Took a look at the "trending" articles on this network. Most of them are about cryptocurrencies, followed by phishing-scam warnings, and finally a smattering of other content. This seems like a network built around the hype of cryptocurrencies that is hyping itself into value.
I'm experiencing a lot of anxiety lately that I'm missing the cryptocurrency boat, but at the same time the more I research the possibilities I'm finding far less opportunity to invest and much more opportunity to get taken.
> I'm experiencing a lot of anxiety lately that I'm missing the cryptocurrency boat
Don't let that be a source of anxiety for you, there is no point to that. There are plenty of other things to worry about in life than finding the perfect investments. And crypotcurrency remains a risky bet regardless of any recent activity in that market. I know plenty of very smart people who are very knowledgable about bitcoin but who refuse to buy into it. There's nothing wrong with that.
Seconded. FOMO is silly. Thousands of opportunities are passing everyone by every day, it's just part of life. Very few people tread the golden path, so to speak. So just live your life and try to have some fun long the way. :)
I think that's a bit unfair. The idea that a niche social community would be primarily interested in the things that are unique about their own social community is not exactly a condemnation. Conceptually, a social network that pays people for generating highly-upvoted content is an interesting one, I think. It may turn out to be a disaster, but there's something there IMO. What it'll take to really find out is some degree of mainstream usage. Right now it's all crypto nerds using it and trying to P&D cryptos, but it isn't fair to take that as evidence that the idea is flawed. That's just the nature of the community at the moment.
They're interested in their network getting big so they can make money. There's not much nuance to it. You can spin it another way but read the thread. It's a soulless money grab, and it's disappointing because they actually have decent software.
Once you've built a core community that is first and foremost interested in ICOs and cryptocurrencies, how do you get out of that?
Anybody who has STEEM benefits from increasing the network effect, not just him silly. Bitcoin and Ethereum has the exact same incentive to do so.
The idea is to create thousands of micro community who have their own ideas of where their communities wants to go. They can use their own tokens with their own economics if they happen to not agree with:
1. The inflation rate
2. The curation reward curve
3. The initial distribution
I have a friend over there who's participated since its inception.
A lot of what you see over there now are schemes that essentially involve paying people to upvote content. At first, I was surprised they allowed people to bribe others to vote. But, when you think about it, that's exactly what the site itself is doing (bribing people to participate).
And, bribing people to upvote is not exactly the best way to encourage good organic content. I tell my friend the model is unsustainable in its current form, as it destroys the value it's trying to create. Worse, that value is what it's trying to redeem to entice more people to participate. So, it'll inevitably run out of gas (they apparently jump-started things by subsidizing initial posts, which sparked early excitement, but payouts sharply declined thereafter).
Some might argue that it democratizes content production, but the value creation effect is not the same as paying a smaller set of producers for valuable content that a larger set would consume.
So, instead, it's more like a perfect case study in tragedy of the commons.
Check the dictionary...there is no multilevel marketing happening there. They don't even have 1 level since there isn't even a referral program. It's a social network, of course he will talk about the network effect.
A network where participants are only interested in profiting from its networking effects.
The Steemit frontpage has many self-referencing articles and self-serving, monochromatic content.
Similar to Herbalife which is mostly made up of entrepreneurs selling entrepreneurship to the unsuspecting. There is no product-market fit. When there's money being made and no market fit, suspect MLM.
First off, thanks for checking us out! My first question is: what do you have to lose? Unlike every other crypo-related project out there, steemit.com (and any other site built on the Steem blockchain like Busy.org, Dtube.video, Dsound.audio, etc.) is totally free to join and you can start "mining" Steem just by adding content to them. Personally, if you have FOMO Steemit.com is the lowest cost option for alleviating your symptoms!
You're right that we're still a small and niche social network and that may be reflected in the trending page, HOWEVER, that definitely creates opportunity for people to bring something different to the table. Our MOST successful blogger is actually a travel blogger named @sweetsssj. You can see her stuff here: https://steemit.com/@sweetsssj. If you are right that the content isn't valuable, then that means their is a gap in the market that you can fill! Believe me, I know a lot of our community members and we jump any time anyone with a unique valuable proposition comes to the platform and genuinely engages with the community.
A year ago people levied the same criticisms as I am seeing here. Since then we have grown by orders of magnitude and so has the value of our coin. Personally, I don't really know how to respond to people struggling with FOMO. I certainly empathize, but I made a vow not to make decisions based on fear, but instead focus on the vision of the future I want to actualize (one where those who add value to a network receive a proportionate amount of stake in it) and, of course, self interest. I believed in the vision held by those who founded Steemit which is why I started contributing to it (and earned a great deal of Steem in the process) and why I eventually jumped at the opportunity to join the team. I hope to see you around our amazing community. We sincerely believe people come for the rewards, but stay for the community. And there are exciting changes coming soon too!
If you are having trouble sorting out where to put your attention in the cryptocurrency space, here's how I would focus:
Most people are treating these things like startups, where the code is the primary asset. That's wrong. The code matters, but the primary asset behind a cryptocurrency is a balanced set of incentives which create an environment that encourages some predictable behavior.
Balancing those incentives is work, and not every project is doing it. Seek out communities where there is focused, ends-oriented discussion about incentives, grounded in recent crypto techniques.
If you find one that is also rallied around a cryptosoftware that does something you care about, and has a "healthy" work culture, whatever that means to you, that's your pot of gold. Not only do you stand a good shot making money investing in that communitity, but you can find a career there, and possibily even make a name for yourself.
True. There's a massive shortage of interesting content on Steemit in my opinion. I wish there were some way to convince people on HN to start blogging on Steemit because as a blogging platform it has a lot of potential (plus there's some money in it... I made ~$50 on my first article if I recall correctly).
There's definitely some good/decent authors there, but they don't make that much money. Probably $10/article on an average day. Most people are at the mercy of a "whale" or some concerted author circle to actually make any substantive amount on an article that isn't some travel blog/ebegging garbage.
> I'm experiencing a lot of anxiety lately that I'm missing the cryptocurrency boat
That is just the hype getting to you. Anything that sells itself with as much hype as bitcoin does with the implicit (sometimes explicit) message that you better BUY NOW or you'll miss the boat... it means it is probably too good to be true.
The deeper you dig into bitcoin, the less attractive it actually is. Everything from the super shady set of characters that are at the top of its pyramid who hold the majority of its coins to all the promises it makes that are blatant mistruths (it isn't free, it isn't instant, it isn't trustless, it isn't decentralized....). Bitcoin is not a good investment.
You just need to find people, which you like, and start follow them, then all interesting things are in your feed.
Why so many crypto news are on trending. It is simple. Most of users came from this area, but right now Steemit is the only blockchain project which actually be used by every-day people.
Just don't buy any of the newer cryptocurrencies. There's much less risk involved in the older cryptocurrencies. That being said bitcoin seems intent on tearing it's self apart at the moment.
If you want to choose a cryptocurrency as a hedge I'd go for litecoin, it's fairly old and under active development. It's far past the point where it's riding on a couple pump and dumps and unlike bitcoin isn't talking about 2-3 chain splits in one year.
It's very hard to tell which of the new cryptocurrencies are legit, and even if you identify ones that look good, that's no guarantee the price will actually go up.
Why should anyone buy the older cryptocurrencies for a pricer higher than the early adopters?
Surely cryptocoin software is more than a pump and dump system right? Hodl until you can pass off to the later bag holders?
What happens when the old networks are obsolete?
In economics, the Gini coefficient is the standard measure
of how inequitable a society is. This is tricky to
determine for Bitcoin, as it's not quiet a "society" in
the Gini sense, one person may have multiple addresses and
many addresses have been used only once or a few times.
(The commonly-cited figure of 0.88 is based on one small
exchange in 2011.) However, a Citigroup analysis from
early 2014 notes: "47 individuals hold about 30 percent,
another 900 a further 20 percent, the next 10,000 about
25% and another million about 20%"; and distribution
"looks much like the distribution of wealth in North Korea
and makes China's and even the US' wealth distribution
look like that of a workers' paradise
Dorit Ron and Adi Shamir found in a 2012 study that only
22% of then-existing Bitcoins were in circulation at all,
there were a total of 75 active users or businesses with
any kind of volume, one (unidentified) user owned a
quarter of all Bitcoins in existence, and one large owner
was trying to hide their pile by moving it around in
thousands of smaller transactions. (Shamir is one of the
most renowned cryptographers in the world and the "S" in
"RSA encryption")"
Cryptocoin minting algorithms distribute the supply based on what the developer typed in. Almost always, this is exploited by the developer to create the most amount of coins for the least amount of effort to the smallest group of users at the start of the project. Then they just wait in hopes other users speculate on the "limited" supply and they dump their holdings which cost less to produce then current coins are being produced for.
Trading cards, beanie babies, and database-coin entries have production costs, which users don't always realize are significantly lower than the price they're charged for in retail.
The trending page is not an accurate representation of the depth of the articles on the platform; we’re working on a number of features to allow people to better tailor their reading to their preferences (beyond a simple “follow”).
If you’re logged out, the trending page is across the whole of the network; that’s of course going to skew toward cryptocurrencies at the moment because, well, Steem itself is also a blockchain and cryptocurrency.
That’s like complaining that HN is about “internet stuff”. Duh. :)
Hi there. Some of you know me from HN - this is where the bulk of my effort has gone for most of the last year. The team we’re building at Steemit is downright amazing, and the community around it is what keeps me going.
Think reddit, but on a blockchain (the posts, comments, and votes are actually in the merkle tree in consensus), and the upvotes are real money - that’s where the majority of the token’s inflation (~9% per year, decreasing further over time) goes.
It’s sort of like a censorship-resistant, distributed pastebin. You can put arbitrary json into the blockchain, which gets mirrored to hundreds of nodes, permanently, in three seconds. The Shadow Brokers have taken up blogging on Steemit.
We call it censorship-resistant, but I can’t think of a way to meaningfully redact content already posted to this blockchain that anyone on Earth could practically implement.
Our second annual Steemfest is in Lisbon 1-5 November and hopefully I will meet some of you there.
I've found reddit's "anybody can be a moderator" model to be disasterous myself. It creates cliques founded entirely on fluff and plastic fakery, which is horrible to see.
On the other hand, HN is moderated by a couple of people on payroll.
I understand (might be wrong, but I think this is true) that Imgur uses volunteers, but puts them under NDA. Objectively makes sense for a site aimed for maximum ad impressions above all else, but only objectively.
I would really, really like to find out if it's possible to find a good balance. I'm not sure if the /. model is at the cutting edge (per se) of social/technical interaction.
You can always create an alternative frontend, which will moderate content which you like. Steem gives you freedom. You can build on top of it any kind of frontend with any filter.
For example guys from EOS decided to build own forum based on STEEM: https://eostalk.io/
They filter out everything not related to EOS :) Of course all content is available via generic websites/blockexplorers like steemit/steemdb.
Maybe the distinction lies in the filtering. Stackoverflow and Wikipedia have high quality because only people that really care about a subject (and thus usually know a lot) will invest time for free.
Once you start paying people, the much larger audience of 'people that want money' starts posting and the good people get drowned out.
Your friends who are employed were filtered by the hiring process. I imagine Google would be much worse if they hired everyone who applied.
> Once you start paying people, the much larger audience of 'people that want money' starts posting and the good people get drowned out.
Yep. Seen this on a forum called Digitalpoint, back when they had revenue sharing for posts. In theory, that should have made people post higher quality content given the financial reward for doing so. In practice? It inspired thousands of people from third world countries to join and post uninspired gibberish for the chance to get their Adsense ID used in every thread they posted in. A site that already had problems with spammers registering and posting meaningless content for signature backlinks ended up getting flooded by people who saw it as a convenient get rich quick scheme.
With larger audience you will have a greater variety, more bad and good content. Good content tends to float to the top, bad one is ignored, on average. Everyone benefits.
This is missing the last point of my argument though. Paid professionals like those that build Photoshop or Google are filtered by the hiring process.
Steemit (and I assume Woyano in the parent) is lacking both the GIMP/Wikipedia filter of people who are willing to work for free and the Photoshop/Google filter of screening people for ability before paying them to do something. This can land it in an unhappy valley where people are encouraged to churn out whatever and sheer volume makes it harder for good content to rise to the top.
I’m not saying it’s impossible for a model like this to work, just that it’s easy to fall into a trap where the best strategy to make money is to churn out low-quality content and so that’s what you get flooded with. Think of it as similar to the clickbait problem in online journalism.
There is a difference between paying people to create content in a desert and allowing anyone to monetize their audience. In every current social network there are people profiting from the content that they share or create. About good content, I think it's more a question of the tools offered to discover, selection and moderation of what is created.
I used to be involved in Steemit with some success, mostly by writing articles about the Steem blockchain itself and how to interact with it.
The appeal for me as a developer is that you're working with an unrestricted firehose API. If you want to build something you don't need to worry about limitations or breaking some terms. You can build your own Steemit front-end if you want since the back-end is just another node on the chain.
The community is really nice and I made many good friends. Regardless of the future of Steem I consider it a success and a tell-tale of real life applications for blockchains.
Pretty cool, but in practice Steemit's content is pretty mediocre. There are some high quality articles, but the front page is largely clickbait and articles talking about how successful Steemit is. I tried to write some programming articles (one of which got a lot of traction, actually) but I just got bored of doing that after a little while of getting barely any views. I think Steemit has potential if people begin to use it like Medium, but a lot of people are there as basically a business, running their personal BuzzFeed.
I agree and was curious why they picked it. I guess their reasoning is as good as any.
> Steem is a form of esteem, which means to prize or value. Steem is also a homophone for steam, which is frequently associated with power, and a step further, steam powered trains gave influence to English idioms, such as ‘this conversation is picking up steam.’ The associations with prizing, language and empowerment only felt right.
But there is already a very popular service called Steam, so I think I would have kept searching for another name, personally. No reason to risk confusion.
I expect that establishing an extrinsic reward (ie: money) will be hugely demotivating and actually diminish activity. Social media become a lot less fun when an hour's worth of effort "earns" you $0.07.
Also, they should expect a tidal wave of bots and fake content. Think about the mess Twitter is in, now add a straight path to cash.
This tread is full of ignorant sourpuss who missed the boat.
What people fail to see it that steemit is only 1 of many many websites being built on top of that blockchain. Youtube, twitter, instagram...they can all be built in their own little silos. With SMTs they will even be able to have their own tokens with their own economic models.
On a side note - I am currently in the process of cashing-out my Steem tokens in order to purchase a 10 oz. bar of silver bullion - which would be my own little "proof of concept" that so-called, "Ephemeral Money," is actually a real and useful vehichle for creating REAL wealth.
So they’re still monetizing peoples’ attention? I suppose it’s more noble to pass proportionate value back to the creators, but that’s not a system Facebook et al couldn’t quite easily adopt if market pressure forced their hands.
In fact, they could use a Smart Media Token to do so :). All joking aside, the structure of such systems are antithetical to the way large corporations operate. That being said if Facebook decided to replicate our model (our protocol is open source and it relies on an open and public database, which is obviously part of the reason they won't)and distribute profits back to its most valuable users, I would count that as a win. I bet they won't. I also bet they won't distribute nearly as large a percentage as we do (100%) because they have expensive data centers to take care of (I think the latest one alone cost $1 billion). New technologies with fundamentally different economics always disrupt large incumbents. It might not be likely, but it is possible and the potential rewards are large and accrue to the earliest stakeholders. Always. I'm not saying people should invest anything they can't afford to lose in crypto projects--whether it's time or money--but if I had listened to all of the naysayers for the past few years who dismissed bitcoin, then ethereum, and now steem, I would be much poorer in many different currencies and I wouldn't be part of an amazing team solving incredibly difficult problems every single day that give it an incredible competitive advantage against anyone who tries to do what we do. So I know Facebook can't do what we do because they don't have us :)
"A Wireding" reads like a Bene Gesserit activity, and it lacks the thump of "a Slashdotting."
Either way, Steemit isn't handling it right now.
```
HTTP/1.1 503 Service Unavailable: Back-end server is at capacity
Content-Length: 0
Connection: keep-alive
...
It's not just you! steemit.com looks down from here. (http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/steemit.com)
```
Great question! It is vaguely similar but different in many important ways. To be clear we do not see Brave as a direct competitor and wish them success. While they have referred to us as competitors, I believe that is a bit of an overreach. First of all, Steem tokens (and the Smart Media Tokens others will be able to launch on top of Steem in the coming months) can be transferred in 3 seconds with zero fees. This enables us to connect money to "likes" or in the case of Steem "upvotes." Brave is a pay-to-play system that uses an Ethereum token which is both slow (10 minutes) and has fees. Steem, on the other hand, is a protocol which anyone can use to build applications that leverage this crypto fuel engagement without adding paywalls or cognitive load. The crowd acts and money flows the most valuable members as determined by the stake-weighted vote of the users. In short, the Steem blockchain is protocol that the Steemit team launched and leveraged to create steemit.com but anyone can use it to fuel their app, INCLUDING apps that serve the same use case as Brave ... but with real-time fee-less transactions (i.e. better). If you'd like to learn a little more about how the system works you can check out the following video featuring yours truly: https://youtu.be/z-V6HnfbGUA
Hi, my name is @andrarchy, I'm part of Team Steemit and you can AMA :). This comment was originally intended as a response to aaron-lebo, but as it became quite long, I decided to post it here.
Aaron-lebo says, "They're interested in their network getting big so they can make money. There's not much nuance to it. You can spin it another way but read the thread. It's a soulless money grab, and it's disappointing because they actually have decent software."
He's right in a lot of ways and wrong in a lot of ways, but obviously I'm biased :). Regardless of whether we agree or disagree I want to thank anyone who even gives a moment's thought to what we're trying to do at Steemit. So thank you @aaron-lebo.
What's right:
We have decent software. Well, when it comes to offering a free social network that rewards tens of thousands of ordinary people all over the world for their content in a cryptocurrency that can be traded on exchanges and cashed out for fiat currencies, we're the only game in town, so I think we have a pretty strong argument that we have the BEST software. And knowing our engineers I have no problem saying they are the most intelligent, diligent, thoughtful, nice, and hard working people I have ever had the distinct pleasure of working with. IMO they're the best in the world and welcome proof to the contrary.
One common criticism (not made by this commenter) is that most people "don't make a lot." First off I want to highlight exactly what this criticism is saying: some people on steemit make a lot. A lot of other people make a bit. A lot of people make not a lot. This is all true. But these types of comments invariably dismiss the difference that making $5 or $10 on a post (which MANY people DO make) can have on a person's life especially in many of the countries where our users are from like those in Africa, Indonesia, and more. But even with respect to more wealthy nations, I often find the critiques of how much our users make to be remarkably tone deaf. It is certainly true that not everyone can make tons of money on Steemit and you will never see anyone on the team saying anything to that effect. Steemit is definitely NOT a get rich quick scheme. It's only true that you CAN make money on Steemit and people do every single day. That's right, the Steem blockchain distributes thousands of dollars worth of STEEM every single day to users. In fact, ALL of the money created by the Steem blockchain goes to users who provide some service to it whether it's posting articles, comments, curating content, or running a node. Like every other major cryptocurrency/blockchain protocol, the fact that anyone is free to participate in it is part of what makes it anti-fragile. None of that Steem goes to the team, unless of course we do one of those things. I understand the content that is currently on the site might not appeal to many, but the amount of rewards are real (no one denies that) and who is receiving them changes every day. What I recommend is that people view the lack of diversity of content on the site as an opportunity to contribute something new to the platform. That's certainly how I looked at it when I started as a contributer on the platform and worked my way up by creating videos that helped explain the tech to the many lay-people on the platform. Eventually my videos got the attention of the people at Steemit and I was brought on board! That being said, we are still a small social network, so of course our content is not going to be able to match the bigger players. But if people want to look at the data for themselves, project our growth rate, and estimate when we will reach such scale they are welcome to. All the data is on the blockchain which is an open, public and decentralized database.
What's wrong:
We're not soulless. I swear we have souls! :) There are more than 30 people on the team at this point and statistically speaking it's just highly unlikely that we could ALL be lacking in what is typically described as a near human-universal. Unless, of course, you don't believe in souls in which case, yes, this statement is technically true. What I would say is that those in the cryptocurrency sector are often critiqued as being TOO ideological. We all openly advocate for decentralization for the purpose of spreading power (and money) among the people. That's certainly why I got involved in the field and have been blogging and vlogging on the topic for over a year, all of which is immutably preserved on the blockchain for your investigation ;). At Steemit we do want to make steemit.com as big as possible because we all have Steem, but so do all of our users. So, yes, they do too. But to claim that anything else should be the case is like saying that Facebook is better because ONLY Facebook shareholders benefit when Facebook grows. The idea that we are somehow more soulless than Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or any other social network that wants to grow because their model depends on eyeballs to sell ads to (notice any ads on steemit.com?) is pretty laughable. Yes, we have figured out a sustainable and scaleable way to align the incentives of the creators, developers, and users of an open, public, anonymous, censorship-resistant, and decentralized database protocol so that when it grows everyone benefits. We're not sorry :)
One of the most frequent errors people make (and this is 100% understandable) is that for us it's ALL about growing steemit.com. This couldn't be more wrong. We are interested in growing use of the Steem blockchain protocol (just like the creators of Linux wanted to increase use of their protocol) and the demand for Steem. I'm not saying it's not selfish, I'm just saying it's not accurate ;). But let me be absolutely clear and I will happily hold myself accountable for this claim for all of time: this is because I believe that the Steem blockchain is a force for good. It is an open and decentralized database which is not controlled by any single person, corporation, or government, that anyone can acquire a stake in, that is free to use, that is anonymous, and that is censorship resistant. We see a lot of problems with existing social media solutions (like all of your personal information being held and profited off of by a private company with tight links to authorities) and we sincerely believe we have solved them with Steem. One can argue whether we are right, but I know our beliefs are sincere.
PROOF: Smart Media Tokens
That's exactly why we launched Smart Media Tokens. It was always our desire to get developers to leverage Steem to create their own applications that would reward their users with money while enabling them to retain control over their personal identities and protecting them from censorship, but through conversations with entrepreneurs and developers we learned that there were additional features they wanted. While steemit.com is incredibly important to us and the number of engineers we have working on that site is now greater than ever, we decided to also commit significant resources to designing the Smart Media Tokens protocol precisely because we want to encourage other platforms to leverage our technology. If all we cared about was steemit.com this strategy would make no sense. Once Smart Media Tokens launch, any site (including this one wink wiiiiiiiiiiiiink) will be able to launch their own Steem-like token with; customized parameters, the ability to allocate founders tokens, the ability to raise capital, and more. Shameless plug over ;).
Yes, the system is designed to increase demand for Steem and that will benefit all current Steem holders, including the thousands of people doing the massively valuable work of contributing content to our platform while it is still growing. We are not idealists, but we're not soulless either. We are ambitious and hopeful technologists who are leveraging a revolutionary technology to disrupt a massively centralized, exploitative, and corrupt landscape. You're welcome ;)
If you'd like to learn more, check out this video of yours truly explaining how it all works: https://youtu.be/z-V6HnfbGUA
Regardless of your view of steemit, if you've gotten this far, you're amazing. Thanks for reading!
I don't understand why people on HN are so anti-Steemit. Disregarding the service is very patronizing to its users. It's obviously giving them something of value but HN is so quick on placing it in the same bag as some random scam ICO. Not saying the model is perfect though.
> I don't understand why people on HN are so anti-Steemit.
Because people on HN that have been around a while, have seen a dozen variations of this come and go, all the way back to the days of Flooz. Steemit will pop and rot, for exactly the same reasons that not a single system like this has ever worked long-term.
What Steemit actually represents is a signal that the crypto-currency mania is nearing an end for the initial speculative wave. The big dump comes next, in which most crypto-currency experiments that have attention today will die off.
There's nothing special about what Steemit is doing. They're slapping the latest hype train on top of what has been attempted for two decades. It doesn't work for a fundamental reason and there's nothing Steemit can do about that. It doesn't matter if you use a clone of Bitcoin as your foundation or an arbitrary tokenX with a different set of rules governing it. Slapping Bitcoin on the concept doesn't change the underlying broken premise.
You make it sound like it's some random social network with an unrelated token connected to it. That's not how it works.
1. Reward from blocks mined are distributed to the highest voted posts. This is all part of the Steem protocol. Only a small percentage goes to the actual miner.
2. The whole database sits on the blockchain. It's completely decentralised.
3. The incentive to have more Steem on your account is that your upvotes are worth more. This is both the blessing and the curse since whales become powerful curators. On the other hand it gives an incentive to hold Steem unrelated to the monetary value. That's why I don't see any dumping happening any time soon unless Steem skyrockets in value.
I simply don't agree that this has been tried before. It's a different story, even if it turns out to be a failure in the end.
Haha. I appreciate the attention you're giving our little social network, but you clearly know nothing about us. We've been around for well over a year and our founders and team members have been long-time members of the crypto community. We've been giving out rewards every day, our crypto is traded on many markets, the price is stable, and our userbase is growing exponentially. I'd love for you to give an estimate on when exactly this "dump" will come because I've been hearing this from people for a long time now. Probably as long as you have been seeing stuff like Steemit on HN, though that's obviously not true. Anyone with a rudimentary understanding of blockchain technology knows our tech is legit. Meanwhile Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Steem have made me a very happy man. Oh btw, how much have you made posting on HN? ;)
Steem blockchain produce constant amount of STEEM tokens everyday (1 STEEM per block every 3s).
Those tokens are distributed among all users according to votes of all users.
We all know, that it is not so easy to write a post/comment which will receive tons of upvotes.
So if you will spend 3 hours writing awesome blogpost, and after a week (voting period) you will endup having 3 STEEM tokens... question is, would you give away those tokens for free? Probably not for free...
Also, there are people on the platform, which like to gather STEEM tokens. Why? Because if you have more STEEM tokens you have greater influence on the platform, your posts will have greater visibility, and you have more to say about who will receive more tokens next time.
Its not any more ephemeral than the money that our government prints. In steemits case, they are the government and can arbitrarily "print" money. If the government of steemit crumbles, so will its currency. Just like any other government. Every single currency is ephemeral to some variable degree...
I think the difference is that people don't see USD as ephemeral because the chance of the US government collapsing is about 0 while the chance of a cryptocurrency startup collapsing is definitely much greater than 0
Nobody is taxing you in Steem. Governments create money so you have the means to pay your tax bill. And by doing that they get you to create and give up real goods and services for the common good.
A money system that works to enable transactions is one where hoarding it doesn't really get you anything. In fact it should cost you to hold a rainy day fund - as any insurance should.
Cryptocurrencies try and pretend they are electronic gold bars. But they are not.
They are ideas with a label on it. Some smart salesman has convinced people that there are only so many ideas with a Bitcoin label and that finite supply will make the price go up. So then people start hoarding them, and transactions for real things start to go down because nobody can get hold of the currency.
So then somebody creates the same idea with a different label, which also has a finite supply...
Classic fallacy of composition. Finite within the scope of the label, but not between labels.
The world's fiat currencies are relative finite between labels - because there are only so many governments - but have a fully dynamic supply within the label. That focusses the currency on transactions, not hoards.
Holy crap thats alot of downvotes... I mean i was talking ephemeral on a pretty large time scale here, just to clear things up for all the people who apparently believe that USD is an absolute.
I'm experiencing a lot of anxiety lately that I'm missing the cryptocurrency boat, but at the same time the more I research the possibilities I'm finding far less opportunity to invest and much more opportunity to get taken.