Interesting, well good to hear you've hedged your bets. I hope others are as smart as you. There are several other dapps with promise like Augur,Brave, Digix, Status, Breaker, OMG and so on, but it's too early to talk about really succesful products, but the thing is, they are being built and are ready to be adopted. Can't say the same for Steem really. Oh yes, we have drugwars and Steem monsters :) Have you tried them? Lots of hype for... not much.
And it's funny how you mention how much sway Vitalik has in Ethereum, yet Steem is a lot worse in that case with Steemit Inc and premine + handful of whales controlling majority of the stake. And due to way Steem is structured, these guys can keep milking the system until the end of times. I'd rather not support that with my own money, especially seeing what we get in return. This place has mainly been a dissapointment, and I'm here because I saw promise in it, but it seems the goal was never to reach that state, a huge let down.
I'm ready to bet that Ethereum, in its current architecture, is heading nowhere, but I'm prepared to be proven wrong (I've "hedged" by owning some, in case it moons despite my negative opinion :)
Thank god lots of devs are busy upgrading it then.
But even though Steem is a failure in my eyes for now, I'll hold on to some small amount of tokens, there's not yet a good competitor and perhaps one day major stakeholders actually start caring about something other than their short term profits. Until then, I'm looking elsewhere for projects that will hit mainstream.
Wait, are you saying that Steem, where "a handful of whales controlling majority" is "a lot worse" than Ethereum which is basically controlled by ONE person ?
I mean, oligarchies are certainly not great but I tend to think they are an improvement over an absolute dictatorship
I elaborate this here Why Blockchain Is a Revolution
Back to dapps, enough saying that I use the "social apps" (steemit, partiko, steempeak, esteem, etc.) almost daily - as I say in one of my first posts I always wanted to blog but was terrified by creating a blog that nobody would ever discover let alone read. Steemit fit the bill perfectly. On the other hand, I've never felt any need which an Ethereum based application would fulfill.
But your mileage may vary
Well Steem really is controlled by one entity, Steemit Inc and its massive stake that's being hidden now actively by Ned. Accounts like Pumpkin and Freedom get to choose witnesses and so on. So not really oligarchy even, more like Putin and his cronies who get to leech from him.
How is Ethereum controlled by one person? What I've read lately from Eth dev meetings is that Vitalik seems to have no power at all.
Yes, Steem still has promise, sadly the premine is still holding it back. When it comes to Steem, it matters a lot who controls the stake unlike in other blockchains.
Errr, I thought Putin and his cronies are the textbook definition of an oligarchy :-)
I don't see how the premine is holding steem back. It sounds a bit like saying "the real world is held back by the fact that some people have started vastly richer and more powerful than the vast majority" True, but it didn't prevent the world from progressing ... Steem is rather held back by the lack of leadership and vision and the fact that nobody is yet familiar with "cooperative ownership" as we experience in blockchain environments. So we tend to mentally rely on a strong leader instead of assuming leadership ourselves
"Errr, I thought Putin and his cronies are the textbook definition of an oligarchy :-)"
Yes, and to many, that's what Steem is with its huge premine. I've tried to market Steem, but anyone with few years in crypto shun it for this reason alone. Have you tried?
"the real world is held back by the fact that some people have started vastly richer and more powerful than the vast majority"
Yes, and the point of blockchain that there's now alternative to that kind of system, so people rather not jump to a system that's just more of the same.
See, the problem is that there's ton of other blockchains as well, and the problem is getting them to join Steem when there are other systems that are deemed way more fair and decentralized. Huge premine,only 21 PoS nodes selected by it aren't exactly shining example of that.
But Ripple has garnered traction, and for that reason I think Steem will have its chance as well, we really just need to start pushing forward more. As you said, there's serious lack in leadership and vision over here.
I think the stake is in the wrong hands, to them Steem is just profit maker, a small one. It needs to be in hands of people who live and breath Steem... I'm not sure if we have enough time to see that happen, cryptospace is moving fast.
Steemit Inc pulled +30 million dollars from this chain and has managed to give very little back, funny to see the change when witnesses started to discuss kicking them out.
I believe steem is interesting because it allows people who don't care much about crypto at first to begin paying attention to some new mechanisms of interaction that are simply non-existent on other blogging or "creative sharing" platforms.
I wouldn't bother too much marketing steem to people with a background in crypto already - their ideas are already made, they have "built their internal image" of what crypto should and shouldn't be.
Steem being so different from other cryptos, it's almost certain that they will reject it instantly as not fitting their ideas.
I'm more interested in making people with zero idea about blockchain discover that "blockchain" is more than computers burning electricity to calculate useless hashes, that it's more than sending some numbers called "crypto" from one computer to another ("who cares?"), that it can have a direct role in intermediating social contact.
Premine is mostly irrelevant here.
Hmm, yes, I see what you mean and that is typical of people who come from bitcoin. They were attracted to bitcoin first because they thought bitcoin is an alternative to our real world system. Bitcoin's ethos is that, indeed, and it was that for as long as people could mine bitcoin with their CPU. Even bitcoin has created a social stratification now between those who can afford an S9 or other ASIC miner and have on top access to cheap electricity and those who cannot afford the upfront investment (let alone the industrial miners who have invested tens of millions in equipment)
After bitcoin, these people took an interest in crypto looking for "the next bitcoin". I contend that is a vain task (see the tweets of @aantonop for instance). Most importantly, this set of people, the "bitcoiners", is limited, is not growing and will not grow. 99% of the people, even if not very happy with the current system, are not ready to see in bitcoin an alternative.
That's a good reply, but even in the eyes of average joe the system needs to be fair, not sure with the current bid botting and lack of manual curation that it will happen, perhaps, perhaps not. We'll have to wait and see what will happen once the next bull run brings ton of new people here.
I love bull runs. Bull runs are breathing life into the system and allowing us to progress, even (or especially) when irrational and based on wrong assumptions ("trees growing to the sky")
I've actually thought what would be required to replicate Steem on Ethereum using Loom PoS sidechain or just normal plasma, since I actually like the core idea of Steem, where network members get to reward others from shared reward pool. Witnesses probably wouldn't be needed at all and all the inflation could go to creators and stakeholders. Also the supply creation would be controlled, rather than dumping it all to few early entities who then control the whole system.
I reckon it could attract support within Ethereum community if the system is deemed fair
The reward pool is a fundamental feature to social behavior. I don't see how you can do that with plasma as that is purely a technical trick to increase transaction speed. "Replicating" would basically mean redeveloping Ethereum. I don't know enough about Loom but again, if you don't design around it, I believe it's naive you can "replicate" the reward pool. And there remains the powerful repellent of "paid transactions". Ethereum is built around the idea of transaction fees. This is a UX killer. To me, you vastly underestimate the differences in design between Ethereum and steem
That's where Plasma and Loom come in, they provide almost feeless and instant transactions.
Isn't it just code?
Well, it's just code when one person owns that code and can implement changes as he pleases. When the changes are so extensive that at least two developers are needed and shared ownership ensues, it becomes "code AND consensus among the code owners".
In blockchain settings it is BY DESIGN always "code AND consensus among code owners". The second part is the more difficult - quasi unsolvable part, not the code in itself