Block-Buster Witness Is Up and Running Again!

in #witness-category5 years ago (edited)

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The necessity is unfortunate but we here at Block-Buster would like to make clear that we are not a new witness, nor has our account been bought out. We have a nearly three-year history here on Steemit with our highest witness position at one point climbing up into the low 60s. It’s been a while since our last post, regrettably our witness was operating at a time where it was simply too much to keep up on our server costs. Now however our witness is coming back stronger than ever to support the Steem blockchain.

OUR STANCE ON RECENT EVENTS

We’ve remained silent during the recent debacle in order to take our time observing, learning, and forming our own opinions about the situation. From this carefully thought out standpoint we would like to make a couple of points.



We at Block-Buster stand with the Steem community. Community is fluid. It is an ever changing ever evolving entity and needs witnesses who understand and are willing to be honorably flexible in order to accommodate change for the betterment of the blockchain.

Community always comes first.
Block-Buster witness is not selling out for profit and will never do so. We will continue to evolve with the community as needed while maintaining our foundation of our principles.

We are not taking sides in a grudge match. We recognize legal ownership of Steemit Inc. by Justin Sun, we respect the sanctity of property and we will not condone any actions or codes that freeze, burn, or otherwise impede upon the stake of anyone within the Steem community.

Block-Buster does not encourage or condone any racial discrimination.




WITNESS RESPONSIBILITIES

We are not opposed to the removal of downvotes, but we would rather see a limit implemented. We believe that everyone's stake is entitled to a percentage of their inflation. We would like to see a system where it isn't possible for one user, no matter the stake, to eliminate all rewards for a single post. We understand the need for the community to discourage bad behavior via downvote usage, however some users have been utilizing this function in an abusive manner that discourages quality content creation and engagement from smaller accounts.

We are supportive of a shorter power down period of no less than seven days. Anything under seven days run too great a risk of reward pool abuse.

Once again, we will never vote for freezing, limiting, or burning an individual’s stake.

We hope to build and support engagement by creating a support system for all users, giving support to those who need it most, i.e. new users and minnows.

We will maintain transparency with the community by providing regular witness updates highlighting data and our personal views.

We are prepared for backup/full node if voted into consensus.

BLOCK-BUSTER TEAM

@MrViquez
@BirdInc

We do not believe that Steem/Steemit is dead. We have full faith that this blockchain has a future and we will do everything in our power to see it to fruition. We understand and offer our full support to those choosing to relocate to another chain, the greatest beauty of the blockchain is having the choice to do so. We have spent years pouring ourselves into Steemit, investing currency, time, energy, and heart. We are making the choice to follow these investments through and we wish all members of the community, past and present, the very best.


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If you support our initiative please vote @Block-Buster for witness!

Running Version 0.22.5
Current witness specs:
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We are not opposed to the removal of downvotes

You have read poorly. We are not opposed simply mean we are open to a better solution.

I think that means you had better come up with one. I read the rest of the paragraph too and what you're asking for is magical thinking.

Good luck and I would have voted for this, except removing downvotes is a deal breaker for me.

So, I wish you well, but can't vote for you.

I would love to see a Steem/Hive without down-votes one day. Taking money from people because one doesn't like them or the content makes the game too divisive, I think.

Are you saying that you’re fine with it if someone feeds 300 RSS feeds in a posting bot and distributes them over few accounts then starts circle jerking on those. Or posts them to communities, where people often don’t check on content origin?

Because to me that’s an integral part of downvotes. Or shall we return to the ridiculous era of bidbots?

The economics of DPoS drive people away who don't have a circle.

That’s because they’re poorly educated and in general this platform is an earning utopia. I have mentored multiple bloggers and most understand how difficult it is to earn because... they don’t earn a dime for many months.

Poor education, understanding is IMHO not a free pass for abusers to have free reign.

Btw this has nothing to do with “DPOS economics”, the rewards mechanic is specific to Steem, Hive, and few smaller forks. Plenty of DPOS out there without those economics. DPOS is a governance model, not an economic structure.

Sorry, this was a poor and absolutely disappointing answer.

The key to make money is to get attention from large stakeholders. The system has always been very top heavy and many bloggers do not get noticed at all.

There has always been a massive sweatshop economy on steem.

Within 2 months I had 2 OCD upvotes, several acidyo upvotes, and two solid curie upvotes. While I could have, I even never ventured into SteemStem or Utopian. Or Dlive/dTube.

Believe it or not, there's hundreds of authors who scrape multiple $TU together each day, just going through the different dapps/media types.

That is an utopia available to anybody who invests few days of time in getting to know the ecosystem. They may not score trending but they all score several tens, several hundreds of dollars each month.

My question to you: how long does it take the self-hosted blogger (without previous following to harness) to achieve sufficient traffic to earn their first $100.

If any problem on steem it was for the creators who didn't do the sweatshop economy. More often than not, after an unbelievable first quarter, they would not have any support anymore once rep 62-63. Whales and orcas are hard to come by, unless you're haejin. That often resulted in retention problems.

But the utopia, both for newcomers and for penny pinchers, is a reality. The latter can, of course, be seen as a positive because it is distribution and also spreads finances to multiple parts of the world.

PS: I think the lack of retention is the biggest issue. But EIP and 50/50 have introduced massive curation sniping and seems to have spread the distribution. More communist style, less for everyone but for more.

Your analysis is spot on! Nice work.

It sounds like a good idea on the surface. Have you checked out what happened with Whaleshares?

What I would rather see, is the ability for people to NOT post and still get a percentage of their Inflation (not that we call it that) In exchange they would not be able to vote to allocate rewards.

I would even be okay with tempering some downvotes where 1 vote can't remove everything, but we need a way for the community (stake) to say this is unacceptable.

This seems like a great idea instead of removing it comepletely. Will change our post. Thanks @whatsup for your input!!!

Back when my son competed in karate tournaments, the 5 judges in the kata events would discard the highest and lowest scores, and the contestant's final score would be the average of the remaining three. This eliminated the disproportionate influence of any outlier votes, whether on the up-side or down-side.

I'd like to see both upvotes and downvotes on Steem get tempered in a similar fashion. I think the possible loss of influence from being an outlier would incentive people to vote to reflect actual post value more accurately. I wrote about one possible strategy for accomplishing that here.

I'd vote for your witness, but the steempeak witness list says it's stale and still running version 0.20.6. I'll check back again in a few days.

@remlaps Thanks for your consideration. It only showed Stale on SteemPeak because we had yet to witness a block. We witnessed a block last night so it is now updated. Thank you for your support!

Whaleshares didn't do anything in the crypto industry.

I was talking about the former split from Steem by Fuzzvest's team. whaleshares.io
It's true they didn't do much, but on their site which was a fork of Steem they removed downvoting and they found out very quickly what a bad idea that was.

I'm very familiar with the Whaleshare story. Why was it a bad idea? Ended up with a concentration of coins in few accounts?

It ended up with all of the whales making... "Account Preservation Posts" 10 times a day.

That's all they said...

No one curated, most quit making real posts at all. All the small accounts left and the value went away.

Now they have switched to a tipping site, but the tokens are worth nothing.

There has to be a reason or motive for people to curate or make a real post or it will quickly make posting at all pointless and just be an inflation distribution platform.

"We are not opposed to the removal of downvotes." We can take this out to get your vote. @block-buster what do you think?

Agree with your vision. Good to have you on our side.

Glad to be back!!

Good job! heading on over to vote now. Good team here peeps!

Thanks for the support!!!

HIVE Could Face a Massive Class Action Lawsuit for Intellectual Property Theft

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A group of rogue members of the Steem blockchain community have unilaterally copied the intellectual property of millions of content creators without even the slightest decency to even attempt to seek their consent...

I published my intellectual property onto the Steem blockchain. That was my choice, and I was fully aware that it would remain on the Steem blockchain, where it would be protected. HIVE copied my intellectual property for financial gain, which is illegal.