1000
July 24, 2016, 10:52:35 PM
The funny part is, Anonymint is worried about some parts of this thing being unworkable when Larimer broke literally every single social contract possible in Bitshares.  If you are required to slap yourself in the face 10 times to log in to make this thing functional and keep going, that is what Larimer is going to hard fork it to.  The entire thing could be completely different or wiped at any day.  It's possible Larimer himself taught Vitalik how to hard fork.
sr. member
Activity: 336
Merit: 265
July 24, 2016, 10:48:37 PM
15 - 20% stickiness I think would actually be okay. We have to see if that is the case longer-term...

https://blog.kissmetrics.com/9-metrics/

Users    1 Million +

At its peak, the social network was processing more than 30,000 signup requests an hour. It is estimated that 20% of sign ups remain active on the site one week after registration.

In October 2014, Ello reorganized itself as a benefit corporation and raised a further $5.5 million in venture capital.

At 3000 signups per day with 20% retention, Steem will require ~5 years to reach only a million uses.

It has to be able to cross the chasm from its one-degree of relation to a Blocknerd to a viral mass audience if you want to see it break out beyond Bitcoin's audience significantly.
legendary
Activity: 1260
Merit: 1000
July 24, 2016, 10:45:04 PM
I also have my doubts about whether DPoS is scalable without being centralized.

The quantity of delegates obviously has to be high enough to prevent ease of collusion.  When Larimer was originally trying to change this number to 20 in Bitshares, I was like..wtf?  Are you serious?  20 people can collude easily.  Nearly everyone thought it was a horrible idea, but he was hell bent on making the system a "profitable DAC" over anything else.  It is best not to consider Bitshares a decentralized system, but the first bucket shop without a single point of failure.  Steem is essentially the same thing except a non-single point of failure Reddit hybrid.  It's not a decentralized currency or anything.  

There would need to be something like the original 101 delegate number or more to be considered remotely decentralized.  I'm not exactly a Vitalik fanboy or anything (obviously), but I think he considers this number needed to be around 1001.
sr. member
Activity: 336
Merit: 265
July 24, 2016, 10:31:06 PM
One strategy might be to signup as many free 10 SP accounts

The free offer is "$10 worth of SP" (i.e. 3 SP at present) not 10 SP. The 10 SP may have been the offer at one time but not any more.

Ah I see. So the point remains that users need to want to stay on the site, else they will have many abandoned 3 SP accounts.

No doubt. Of course nothing prevents those users from coming back later to claim the accounts if the value goes up. There is no maintenance cost to idle accounts that don't use bandwidth.

See the edit on my prior post.

Price going up doesn't help them reach 30 SP easier. Actually it may become more difficult as more bloggers will be competing.

By claim, I meant use, not come back just for the cashout. You are still viewing this from a crypto coin perspective where it is all about getting at those coins (like a rat killing itself pressing the button hoping that coins will come out of the chute) not a social media perspective.

If Steem becomes very popular then people who signed up early but stopped using it will probably want to come back. This applies even with no rewards at all. I signed up for twitter very early but never used it for years until it became popular.

I knew what you meant and my point is it won't easier for them to get their 30 SP at that point, so they may not be motivated to stay after they come back.

Also many will forget/lose their password.

I think we can estimate the attrition rate by combining these two resources:

https://steemd.com/distribution
https://steemle.com/charts.php (Account creations per day)

So I count 6895 account creations past 7 days. So we can see that (13,062 - 6895) ÷ (34,175 - 6895) = 22% remain active. So the attrition rate appears to be over 80%. Appear to be very close to the computation of those who didn't reach power down level.

Edit: the data is here that 29k of 34k (85%) have not reached power down level and majority (of them or new signups?) were not active in the last 7 days:

https://steemd.com/distribution

15 - 20% stickiness I think would actually be okay. We have to see if that is the case longer-term. But it also means that most of the free giveaway will probably end up abandoned, so the argument that it is diluting the insiders is probably not entirely correct.
legendary
Activity: 2968
Merit: 1198
July 24, 2016, 10:24:21 PM
One strategy might be to signup as many free 10 SP accounts

The free offer is "$10 worth of SP" (i.e. 3 SP at present) not 10 SP. The 10 SP may have been the offer at one time but not any more.

Ah I see. So the point remains that users need to want to stay on the site, else they will have many abandoned 3 SP accounts.

No doubt. Of course nothing prevents those users from coming back later to claim the accounts if the value goes up. There is no maintenance cost to idle accounts that don't use bandwidth.

See the edit on my prior post.

Price going up doesn't help them reach 30 SP easier. Actually it may become more difficult as more bloggers will be competing.

By claim, I meant use, not come back just for the cashout. You are still viewing this from a crypto coin perspective where it is all about getting at those coins (like a rat killing itself pressing the button hoping that coins will come out of the chute) not a social media perspective.

If Steem becomes very popular then people who signed up early but stopped using it will probably want to come back. This applies even with no rewards at all. I signed up for twitter very early but never used it for years until it became popular.
sr. member
Activity: 336
Merit: 265
July 24, 2016, 10:20:36 PM
One strategy might be to signup as many free 10 SP accounts

The free offer is "$10 worth of SP" (i.e. 3 SP at present) not 10 SP. The 10 SP may have been the offer at one time but not any more.

Ah I see. So the point remains that users need to want to stay on the site, else they will have many abandoned 3 SP accounts.

No doubt. Of course nothing prevents those users from coming back later to claim the accounts if the value goes up. There is no maintenance cost to idle accounts that don't use bandwidth.

See the edit on my prior post.

Price going up doesn't help them reach 30 SP easier. Actually it may become more difficult as more bloggers will be competing.
legendary
Activity: 2968
Merit: 1198
July 24, 2016, 10:14:13 PM
One strategy might be to signup as many free 10 SP accounts

The free offer is "$10 worth of SP" (i.e. 3 SP at present) not 10 SP. The 10 SP may have been the offer at one time but not any more.

Ah I see. So the point remains that users need to want to stay on the site, else they will have many abandoned 3 SP accounts.

No doubt. Of course nothing prevents those users from coming back later to claim the accounts if the value goes up. There is no maintenance cost to idle accounts that don't use bandwidth.

sr. member
Activity: 336
Merit: 265
July 24, 2016, 10:13:04 PM
#99
One strategy might be to signup as many free 10 SP accounts

The free offer is "$10 worth of SP" (i.e. 3 SP at present) not 10 SP. The 10 SP may have been the offer at one time but not any more.

Ah I see. So the point remains that users need to want to stay on the site, else they will have many abandoned 3 SP accounts.

Edit: the data is here that 29k of 34k (85%) have not reached power down level and majority (of them or new signups?) were not active in the last 7 days:

https://steemd.com/distribution
legendary
Activity: 2968
Merit: 1198
July 24, 2016, 10:10:17 PM
#98
One strategy might be to signup as many free 10 SP accounts

The free offer is "$10 worth of SP" (i.e. 3 SP at present) not 10 SP. The 10 SP may have been the offer at one time but not any more.
sr. member
Activity: 336
Merit: 265
July 24, 2016, 09:44:30 PM
#97
I want to explore if Sybil attacking the signups is viable.

Who sets the minimum and how is it computed? Will it decline from 3?

Sybil attacking depends on the measures used by whoever it is who is paying for the account with their Steem. If you are getting your account from the steemit web site, they have various rules about social media accounts, IP addresses, etc. I'm sure they can all be bypassed, but that may or may not be worth it for $10 of value that has further restrictions on liquidating it (and these rules can all be changed if it becomes a problem; nothing at all is promised when it comes to free accounts). The minimum to power down is not the primary obstacle to milking the free accounts, but it does reduce the incentive somewhat, so other barriers can be a bit lower, inconveniencing legitimate users less.

The minimum is set by witness vote. Might decline, might increase. There is no set rule. It is possible the minimum might at some point not be sufficient to actually use the network much if at all, since bandwidth scarcity could increase the amount of SP needed. That depends on a number of things including usage, technology, etc.

My point is that it has to be difficult to reach the power down level, else it can pay to Sybil attack. So while 10 free with 30 power down threshold might be borderline for the attacker, it must also not be too easy for average users to hit that level unless they stay on the site for a while, else the Sybil attack may become viable by arbitraging the labor costs in the Africa. I don't yet know what the attrition rate is even though I've asked for that data numerous times. Surely with your resources, you would want to know. I assume Dan and Ned know, but they aren't telling us apparently.

If the witnesses vote to fork the protocol to block the accounts, that would be equivalent to Ethereum hard forking to stop the DAO attacker. It would mean it is not a blockchain that can be trusted to honor its own rules.

One strategy might be to signup as many free 10 SP accounts as you can using harvested Facebook accounts, then set up bots to earn curation rewards and/or hire cheap blogging labor to raise them up to 30 SP, you can power them down. I've seen phone verified Facebook accounts for as low as 80 cents, but I think you could create them much cheaper than that. For example, here in the Philippines you could probably buy mobile phone numbers for as low as 20 cents each (maybe half that in bulk, especially stolen ones). At 30 SP threshold it appears borderline, but at 20 SP, I think it would become very viable. I bet you can find decent bloggers in Africa who can emulate the popular posts, for perhaps a few bucks per successful blog. They could invent interesting life stories, use photos of others on the Internet, doctor them with Photoshop to paint Steemit on their Tshirt, etc..

Bandwidth costs less than $10 per terabyte. It is costing more on Graphene because Graphene is not the best design we can do (for example on Graphene then all delegate miners have to validate all transactions so O(N2) bandwidth cost where N is number mining nodes). So if a competitor comes along to challenge Steem with a better cost model for transactions, then game over because users don't like to pay to use social networks and if they can't earn fast enough to cover their bandwidth allocation, then they leave for the technology that can.

I haven't done analysis yet to determine if paying for comments is worthwhile.

In practice the main effect is to sprinkle a little rewards around to a lot of people. I doubt anyone will make a living as a professional commenter, but who knows.

Those who have a financial or "SP as karma level" incentive to comment, are those who aren't successful at earning from blogging.

So that might true if we end up with more professional bloggers and their flock or followers earning some karma from commenting and post curating.

What if they earn less from commenting than their bandwidth allowance cost.  Sad
sr. member
Activity: 336
Merit: 265
July 24, 2016, 09:12:56 PM
#96
The focus seems to be very short-term pumpy-dumpy, instead of long-term focused.

Think outside the box. man.

It's not about more boring fucking "social media" for professional slackers.

They are jumpstarting a currency with 3 sec confirmation, 500,000 tx/second blockchain...
The "blogging platform" giveaway is just a Trojan Horse to build the user base to, say, 100,000 in 6-12 months...
Then you can build ANYTHING that requires micropayments on Steemit... any market of any kind that moves real money.

It's not a pump...
Some people are actually serious about "world domination" = mainstream cryptocurrency...
And retiring that embarrassing geezer Bitcoin... and the incoherent, schizophrenic Ethereum.  

Think big, man.

Yeah I realized that long before Steem was announced (I been devising similar plans over the past months for launching a microtransactions block chain with social networking):

Quote from: iamnotback
The only reason to be bullish that I can see is if you think the demand for STEEM will increase. And the only reason I can find for that which makes any sense to me, is if the transactions involving STEEM will increase to $billions per year. That is a very big if.

Agree somewhat. SP as buying access to the network may or may not also be significant...

I have at least two retorts.

1. 100,000 users is not enough to scale up a microtransactions ecosystem. You need many millions. And I don't know if they can cross the chasm:

It is not clear yet if Steem can cross the chasm from gfs of blockchain nerds being coaxed by their bfs to post on Steem, to a wider demographic. Remember Beyonce and professional investors measure importance in terms of the demographic's global share of the population. Blockchain nerds and their bitches isn't likely a very large share of the population.

2. I am not confident that their Graphene blockchain is entirely adequate (it may be okay for some use cases but who knows maybe not for the most important use case that is discovered):

I think the structure can be improved so that:

  • A superior, scalable microtransaction blockchain design which is my improvement on Satoshi's PoW blockchain (i.e. not proof-of-stake), so as to give a valid use case for transactions that can't be done (nor scaled) with credit cards nor Bitcoin. Note although Graphene (Steem's blockchain) claims 3 seconds per block confirmation speed, this may not be fast enough for real-time gamification transactions (who wants to pause for more than 3 probably 5+ seconds every time they need to access some resource). I also have my doubts about whether DPoS is scalable without being centralized. Also I have my doubts about the reliability of DPoS when pushing for faster transactions, because it depends on only one delegate validator per block (perhaps this could be improved but game theory issues will arise unless it is essentially a centralized, corporate run blockchain and in which case you don't need a blockchain, just run a corporate database?).

    Note proof-of-stake would be retained for some aspects such as voting power and rate-limiting.
legendary
Activity: 1588
Merit: 1000
July 24, 2016, 08:43:15 PM
#95
The focus seems to be very short-term pumpy-dumpy, instead of long-term focused.

Think outside the box. man.

It's not about more boring fucking "social media" for professional slackers.

They are jumpstarting a currency with 3 sec confirmation, 500,000 tx/second blockchain...
The "blogging platform" giveaway is just a Trojan Horse to build the user base to, say, 100,000 in 6-12 months...
Then you can build ANYTHING that requires micropayments on Steemit... any market of any kind that moves real money.

It's not a pump...
Some people are actually serious about "world domination" = mainstream cryptocurrency...
And retiring that embarrassing geezer Bitcoin... and the incoherent, schizophrenic Ethereum. 

Think big, man.

legendary
Activity: 2968
Merit: 1198
July 24, 2016, 08:38:03 PM
#94
I want to explore if Sybil attacking the signups is viable.

Who sets the minimum and how is it computed? Will it decline from 3?

Sybil attacking depends on the measures used by whoever it is who is paying for the account with their Steem. If you are getting your account from the steemit web site, they have various rules about social media accounts, IP addresses, etc. I'm sure they can all be bypassed, but that may or may not be worth it for $10 of value that has further restrictions on liquidating it (and these rules can all be changed if it becomes a problem; nothing at all is promised when it comes to free accounts). The minimum to power down is not the primary obstacle to milking the free accounts, but it does reduce the incentive somewhat, so other barriers can be a bit lower, inconveniencing legitimate users less.

The minimum is set by witness vote. Might decline, might increase. There is no set rule. It is possible the minimum might at some point not be sufficient to actually use the network much if at all, since bandwidth scarcity could increase the amount of SP needed. That depends on a number of things including usage, technology, etc.

Quote
I haven't done analysis yet to determine if paying for comments is worthwhile.

In practice the main effect is to sprinkle a little rewards around to a lot of people. I doubt anyone will make a living as a professional commenter, but who knows.
sr. member
Activity: 336
Merit: 265
July 24, 2016, 08:27:01 PM
#93
earn the minimum 100 SP to initiate power down

It isn't 100 SP minimum, it is 10x the minimum account balance. Currently that is 10x3 SP = 30 SP. Natural growth in SP counts, as does reductions in the minimum (applies retroactively to older accounts). I think most of these will end up being redeemable, though I don't know what percentage of users will actually do so.

Please explain more in detail. I want to explore if Sybil attacking the signups is viable.

Who sets the minimum and how is it computed? Will it decline from 3?

The attitude of the social media userbase is very different from the crypto user base in terms of not being so focused on getting the SP money out. Looking at SP as influence and karma (especially when received free and/or earned rather than purchased as speculation) rather than being a coin at all is a perspective that is under-appreciated from the crypto side.

Yes and that is why I think a better design is don't pay bloggers any STEEM. Only SP.

Bloggers should be long-term invested, not extractors (like myself?).

Also, as the the user base has grown, the ways to earn have grown as well. For example, most non-retarded comments are getting upvotes now, which is a big change from the previous status quo of typically 0 votes per comment. Maybe it is only a few cents in most cases ($1 not terribly uncommon) but it is better than nothing, especially since people may most many comments per day.

I haven't done analysis yet to determine if paying for comments is worthwhile.
legendary
Activity: 2968
Merit: 1198
July 24, 2016, 08:13:25 PM
#92
earn the minimum 100 SP to initiate power down

It isn't 100 SP minimum, it is 10x the minimum account balance. Currently that is 10x3 SP = 30 SP. Natural growth in SP counts, as does reductions in the minimum (applies retroactively to older accounts). I think most of these will end up being redeemable, though I don't know what percentage of users will actually do so.

The attitude of the social media userbase is very different from the crypto user base in terms of not being so focused on getting the SP money out. Looking at SP as influence and karma (especially when received free and/or earned rather than purchased as speculation) rather than being a coin at all is a perspective that is under-appreciated from the crypto side.

Also, as the the user base has grown, the ways to earn have grown as well. For example, most non-retarded comments are getting upvotes now, which is a big change from the previous status quo of typically 0 votes per comment. Maybe it is only a few cents in most cases ($1 not terribly uncommon) but it is better than nothing, especially since people may most many comments per day.
sr. member
Activity: 336
Merit: 265
July 24, 2016, 07:51:10 PM
#91
Hard evidence no in terms of validated demographics? No, especially since it is hard to tell whether new users are Bitcoin users are not without them mentioning it, but it is pretty apparent to me that many of the new users are not Bitcoin users. Answering their questions about how to get their payments out (they have often never heard of Bittrex, Poloniex, Coinbase, etc.) makes that pretty clear for example.

But you don't know if their bfs are blocknerds who have been mentioning Bitcoin for years.

I saw many blogs explaining that females were coaxed into it by their Bitcoin bfs. It is like they get to make their bfs happy and make themselves some cash at same time. But what about the ladies who signed up and only earned 3 pennies. Do we hear from them?

Of course some are that, but not all. Many ages and backgrounds are represented. The apparent demographics are just much wider than Bitcoiners.

Once it gets large enough that real studies can be done I'm sure we'll see better numbers. Or we'll see that growth plateaus once people one-degree away from Bitcoin are tapped out. That won't take long.

Bitcoiners have all ages and demographics one degree away from them.

True, but a story frequently told is that attempts to spread previous cryptos even that one degree also failed, but with Steemit they are succeeding. The real question will be whether it can spread more than one degree or is getting uptake outside of crypto altogether, and I do think there is at least some of the latter (former is entirely unknown, at least to me). Though even just a high acceptance rate at one degree still beats previous crypto by some factor. Overall we don't know yet. The site has really only been live (meaning payouts, and the explosive user growth) for three weeks.

Agreed on all that.

I'd be more bullish if it was truly open source. I think open source could quickly race past closed source.

I'd be more bullish if they weren't penalizing long-term investors who buy in from the outside.

I'd be more bullish if they weren't using a quadratic (super-linear, sub-quadratic might be sufficient motivation) payout to try to trick users into overestimating what they can earn from the site, and instead were more forthcoming about the potential revenue users can earn. The focus seems to be very short-term pumpy-dumpy, instead of long-term focused. The design pisses off the bulk of your signups (unless they are one-degree from blocknerds in which case they probably happy even if they earned very little), it "pre"-mine 80% (which is probably reducing at only about 10% per year if most signups end up abandoned accounts because can't earn the minimum 100 SP to initiate power down), forces long-term investors to lockup for 2 years (1 year weighted price)...
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