All valid points.
The question is whether the only thing we have to fear is fear itself?
It all comes down to expectations. I am very open in that I do not like the marketing of STEEM by many of the members who are on FB and YT. They promote the money aspect of things. That is setting people up for the idea they will make lots of money (like $15K in 24 hours). Instead I feel we need to promote a lack of censorship (although it exists to a degree), decentralization, and the taking part in laying the foundation for a total societal shift.
The challenge is we are still in the age of scarcity that the banksters erected. We are moving towards the Age of Abundance yet few can see it. They are still tied to the greed, fear, and take take take. It is going to take a while to shift.
Fortunately, cryptocurrencies in general are creating a lot of wealth for people. We are also seeing other measures spring up that are starting to focus upon the overlooked and suffering.
So where does greed end? When the motivation is money and you have people conditioned in the scarcity mindset, it is going to take over. The ones you refer to in the article, with the huge SP, it doesnt take a math whiz to figure out what they will net if STEEM moves up to even low double digits.
There is hope...the fact that more people are moving up, albeit slowly means that the system will distribute the wealth to others. To me, the worst cog in all this is the fact that the sign up process still only lets a hundreds of maybe a couple thousand new accounts through a day. I believe the interest is there yet the process is bogged down. I am wondering if this is by design.
If the blockchain had 10M people with 500K active each day, much of what is discussed would not even be an issue.
I agree for the most part. But STEEM started with a massive problem of initial wealth distribution that actually came out of mining. There are many whales who neither earned (via proof of brain) nor purchased their stake. They just mined it. We lacked proper initial distribution.
I’m so happy to see people talking about betterdistribution. I don’t know much about math but it seems pretty obvious to me that the more distributed the power is among individuals who care about others and contribute to the platform, the less of a problem we have because we can pool our efforts to steer the direction of the platform, rather than being forced to trust a few ultra whales and witnesses that they back up to work it out. Since I’m not good at the math though, I mainly focus on the human aspect and helping keeping great content creators here and bringing them together.
I think whatever that's going to be based on SMTs are going to have some better distribution. We could even end up seeing people using SMT based sites/projects more than STEEM itself. If this ends up happening, the initial distribution problem will be more or less taken care of. STEEM would keep increasing the value while SMT projects creating better communities through better distribution.
It was really stupid to mine STEEM in the first place. A pre-mine and a faucet would have been a far better option. NANO actually did this and it ended up well.
I've read about the lack of proper distribution, but don't know enough of the mechanics to discuss other methods that would have worked better.
I'm no expert either. I think EOS did a great job with distribution. I think public mining was a disaster. Proof of Brain with somewhat high inflation would have done a decent job coupled with a lengthy auction of STEEM like the one EOS had. People have incentive to be early adopters as there would only be a short high inflation period and those with deep pockets would actually have to pay for their stake and more demand they create, higher the price would be for Proof of Brain crowd. Nothing is perfect. But that would have made things better.
Also a faucet that reward people for http://steemitboard.com achievements would have been nice too. That's just my suggestion.
Hey @taskmaster4450, would you mind elaborating a little bit on this:
I'm wondering what you might be referring to specifically, and how having more people on with a limited sized reward pool would actually make what we're discussing no longer be an issue?
Just to be clear, I'm only seeking to understand how that can be, so I can better understand how this platform works.
Also, from the last video the Steemit crew did as part of someone's interview, one of them said they've been manually processing the accounts. I don't know if that's still going on, but it sounds like it. And since they're planning to open the flood gates with HF 20 Velocity, it may continue that way until the HF 20 drops.
Most of the reward pool goes to the authors. The more people who sign up, the more that pool is diluted. This means the distribution of the newer tokens favors the smaller accounts since there are more of them. In short, the few large accounts cannot produce enough content to deal with the overwhelm. They could vote bot all they want, instead of $600 on a trending page, they get $40...still a nice sum but not the overwhelming amount they have now.
This means an acceleration in the distribution of the tokens. The whales, as a whole, have been getting weaker over the last year. They experienced significant drop in their percentage of ownership. More people will make it go down that much quicker.
As for the manual sign up, I believe it is still in effect. You could be right that they are waiting until HF20 before changing it. I saw a video where they said they had something else they were working on...I guess it didnt pan out.
Okay. So more smaller accounts, the less there is for the bigger accounts. So that helps the smaller accounts, but not sure how that keeps the bigger money here? Delegation maybe? I guess it would depend on how much each smaller account is getting.
Okay, well, that helps explain that.
Interesting on the thing they were working on not panning out. I should probably check that out, too. :)
This an interesting aspect of growth that I hadn't considered, but surely the degree of dilution of whale rewards depends on the ratio of rich to poor people signing up? I.E. if for every 100 'normal people' who sign up, we have one multi-millionaire haejin clone things just stay as they are?
This would make sense to me. Hopefully this isn't the ratio we are looking at!
Could the fact that the bigger accounts are experiencing that drop be another reason why they are upping the anti on profiting via the self voting etc?
Thanks @taskmaster4450, a thorough response as always.
I'll pick this one out as I think it's really key - we have the chance to bring this age in, but it will need a majority to realise it - old habits die hard as they say. The above names can see what you see, and I'm pretty sure they will all hang on to this vision until all hope is gone - which is not yet.
Signups don't worry me too much at present, but as we saw over Xmas, there is a bottleneck in the process. Bandwidth took a hit then too and so I guess these are related.
Thanks again, keep trucking :)
Agreed. Monetization is an essential part of this platform and why many of us are all here but by overemphasizing it we fail to build a culture of cooperation and honesty, as many people are still stuck in a scarcity mindset.