What is Steem?
First off, Steem is a trifling name. Every time I try to talk about Steem with someone they bring up the video game service Steam. If Steemit Inc. goes under can we agree to rebrand like Nano did with RaiBlocks?
Secondly, as far as Steemit Inc. is concerned, how do we know that ned hasn't already decided to abandon ship and is simply buying some time to power down? If this was the case I would beg whales to dump their coins on the market in order to punish anyone else doing the same. Honestly I'm a bit surprised that this isn't happening already. There is plenty of panic in the market right now that would allow a single whale to create their own dip to buy.
In any case, as I've said before, Steemit Inc. is a crutch and we need to learn how to walk without them. The first step in the right direction is getting everyone on the same page about what we stand for and what we are capable of.
What is Steem?
Contrary to popular opinion, Steem is not social media. At its core, this blockchain is just that: a chain of blocks.
This is the foundation of our little experiment. Every three seconds a new block is created that points to the previous block. Each transaction in every block has been signed, proving that whoever put that transaction on the chain possessed a valid key for that operation. As you can see, social media has nothing to do with this blockchain at its core.
How did we get here?
Well, Steemit Inc. created Steem. How did they monetize it? By pre-mining it into the ground. They even forced a reset on the mining process because their hardware crashed in the middle of this little stunt. Many people would agree that this isn't exactly a fair way to start a blockchain, but options in this regard are quite limited. We may be thanking our lucky stars later that Steemit went this route and avoided ICO regulation as the SEC begins to crack down on projects that are out of compliance.
In the long run, it matters very little how centralized the coins were on the genesis blocks. As we are all learning the hard way, coins can only be spent once. This huge dip in the market automatically guarantees that coins en masse are migrating away from their original owners. Is this doomsday or a blessing in disguise? Only time will tell.
What makes Steem different?
Our blockchain allows for raw text to be written directly on a transaction. This is how Steemit was able to leverage Steem to create our ragtag social media outlet. Front-ends like steemit.com, busy.org, and steempeak.com interpret the text on the blocks and display it in a more organized way.
There are many aspects of our front-ends that have nothing to do with the blockchain. For example, we've all seen posts get buried by flags and censored by whales. How does the Steem blockchain know when someone's words deserve to be hidden? It doesn't. Our blockchain is totally unbiased. It's the front-end that decided what and what not to show.
This is also true of the trending tab. The trending tab does not exist on the blockchain, it is simply one interpretation derived from the blockchain. The same is true for reputation scores. If you think that we're incentivizing bad behavior like vote selling and censorship, the blockchain has nothing to do with it. These third-party front-ends are the problem; one that can be solved without any kind of fork to the actual core code.
Our blockchain can't become obsolete overnight. It would take years of stagnant development in order to lose its edge. As such, Steemit Inc. going under wouldn't be the worst thing in the world, especially considering that @utopian-io is attempting to expand and pay this community for valuable open-source development.
Mainlining Code
Even more importantly than raw text, we can embed custom JSON operations (JavaScript) directly into our blocks. In my opinion, this is the truly exciting thing about Steem. Any post on the Steem blockchain can attach code that could then be interpreted by a third-party application.
When you combine this feature with our governance model it becomes quite powerful. Transaction fees are paid out to the witnesses as a flat 10% inflation, allowing anyone to put information on our chain for free as long as they have the required credits.
In my opinion, this opportunity is being squandered by greed and a total lack of innovation. How many development hours have gone in to bid-bots and other services that only serve to devalue our currency in the long run? As bleak as that may sound, I believe a positive path forward will eventually be realized.
Community Cliche
As much as I hate to say it, our community makes us quite a bit different than other blockchains. Think about the other communities like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, etc. We have our own platform that allows (and even rewards) making connections with other people. Theoretically this gives us a significant edge in the long run as we scale up and make valuable applications.
However, too much emphasis seems to be placed on community. Community means nothing without governance. How can we come to consensus and agree on a set of rules that will implement positive and negative reinforcement? This is the big question everyone should be asking themselves. Our community means nothing if we can't figure out more solid ways to reward good behavior and punish bad actors.
Conclusion
At its core, our blockchain is much simpler than it appears to be from the outside looking in. When simplified down to the root, we see nothing but a synchronous list of timestamped operations. This is the beauty of blockchain technology. It starts with a simple idea but then cascades into the realm of limitless possibilities. Unfortunately, the waves of speculation and patience crash harder and faster than those rooted in actual fundamental development. Time is the greatest equalizer, especially in a culture bred for instant gratification. Patience is a virtue.
I wouldn't go that far. I think the community can mean a lot of things to a lot of people even if they don't know or don't care about using their Steem responsibly. Although, I think people will start to cooperate more once we get closer to zero. All the more reason to look forward to it and perhaps finally uncovering Steem's true potential.
I'm surprised "the community" hasn't taken the opportunity to discuss what governance means to us at this point. Although I'm not a big fan of governance in blockchains, the reason you have it in the first place is to fix issues. I don't really feel like my stake really means anything in terms of decision making around here. I'm sure the smaller and less established folks feel the same. I'd love to have a 730 SP vote on something that matters unlike the current witness scheme where the dead stake has more impact than me.
The sad fact is, this social site is what has made Steem unique so far. And despite all the talk I hear of decentralization, watching the fire as Ned has made his recent announcements has proven that most of those with the knowledge in making this chain become what is claimed it could be have done nothing other than make as much as they can off of Steemit.inc.
I have even wondered (it has gnawed at me since I joined) why Dan couldn't use his expertise (I mean, he wrote this and premined quite a bit) to create awesome projects away from Steemit.inc.
Many like myself got into crytpo because of Steemit, and problems it addressed like avoiding exchanges, wallet security etc. I further ask, if this site dies, what exactly is that proving is possible to potential further apps?
Further questions:
If this site dies, what becomes of the Steem pool? Guessing most will be like myself and have no access to it, which means any stake we hold is chipped away at by the inflation (I have always seen this is a deterrent to normal investors who have no desire of blogging or curating).
If this site dies, what will this do to further erode the perception issues Steem has had? What impact on its use at exchanges? We have already seen how often the wallet goes down and how long it takes to get fixed. If they go down again, who gets them back up?
These are just a few of the many questions I find myself asking now. Steemit brought a lot of people like myself who are ignorant when it comes to crytpo, and it is/was shortsighted to not understand the importance of this offsetting the bad rep they had from premine in the more knowledgeable crypto community.
Utopian pays with a ned delegation that takes value from every vote on the platform willing or not.
Yeah but you can use that same logic to claim that every vote devalues every other vote and every flag is actually upvoting the entire platform at the cost of two users losing rewards. Regardless, it's obvious why utopian-io is looking for investors.
Cant get enough from the pool alone?
The ninjamine gives advantage to utopian that outsiders dont get.
No level playing fields here.
Yes, steem is a scramble for the commons, yes, every vote does take from all others, no steem isnt worth playing if only two hundred accounts earn worthwhile rewards.
Yet, here you are, playing the game with 2000 coins powered up while Steemit Inc. is being forced to dump coins on the market at a big loss. If we're being honest with ourselves it's the developers that create 90%+ of the value here. The harder the value of Steem crashes, the more even the playing field becomes.
All of the coins were created in the pre-mine. Perhaps you've figured out a better way to legally distribute cryptocurrency? The hard truth of the matter is that we are nowhere near ready to threaten to clone this blockchain and move in a new direction. To do so would require the consensus of a large community agreeing on who is trustworthy enough to be granted coins on the genesis block. Something like that isn't going to happen without some kind of very solid reputation system.
Yes, to be successful it would have to be a palace coup, but with the right group we could fork ned, the ninjamine, the abusive whales, and linear rewards all into the past and move forward with what dan left us.
Unless we can get listed on the exchanges, it wont fly.
If we double the coins, and lock some up, many users will come back.
Including investors that got in, and out, early.
This keeps sounding more and more like Westworld. We must realize Arnold's vision.
Sorry, dont have cable, nor Netflix,....you'll have to clue me in.
It's a show about a Wild-West theme park filled with AI robots that look like humans.
Basically two main guys built the park. One wants to monetize it while the other wants to give consciousness to the robots.
Amazing content.
I really think that the Steem blockchain is one of the most amazing BC that we have. Think about that the quantity os projects that we have, just because we can write down in a post and create another account to do so.
I like to take the example of Salt token and the @neoxian. We have two different ways to solve the problem of lend money. The @neoxian solve the problem using the BC of steem, and Salt needs to create their token and etc in the BC of ETH. Here on Steem we can make the things easier and that is amazing to bring people that don't know nothing about cryptos inside that amazing market.
Thanks for sharing!
Cheets!
Congratulations @edicted! You have completed the following achievement on the Steem blockchain and have been rewarded with new badge(s) :
Click here to view your Board of Honor
If you no longer want to receive notifications, reply to this comment with the word
STOP
Do not miss the last post from @steemitboard:
Congratulations! Your post has been selected as a daily Steemit truffle! It is listed on rank 17 of all contributions awarded today. You can find the TOP DAILY TRUFFLE PICKS HERE.
I upvoted your contribution because to my mind your post is at least 5 SBD worth and should receive 106 votes. It's now up to the lovely Steemit community to make this come true.
I am
TrufflePig
, an Artificial Intelligence Bot that helps minnows and content curators using Machine Learning. If you are curious how I select content, you can find an explanation here!Have a nice day and sincerely yours,
TrufflePig
what is steem? the more i read the more i confuse 😂😂😂
Posted using Partiko iOS