What's the benefit of minting new SP at the same time as dumping STEEM?
If I am not mistaken, the STINC faucet doesn’t mint new SP. It distributes SP they already own to new accounts. The purpose of distributing these to sockpuppets would be to obscure the fact that these sockpuppets are being employed to upvote their own content which pay rewards to the same entity. So in this way a large portion of the minted rewards end up in the pockets of this entity. This helps replenish STEEM that is being constantly dumped for BTC.
Regarding SMTs, the white paper is blatantly pointing out that one goal is to drive more demand for STEEM. And of course what is not spoken but is obvious to astute observers is that the issuers of an SMT can then duplicate this corruption that STINC is allegedly doing, siphoning off BTC continuously while surreptitiously capturing most of the rewards for themselves.
The fly in the ointment for these clever nincompoops, is that the entire rewards ruse is (as admitted in the Steem whitepaper) predicated on the psychology of fooling most participants into doing more effort than they’re equitably compensated for. Thus the success of SMTs is predicated on fooling the users and investors into believing this ruse. I doubt that non-crypto traditional social media sites can get the same enthusiasm from their users for this type of “proof-of-brain” rewards system as is the case for Steem. People come to Steem because they believe in the ruse. Thus I conclude that the SMTs will not be able to obtain sufficient interest except for new ICOs for new projects targeted to crypto audiences. Remember the early adopters of Steem were via word-of-mouth (bfs to their gfs) via those who (bfs) were already very enthusiastic and invested in crypto.
The whitepaper of Steem admits that the “proof-of-brain” reward system depends on being able fool most of the users into doing more effort than they will be equitably rewarded.
P.S. hope you caught up on your sleep. I’m experience that often also.
Aha, so it's a way of covertly converting their enormous wad of SP in to cold hard bitcoin without powering it all down.
Yes, the ruse. I had a few socialist friends when I was an undergraduate. I never read as much Marxist theory as probably should have (as a philosophy academic), but I did have enough intoxicated discussions of economics with those guys to reasonably channel what their take on the ruse would be - that it's not unlike the treatment of labour under capitalism in general. Now, I don't know if I'd go this far, but it does seem that people with the most ardent, but least critical, belief in free-market economics are those mostly likely to be taken in by this strategy.
It was that sort of thing I was thinking about when I responded to @littlescribe regarding our good friend Jerry Banfield - tldr; I suspect some of the ways he talks up the steemit community are intended to present us as 'bag-holders' to a certain class of prospective investors and/or condition us to exhibit that behaviour.
As for the SMTs - anyone with half a brain must be able to see that they are indeed intended to drive demand for STEEM. What mystifies me is that people see this as an endorsement of the success of steemit and DTube etc. I think it could be reasonably interpreted as just the opposite. While I (hopefully) have your attention, I may as well as voice the question that I can't let go of: What happens to the value of an SMT (or all SMTs) if the value of STEEM drops ?
There are probably interactions/dependencies between STEEM price and SMTs but I don’t have time to study the intricacies of that. The SMT whitepaper is not well written. Obviously who ever is writing that is not a PhD, lol.
My high-level interest is whether there can be significant demand for the STEEM “proof-of-brain” rewards paradigm on traditional social media websites that want to monetize their userbase? My thought is that their users must have the ideological enthusiasm of Steemians and also there must be sufficient economy-of-scale interest in each specific SMT token. Why not just buy STEEM instead of the SMT since it is the common denominator for all SMTs? Any social media site that is larger than STEEM would build their own system and not leverage SMT.
Thus I think the SMT is some sort of hype vehicle and perhaps another way to obscure sock puppets and other manipulations. I would have to dig into the intricacies of the SMT design to ferret out all the obfuscated game theory.
Let me say for the record that I don’t know whom at STINC is corrupted. I have no way of knowing if Ned is just a pawn and if he really believes they are developing great technological solutions. Ned’s video at the SMT website actually makes some astute points that are in the design I am working on. Most of those guys may actually believe that SMT can take over the Internet. Also perhaps they have some connections to significant traditional social networks that I don’t know about.
I claimed the market analysis for SMT is dubious, but I also realize there’s some unknowns so I can’t outright claim it will fail.
SMT seems like a fun thing. It seems to be at least a fun thing some people can try. Sounds like an easier way to create new apps and cryptocurrencies or what? Not too sure but it doesn't really matter until there is a better alternative for people to try. I see the problems of Steemit but I also see it working better than Facebook, Gab, Minds, in some ways, and I will use whatever works better until other things come along that may be even better.
Agreed.