My point in this post will be to point out that steemit is very likely control grid. This would be the third or so imitator of reddit that would attempt to fragment that community. Admittedly, it's very good attempt, or I wouldn't be making this post here. Now. But I want you to try some things on for size, that you maybe haven't thought of before. Call it food for thought. See how it settles with you. And please, share your thoughts. Because I am bothered by some things I've noticed, mainly that Steem has made no attempt to respond to me by email whatsoever, not even a form response. And that is why I'm writing this.
Steemit is based on bitcoin, they claim. That makes it censorship resistant, they say.
We honestly don't know their backend, just a whitepaper to assure us it's above board. We have to trust that they aren't casting an illusion on us by publishing technical details of steemit's working that don't actually match the programming backend reality because its closed-source. Being based on an open source software is just one part of steemit: the rest is proprietary and we don't get to see it either. It would be trivial to spoof the alleged activity and mechanisms of bitcoin on steemit. I could do it: I'm an advanced php/js/node web programmer also. I built a more advanced facebook clone than fb in 2005 and made one of the worlds two first social media classifieds aggregators with a friend, and it failed as fast as our competitor but with 2M fewer dollars. Not exactly braggadocio, but to illustrate my point in having experience launching potentially large startups that are technically challenging and interesting.
Now I too have written a similar whitepaper about a crowdbased lobbying website that uses bitcoin also. It's a marketplace that puts citizens and politicians together to cocreate legislation, to fund it by providing dangling carrots of bounties for politicians to pass the wiki-like legislation, while avoiding quid quo pro entanglements. It's extremely technical and about as long as this whitepaper. It's also a grant proposal. Is it a website? No. It's a good idea and chunks of half working code, for now.
My point is, if you don't get to see the backend, you just have to believe them. It's a whitepaper, but it could also all be applesauce. I'm not saying it is, I'm saying it could be. They could spoof a lot. I've thought of easy ways to do that. They use their own steemit currency also, which leads credence to smoke and mirrors.
Steemit does seem, however, to be legit if people are getting paid.
But keep in mind, there are ways to spoof that also...you could have an internal currency, algorithm to game it on certain posts through activity of 'curators', who decide what something is worth (see the 'bernie sanders scam dollarvigilante' post below) and manipulate it. It would require a large backend (surreptitious) funding to get that started.
For example, the US government has proven that it has unlimited money to spend on a successful propaganda campaign to destroy reddit and other communities.
Secondly, if Bitcoin itself is an elitist scam--which it is looking more and more the case--then steemit would likely be a scam too, if its not simply the bigger fool or a useless idiot.
Bitcoin put very simply involves cracking a code. Who has the most / best equipment to crack codes? The NSA. They have a few trillion dollars invested in a whole building that is a computer. Because of US Military Intelligence's (USMI's) NSA PRISM, bitcoin is an Elitist system you no longer have access to. I'll expand.
You can no longer make money on it if you didn't get in on it from the get-go. It's a ponzi scheme. In order to mine for bitcoin, you have to have expensive equipment. You can't buy enough equipment now to make enough bitcoin to pay for it and make a narrow margin, because of the way the system has worked. In the beginning, mining was easy, but now it's all mined out and more computer power + time is needed to unlock harder puzzles. That's just how it works.
So to start now, you'd need an astronomical investment in computer equipment and lots of spare, discounted energy, like for example a solar farm. No one has that. It's inherently more elitist as time goes on. If you started now, with your computer, it would take over 20 yrs on average to get a bitcoin block, if you ever did get one--which you might not.
My point is that bitcoin has always been elitists, never democratic. It was never based on anything other than who has the most energy and technology. People who got started early have the equipment, so does the USMI. USMI also has unlimited power: they have excess coal reserves, some hydro, some solar and wind, and lots of natural gas and fracking petrol; they also have nukes, which means 'cheaper oil than everywhere else in the world....or else'.
Therefore, the people who will have the most bitcoin at the end of the day is the US military and the 1%, period.
It's also pretty clear the NSA are developing quantum computers. People have speculated that bitcoin at present does not use quantum safe algorithms, and therefore at some point the US Mil can steal all the bitcoin that hasn't been transferred into a paper wallet. That paper does no good either because the moment that bitcoin is put into a usable electronic wallet and a firewall opened, bam, it could be taken by an omnipresent AI agent that's running as several autonomous micro instances in your dishwasher, nest AC controller, your amazon dash button, your iphone, etc.
Btw, just to stop the shilling before it starts, I'm not going to field any debates on bitcoin by people who just want to cast doubt on this by finding one detail and then attacking by splitting hairs with minutiae of bitcoin technical details no one but you cares about. I mean, we get it: you're smarter than me. Unless you can speak to my incorrectness in the birds eye view perspective, or have something more interesting or have something contribute, please--by all means share your thoughts as nicely as you can.
First they fight you, then they win
It would seem a fair conclusion to say that only governments engage in activities that involve inhibiting or threatening cryptocurrencies (and it's useful to mention they fight crypto tools generally...they fought pgp, they fought phpphone, they fought tor, they fought i2p, freenet, torrent, VPNs, they totally undermined SSL with heartbleed, etc). After all, mafias and hackers alike would love nothing more than for you to mine-away and unlock more money for them to steal from you at a later date, or to 'surreptitiously steal mining labor' from your mining equipment so that they are producing bitcoin for themselves on your dime.
Because governments, especially the US government, don't need your money. They can simply pull money from the aether through Quantitative Easing, or QE, which ironically happens to be the same QE representing the alchemical symbol for the quintessence, the aether from which all things are pulled from the realm of the imaginary into the realm of the actual. In other words, they're laughing all the way to the blockchain.
So we had the Silkroad busts. Other darknet site busts. Hacks on bitcoin exchanges and banks. Threats of TOR being undermined, heartbleed SSL bug making everyone question everything's security.
Who ended up with that money? The 1%.. The NSA? <-- coin telegraph or cointel-egraph
You will notice the US Government fought bitcoin at first, trying to rope in the IRS, the SEC and trying to lawyer up on bitcoin, threatening everyone who was playing, and dissuading everyone from getting in on bitcoin. (interesting, eh?)
Until the moment they seized the 20M or so in bitcoin from silkroad. And that happened around the same time the exchanges were starting to be compromised and bitcoin stolen. Then suddenly, the US changed its tune and bitcoin is no longer a threat. Why is that? Think!
It's that now that bitcoin has value (ie: bitcoin now has the potential to be exchanged for goods and services because of the public's trust of the currency to have said value), and that if the US has the lion's share of bitcoin, well they wouldn't to go fighting against a currency because that would only destroy its value. They aren't going to destroy their own wealth, or act against it, in other words.
Steemit's Conspiracy tag suppression
Original post on reddit, couple a week ago
UPDATE: 'conspiracytheory' tag shows up just today, but all those other posts marked 'conspiracy' still don't show. No one wants to use that tag, as evidenced by 3 posts. We're not going to use that tag, ok? Thanks.
Some of you might think this Steemit behavior is appropriate, because some of you actually despise conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists and think they are 'dangerous' because that is how our culture would have you believe them to be.
May I remind you what one anti-conspiracy-theory Noam Chomsky had to say about freedom of speech,
"if you believe in freedom of speech, you believe in freedom of speech for views you don't like. Goebbels was in favor of freedom of sppech for views he liked. So was Salin. If you're in favor of freedom of speech, that means you're in favor of freedom of speech precisely for views you despise"
Tags are how Steemit categorizes posts into reddit-like 'subs'. Using a tags 'creates' subs implicitly. Similar to how Drupal CMS uses taxonomy or wordpress's categories. So for example, filtering by the bitcoin tag makes the bitcoin sub. One can submit up to 5 tags, so this means one can implicitly xpost to up to 5 'subs'.
Here are Steemit posts that are tagged 'conspiracy'
You will note a few things.
Conspiracy is not listed among the right sidebar of tags. That's fine, maybe not popular yet. Ok, so you type it in the filter. Nope. Nothing shows.
Then you go to 'explore', which is a page of tags and their replies/payouts. There is a sub called 'yo', with 9 replies and 0SBD. Basically a throaway, and it shows. You try to find conspiracy, it's not there. Conspiracy has at least 1.24SBD over the 'yo' tag.
If there is zero findability in 'conspiracy' then of course it's not going to trend, because no one can find it and therefore no one can 'see' those posts, and therefore no one can 'upvote' those posts.
Avarice and SCAM
When I first went to Steemit, this article was prominent. Now you can't find it unless you search. Everyone should read, esp. about how Sanders is abusing the system.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@dollarvigilante/steemit-is-a-scam-how-bernie-sanders-screwed-me
Yet, it's now back up to 2k+ Which is good.
Also this user 'knows the CEO' and made 12k in one month, isn't that something. Too bad I don't know the CEO
~~~ embed:steemit/comments/4qug59/is_steemit_legit/d4z2je1 reddit metadata:fHN0ZWVtaXR8aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cucmVkZGl0LmNvbS9yL3N0ZWVtaXQvY29tbWVudHMvNHF1ZzU5L2lzX3N0ZWVtaXRfbGVnaXQvZDR6MmplMXw= ~~~
and yet
WAC supports it, so it's control grid
~~~ embed:conspiracy/comments/4yily6/steemit_a_reddit_alternative_takes_up_steam_with/d6nyazx reddit metadata:fGNvbnNwaXJhY3l8aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cucmVkZGl0LmNvbS9yL2NvbnNwaXJhY3kvY29tbWVudHMvNHlpbHk2L3N0ZWVtaXRfYV9yZWRkaXRfYWx0ZXJuYXRpdmVfdGFrZXNfdXBfc3RlYW1fd2l0aC9kNm55YXp4fA== ~~~
Fluke, you are my faaather
https://np.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/4w5man/luke_the_snook_wacoffski/
But! Corbett supports it
I trust James Corbett, but I don't know why he's so quick to jump on steemit. Seems premature, especially since they clearly suppress the conspiracy tag.
And knowing the relationship of bitcoin to power (it's a petrol-backed currency!!!!!!!!!!!!!!), and given he's made a documentary based on the history of petrol, he should know better than to back a dubious cryptocurrency based on oil. Period.
Trust but verify
I'm ok with something new. In fact I tried Steemit and I like it. However, very few saw my post, nor will many. Because it was tagged conspiracy as primary, and conspiracy will not show up in lists. You have to get to conspiracy by gaming the url manually. That's lame.
No Response from Support
I've told steemit about this, but I've not even gotten an email response to say, we'll respond when we can. It's literally gone into a black hole. Steemit also did not respond to another unrelated support question I sent days before the 'glitch' support email.
Fragmentation
If you think I'm 'throwing shade' on steemit, I'm not. I'm asking valid questions and pointing out things you might have missed. Shill away if you must, but I'm pretty much convinced that Steemit is just control grid, designed to fragment the /r/conspiracy and other communities on reddit primarily (since it's an alternative to reddit). They tried this with voat and they are trying again by monetizing it. You see that's the killer app. Trying to tempt you with money. Only problem is, it's based on bitcoin and it pays out ... what if bitcoin falls apart...as it was designed to do....all along. I guess you'll be out of steem too.
I up voted you because nobody wants to hear the truth. One point about bitcoin being so difficult to mine - its not such a bad thing as it drives innovation. We design faster chips etc. Technology moves at such a rapid rate and early bitcoin days will be remembered forever, as its all a learning process. We move forward as we push forward the envelope. This drives our economy forward into the next century.
I am concerned about the conspiracy tag situation. Can anyone help in confirming this?
WTF are you talking about? Do some basic research instead of publishing FUD.
Steem is not based on bitcoin. it's much better technology.
Steem is open source.