UPDATE: Wow.. thanks for the tremendous support behind this debate. I promised @MadBitcoins to share in whatever bounty may come. He will be a happy camper.
And it appears I failed miserably on one of my statements (that has been pointed out a few times) on powering down. According to the bottom of page nine on the white paper:
SP can only be converted back to STEEM over 2 years via 104 equal weekly payments. ‘1 SP’ can be viewed as a share in a pool of STEEM. Likewise, every time SP is converted back to STEEM it is done at the current ratio. Individuals are guaranteed to have more STEEM in the future than they have when they first convert from STEEM to SP. -Steemit White Paper, pg.9
This makes more sense to me now as your SP and vestment amount doesn't change during the powering down process, only a flag on your account that power down is in process and a calculation of currentSP / 104 = powerDownPayOut. Any other input on the topic would be greatly appreciated, but I think I have a good handle on it now.
Again, countless thanks all! I count myself fortunate to have issued this challenge at the right time.
I think Tone's argument was lost when he starts making character attacks against Blake, usually a good sign that he's grasping at straws for points against the resolution
A tip of the beret to you, good sir.
Verdade
Alex Sterk and I responded to Tone's continued attempts to mis-understand and bash steem, to no avail.
In an earlier WCN video, he claimed creating your own currency was ILLEGAL.
I asked him why he thought so, never responded. Others chimed in saying 'of course its not illegal'... no Tone..
I brought it up again this morning, his reply was 'do it and see what happens' ... I posted links to CNN, Atlantic, and Quora, saying its very common and popular all over the place. Icatha Hours, Mountain Hours, the Brixton Pound, others in France Germany and Japan...
He thinks govts prevent people from making their own local money.
Maybe being a former investment banker causes a cloud of nonsense to follow your conscious mind around as you live your daily life...
Tone pretends to be well read and knowledgeable, truth is, he has a few lawyer friends, probably has a few in his family.
Nuff said?
All you need to know about Tone Vays summed up in one quote ...
"I don't think there's that many smart people in crypto."
Tone: "I don't think it is a blockchain".
@rainman An Olympian needs your help. Please view my latest post. It is to help my friend Cyrus who is going to his second Olympics! He needs our help! I upvoted you. This is my most important post and the money isn't going to me. Please consider upvoting it. https://steemit.com/steemit/@brianphobos/an-olympian-needs-our-help-steemit-please-read-this-if-you-have-ever-been-passionate-about-something
Tone needs to do his research first, before publicly embarrassing himself.
Why? His points on the ponzi were valid and not refuted...
He is clearly interested on SteemIt but has doubts about going thru.
Good work blake, I think you obviously won the debate.
That is not the case .. Blake's 'evidence' against this being a ponzi was anecdotal. Sure some are making a shit tonne of money and cashing it out .. ok, so it's all good right? WRONG!
Tone is obviously not an experienced user, but he did very well pointing out what is obvious to all ...that it is very easy to get money in, but not to get it out .. and those who are getting it out, seem to be the one's who benefited the most. For some reason we are supposed to believe this is a good thing? Perhaps it is not a class ponzi, perhaps the developers hope it will all work out, according to the sales pitch, but the result is the same .. people are to invest in hopes of the same high returns as the lucky few are receiving .. and as soon as you realize that is not happening, it is too late.
I think the issue is Tone doesn't think people's time/effort has value. Then the system appears to be only money goes out but no value added into the system.
Money goes in easily and goes out easily as well with liquid steem token. Powering up is a choice for investors not a requirement to use the system. "Trick" or give user incentive to power up is not equal to force them to be vested. I think this is very different from ponzi.
In the second half of the hangout, Tone started to imply Steem is not even a true blockchain based, only a small group of smart people has the right to determine. That looks pretty desperate to me.
Anyway, it's good to hear different voice.
PS, you might want to an article wrote by @dan in response of an CoinDesk article https://steemit.com/steem/@dan/response-to-coindesk-article-steem-provokes-doubt-of-market-observers
Ding Ding Ding! Winner!
I didnt invest and i cashed out enough fo pay my debts and buy a car cash. So how does that work out? All I invested was time and skills
It's easy to put money into an annuity, and hard to get it out. Are all annuities Ponzi schemes? Are all term deposits Ponzi schemes?
It depends where the money to make the payouts comes from.
A healthy debate.
Tone Vays should join Steemit then he can have a more informed insight into how the system works. Someone should tell him it's free to join and he doesn't need to spend any BTC/ USD.... if STEEM/ Steemit is a ponzi, it's the worse ponzi in the world!
He may even get rewarded for his scepticism (however misguided).
The only people that can potentially lose out are those that buy STEEM, speculating on its future value (or just to have more influence on the platform). It's high risk and high reward for people that go down this route. However this is the same for every cryptocurrency being traded on Exchanges. If STEEM is a ponzi because of this then all cryptos are ponzis!
The difference with STEEM/ Steemit is it has a real life use case (people find value reading/ consuming the content of others every day) and people do not need money or technical knowledge to join the eco-system. It's revolutionary in it's simplicity in that regard.
cross-post
yep, its ironic.
he says its all fake, its nonsense, blah....etc.
he could get involved, generate one helluva lot a content, get paid...
but he won't..
He's afraid it'll all come down in some major SEC raid and incarceration of masses of steemit.com users, or some such nonsense.
Steemit is not ponzi
Dafuq?!
Wow. Going against Tone Vays, a Bitcoin heavyweight! I listened to the first 15 minutes or so and you did a great job! Will catch up with the rest later. I met Tone at a meetup in San Mateo, CA the end of last year and got in a short discussion on Proof-of-Stake and Ethereum (I was arguing in favor of POS).. He's got very strong opinions and I like the way he thinks even if I disagree. I really like some of his trading concepts. I'm going to give him a hard time because he essentially said Ethereum wasn't going anywhere and that's when it was trading around $1 .... I'm going to give him a hard time about that.. =P
Ok watched the rest. Great job being cool, calm and collected Blake! Very solid responses all the way through! Tone is fiercely opinionated so he's extremely tough to debate. He seemed to be set on claiming Steemit to be a ponzi scheme, but you calmly addressed his arguments. Steem is freely traded in markets and has a price based on supply/demand. People aren't forced to do anything. We can't assume people are ignorant. An easy way to address where the value comes is just to say new Steem is rewarded to people just like miners are rewarded new Bitcoin. Blogging is the new mining is a good slogan to use. When someone talks about a premine, there was no premine but early adopters and the creators had a considerable advantage. Next time just ask how much Bitcoin does Satoshi have from early mining and that will at least minimize complaints about 'fairness'... Overall you did a great job. You'll attract open minded people. You probably won't win over Bitcoin maximalists anyways... and Tone's strong opinions will just cater to their desire to affirm their own biases no matter how illogical his arguments are. That's the nature of most debates anyways.
I was thinking about this last night and it's still bugging me this morning. I googled around and didn't find a clear answer (and the white paper isn't clear either). During the debate you mentioned something about your influence and share dilution protection (that makes more sense to me than calling it interest) changing while you are powered down. Can you explain where that comes from? My understanding is nothing changes other than 7 days from the moment of power down, a conversion happens of VESTs to STEEM, but everything else remains the same. I have no basis for that understanding other than various conversations and, I think, a test I did weeks ago where (I think) my SP balance still increased while in a powered down state. Since the account still has VESTs during a power down, it would make sense to me the voting would still work as before.
Again, great job in the debate. This was the only thing I was confused by.
I have exactly the same question/confusion.
I really enjoyed watching this, thank you! Giving you a follow for sure.
I'm in the middle of it, but I'm disappointed by Tone's lack of research on the matter. One should understand the basics of the subject they are debating -it should be a minimum criteria! This is bringing down the whole debate for me.
Blake is killing it though. :)
Tone's love is for bitcoin only!
How @matrixdweller say "A ponzi is where people take THEIR OWN MONEY and give it to other people", if the people make some research will see that on steemit are a lot of people being rewarded just for post interesting and good content, i mean you don´t need to invest any money here to be sucessful, just smart and creative but Some people just think that steemit is too good to be true and then they say:
Saw this earlier, but couldn't find you on here to give you props with the 84 at the end of your name. You really did a good job, and it's a shame that Tone acted childish at points. No need to put you down on your knowledge of blockchains. You more than held your own and I think may even have planted a couple seeds of doubt into viewers of the WCN who were biased against Steemit.
Tone is the perfect example that shows you cannot understand the value of an innovation with so much cockiness and bias.
It is the exact opposite of a Ponzi.
New people joining aren't paying for the rewards of the previous people who joined. In fact it is the absolute reverse situation.
Ponzi is thrown around as a slur in cryptocurrency and the ironic thing is the anti-bitcoin vested interests use the exact same arguments of a Ponzi that Tone was trying to use against STEEM except they use them against Bitcoin.
The arguments around how we don't know who owns what accounts and what they are doing with the markets just seemed rather strange to me. You can make the same arguments with Bitcoin and most cryptos. Also the same can be said for the early adopter advantage/founder advantage - there is no bigger example of that than Bitcoin itself. (e.g. Satoshi's stash)
I have to say I think Blake did very well in defending his position and keeping his cool. Sorry to say Tone came across as a bit of a dick and at times like a pantomime villain. I was waiting for him to pull the camera back to show he was stroking a white cat!
That's not to say Tone's points were absolute rubbish. It's just he seemed to have an almost religious certainty with everything he said. He seemed to have had no sense of irony for the fact that many of his arguments could be levelled at Bitcoin too which he seems to have absolute faith in.
The problem is Steemit is new and is an experiment - just as Bitcoin was in 2009/2010. There is no way of knowing if everything will work or not.
Anyway this was great fun. I look forward to more debates like this:)
In order for the people who have "powered up" now to be able to pull out more value than they put in, we will need new people to buy Steem tokens. Forgot about the people getting paid for making posts and for voting; they aren't participants in the alleged "Ponzi" situation, only the people expecting to make a profit from "powering up" or from holding Steem Dollars are. Both kinds of investors have been lead to believe they will make a profit from holding SP or SBD, but without any plan for where that profit will come from. It seems pretty clear that their profit will come from new investors buying in.
It is ironic, but I think it applies much better against Steem than against Bitcoin, for two reasons:
Bitcoin doesn't promise you any kind of a profit. If you are lucky enough to have the price increase while you hold it then you can make a profit by selling for more than you bought in with, whereas Steem offers you very good interest on both SP and SBD.
Bitcoin doesn't require you to lock up your funds at all to benefit from price movements. Steem's best interest rate is only available if you lock up your funds by powering up into Steem Power, which locks up your coins and requires you to wait 2 years to get them all back.
Unrealistic promises of future gains with no visible source for those gains plus the requirement to lock up your funds for a long time combine to make it look pretty much like a Ponzi.
I agree. I think Tone did an OK job at the start of the video but by the end it was pretty embarrassing. Arguing tht there "is no blockchain" while also admitting that he had no way of knowing whether there is a blockchain was pretty bad. Then he went on to confuse transparency of transactions with the lack of on-chain identity. I wish they could have found someone better qualified to argue the "anti" side.
Thanks for the response. You make some good points. I think it would have been better to have the debate with you there rather than Tone lol! I'm not saying there are not things to be concerned about with STEEM I just don't think Tone made a good argument. The ultimate judge for all this will be time I think.
Here are my thoughts https://steemit.com/steemit/@andrew0/the-great-steemit-debate-why-tone-persuaded-me-much-more-than-blakemiles84
I know you whales like criticism, so this is for all of you :)
This piece is going down in history and will have quite a following over time. Thanks for sharing and the thoughts/perspectives. Namaste :)
Tone gives crypto a bad name, he was making wild comments about steem without any facts to back up what he was saying.
this is not a real ponzi,
because a can earn whithout investing.
Time is money, therefore you are investing.
This would have been more interesting if there was someone more qualified to present the "against" side. He seems to be arguing that there is no blockchain, and then admits that he isn't qualified to know whether there's a blockchain or not. So what's the point of all that?
I have a bad feeling about Steem and can't see how it can continue to pay out such large rewards to content creators, and would have liked to see someone present the "case against Steem" in a competent manner.
The way I see it, the Steem economy is zero sum. Content creators make (zero or more) money. People who upvote posts make (zero or more) money. So who is losing money? It has to be the people buying the Steem tokens doesn't it? Because who else is there?
It could only be a zero sum if there were no outside inputs.
Could you expand on that please? I'm not sure what inputs you are referring to.
Sure there are other inputs in the form of posts, comments, and upvotes. But I'm talking about monetary flows. Money leaves the system whenever an author or a curator cashes out. Where does that money comes from? People writing posts and comments don't add money to the system, and neither do miners. So where does that money come from that ends up in the pockets of the authors and curators? It looks to me like the only answer is it must come from people buying the various Steem tokens for money. Are there any other monetary inputs?
If there were advertisers, then that could be a source of the money. That could even allow for the Steem token holders to make a profit overall, if the advertisers paid enough to cover the payouts to authors and curators. But as I understand it there are no advertisers, or any other source of funding other than token sales, and so token sales are subsidizing the content creation and curation, and can full expect to make a (monetary) loss. Such a loss is fine if the creation of a body of curated posts makes up for it. But that doesn't seem to be how the platform is being positioned.
I see people thinking they're smart to "power up" because they will earn great (monetary) rewards. But I don't see where those rewards come from. Similarly with the Steem Dollars token. Apparently I can buy some Steem tokens, convert them to Steem Dollars, and expect a very good rate of interest on my holdings (in dollar terms) with little to no risk. How? Who is paying that interest, and why?
I don't mean to be anti-Steem. These are just the issues that occur to me when I look at it.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news but you may not be a happy camper if you edited a huge post like this before payout. Editing posts can have a huge impact on your reward, behind the scenes it is treated like creating a new post. I hope I am wrong about this but I don't think I am..
Crap. If that's the case, then its an expensive lesson. Damn I didn't know about that.
Well.... whatever I lost its more than I would have had otherwise. Thanks for bringing this up. Need to find this.
I watched again this video... I have been cheated in the past from a ponzi scheme... the last example I will tell you is hashocean. I know it is hard to believe again in a project once we have been cheated.
In Italy we say that when someone is "putting the face" like @blakemiles84 is doing.... well we have to believe him. I do believe ( maybe I wrong ) in what he said... honestly what do we have to lose believing in what he said? PERSONALLY NOTHING.
The ponzi scheme is asking you to invert your money in something to accelerate the process of earning.
In STEEMIT you don't need to invert money, you need to be creative and create a post that really count!
I did upvote the post that blake is telling in the video... was an african guy that was talking about his phone stolen and how hard was his life. I loved that post I commented and upvoted.
I think that with the money raised he could live a better life isn't it???
I did earn some money in SD for some translation I have done. Guys I love STEEMIT and I really can't imagine my life without it.
I am planning to visit Amsterdam next weekend and I am thinking that I want post here the photos!
It is not a ponzi scheme! Steem is the art of a genius that with few colours (blue and light blue LOL) painted something that fascinated thousands of people.
I will never stop telling you...
Thank guys. Thank @blakemiles84
Ugh Tone proves how he again doesn't know anything about Steemit even AFTER reading the whitepaper.
He showed that he had no intentions of having a real debate after mentioning the "steemit got hacked and the hacker could create unlimited steem"
Basically he was mentioning the hack of 85k which the Steemit team resolved and refunded all accounts, and he combines it with the fake post someone created at the same time where he claimed to be upvoting the same post into infinity.
Here is the first video I wasted my time listening to his empty brain-waste words:
I wouldn't be so quick to say its "impossible" for STEEM to be a Ponzi scheme as some people are doing in the comments. Obviously I am a STEEM user. If I was convinced STEEM is a Ponzi, I wouldn't be here.
But... I am skeptical.
A Ponzi scheme is where later "investors" are paid out with the funds from the people who entered early. If the SD that STEEM posters receive was obviously coming from the VESTS/SP of other users, it might be a clear Ponzi. But there is so much complexity involved in the creation of the 3 tokens (yes, I've read the whitepaper) that its really hard to tell. People who put their STEEM in get it locked up as SP could be left holding the bag.
I don't think this particular guy was actually interested in exploring this and had already made up his mind, and that can be frustrating, so I understand people quick to defend the system and deny the allegation.
...But, I don't think its entirely baseless.
My opinion is very similar to yours, indeed.
Don't want your upvote but your feedback on my post about the Debate, thank you
OK I read your concerns, I think they are good points, and yeah, similar to what I'm thinking. I think its not 100% straight-forward 'YES" or "NO" on the Ponzi question.
I think ultimately it will come down to are payouts coming from new buyers (made easier because are also "locked in" to Vests), or do they come from somehow the overall value in the system increasing? I admit the second choice, the non-Ponzi one, sounds kind of subjective and hard to test for. Also I think we should be more concerned with whether or not the VALUE is transferring from "suckers/bag holders", and not specifically each of the 3 token types. Their complex relationship makes that hard to track.
i reply random things on posts because i hope some one gets mad and talks to me.
Nice debate...Always interesting when people ask questions like: Where do the money comes from ? The answer should be found by answering the question Where did the fiat money comes from.
Some financial education can help:
STEEMIT CAN'T BE PONZI 😉
This was a great debate. It really got me thinking about the value of Steem and Steemit as its own society. I wrote an article that adds another perspective to the debate. Please take a look!
https://steemit.com/steemit/@melek/open-discourse-and-how-steemit-is-qualitatively-different-from-every-intellectual-society-that-proceeded-it
A ponzi is is the simple words which they are using the member money to coupond and make the other interested to their site or we call it Revshare. Never trust about the paonzi because something big wrong at there, which the member start the rograme at first lauching and they can make more money, but all aof member start at the last they will lost their money and the owner of ponzi with the easy words say, we are low income and we dont have more enough money to pay all my member, so it why I suggest you never and stop join Ponzi or revshare
Great job, loved your opening speech..
Edit: I just thought of this: Blake won by a mile, get it!
@blakemiles64
UPVOTES n supported Away
🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀
great post, very interesting and informative video!!
Steemit may have it's flaws, but it is no Ponzi scheme. Due diligence is always advised when making financial decisions/ investments.
i like your post
up
Goooo PR Like Mi Like You ))))
Likeeeee
Steemit is an extraordinary platform that is generating and distributing all criptomonedas days among members who are involved in the community, either creating content or evaluating such content. It comes down to a simple action that is to vote. People who vote earn a rate proportional to the amount that has been paid to the person who created the content amount.
SteemIt is getting far from any other crypto being established before Steem. People are getting excited about it every moment but we cannot deny the fact that there would also be problems and doubts need to be answered and addressed properly to the users and the investors of the system. However, this also indicates that the SteemIt is progressing, it was talked about, promoted and updated. So the least we can do is to stay aside. We must hear it from the experts first and that we can conclude what should be the next of steemit.
cool dabate, but @blakemiles84 was much more convincing for me
👍nice information @blakemiles84,very interesting video
WOW. @matrixdweller brings out a great point. Bitcoin back then was known as magic internet money. Even tedx talks says that, too.
I saw the last 10 minutes of it while it was still live while making a youtube search on steemit. I got pretty lucky lol.
Blake said you stop earning interest when powering down? Is that true?
No. Not before it is released. The rest still works for voting and vesting.
Ah my bad .. got that wrong. I had heard that in the slack channel back in June and never investigated. Remembered reading it in the white paper I thought, but shame on me :)
https://steemit.com/video/@hersheydenbiraz/pr-yourself
I applaud you and take my hat off as well!
interesting conversation
If I'm not giving money to Steem I don't consider it a ponzi scheme. I do however consider it very innovative social network. I'd like to see where this goes! Super excited about Steem just found it the other day.
It seems to me that Tone has more ability to demonstrate his own idea, while Blake seems clueless.
I would really like to have the link that Tone shows about the Ponzi warning signs just to check all the points there.
I'm not sure it's a Ponzi scheme, but I see that the all Tone criticism makes sense while Blake doesn't seem able to reply to them with valuable arguments.
Interesting. Can you point out something specifically ?
For example: in the questions section, you were stopped by Tone for not asking him any question. In general, he is addressing specific issues and problems and your replies seem evasive to me.
Nothing personal, just my humble opinion.
nice to hear the debate